After von Braun had spent three weeks in Thuringia and had met the initial arrivals there (the first train left the center around February 17), he returned late in the month for his last visit to Peenemünde. After staying only a few days, he departed, never to see the place again. All launch activity had been shut down, and the mobile crews evacuated from Heidekraut in January were sent to northwest Germany. The last convoys, trains, and barges moved out in early March, even though travel was difficult because of roving Allied fighter-bombers. Peenemünde began to resemble a ghost town, with only a skeleton staff remaining. Ironically, it would remain that way until May 5, because not long after Kammler ordered the evacuation it was discovered that Soviet forces were farther away than believed. Rather than head north, the Russian winter offensive was going east—in the direction of Berlin.44
Among the last to leave the center was Dieter Huzel, a special assistant to von Braun since the autumn of 1944. When he arrived in the town of Bleicherode in the middle of March, he found an “[e]xtremely primitive headquarters… in a former agricultural school. There was not much sense of order. We couldn’t just bodily lift a whole engineering plant, drop it two hundred miles away, and expect it to continue functioning without interruption.” Although Kammler had made Electromechanical Industries the center of a development cooperative of advanced weapons firms, virtually everyone perceived the exercise as futile. The prospect of total defeat hung like a dark cloud over everything. Von Braun chaired meetings and investigated underground and above-ground sites for restarting work, but there is little doubt that he was merely putting on a good show for the ever watchful SS. By the time Huzel arrived, von Braun was hospitalized with a broken right arm, because his driver had fallen asleep at the wheel one night (the only time safe to travel) and the car had flown off the road and crashed into an embankment. A couple of days before his thirty-third birthday, the young technical director was released from the hospital wearing a massive cast. He rejoined Dornberger in useless planning, while others carried out design work on paper. In divisions like the valve and materials testing laboratories, virtually no work was done, because they were situated far from the oversight of the SS and the headquarters group.45
Not many kilometers away, the concentration camp prisoners were dying en masse, although there is little evidence that the Peenemünde evacuees confronted that suffering directly. Von Braun asserted in 1947 that he last visited Mittelwerk in February 1945 and that working conditions inside the plant were, if anything, better in the last months of the war. While his statement is true in a sense because of the completion of the heating, air-conditioning, and lighting systems, it is also rather callous, because the prisoners were starving and were subject to arbitrary terror even more intense than before. “Dora” had entered its third phase: the relatively mild period of summer-fall 1944 had ended, and the camp death rate once again skyrocketed.46
The situation had taken a noticeable turn for the worse in November. Shortly after the SS had made Dora the main camp of a new “Concentration Camp Mittelbau” (Central Construction), the local SD security organization had succeeded in penetrating and destroying the Dora prisoners’ underground organization. Many of its leaders were locked up in the “bunker,” and some were horribly tortured. Most ended up on the camp gallows, with a consequent acceleration in the execution rate.47
Beginning in January 1945 conditions dramatically worsened. Germany’s war economy and transportation system collapsed because of Allied bombing and the Soviet invasion of the Upper Silesian industrial region. The food supply for the whole population deteriorated, but in the Nazi system distribution was deliberately structured to favor the “Aryans.” At the bottom of the hierarchy, unsurprisingly, were the concentration camp prisoners, who began to starve even more rapidly than before. The food supply and the health situation in the Mittelbau camp system, which now included about three dozen subcamps, was worsened further by transports full of exhausted prisoners evacuated from the east, most notably from Auschwitz. Dora’s population grew from nearly 13,500 on November 1 to more than 19,000 in March, while the total of all Mittelbau prisoners went from about 26,000 to more than 40,000 in the same period. These numbers would have grown even faster but for disease and starvation; the bodies began to pile up at the crematoria faster than they could be burned. From December 24 to March 23, the camp administration counted 5,321 deaths, of which 1,090 were in Dora. The SS created a particularly horrendous situation at the Boelcke Kaserne, a former barracks in the city of Nordhausen, by using it as a dumping ground for hopeless cases, many from the transports.48
With the evacuated prisoners came numerous SS men, including Richard Baer, the last commandant of the original Auschwitz camp. (The primary extermination center for Jews had been the nearby Auschwitz II-Birkenau.) On February 1 Baer displaced Mittelbau’s camp commandant, Otto Förschner, who was probably dismissed for letting the underground get out of hand. The new commandant raised the level of horror yet higher with a gruesome wave of hangings in late February and March that focused on the Soviet resistance organization, although a number of prominent German Communist prisoners were shot or beaten to death in the “bunker.” The unprecedented 162 executions in March included 133 Russians, 25 Poles, 3 Czechs, and 1 Lithuanian. Most of the sentences were carried out in a few horrific mass executions: 16 on March 3, 57 on March 11, and 30 each on March 21 and 22.49
Two of the hangings took place for the first time inside the plant instead of in Dora. Although it is unlikely that any recent arrivals from Peenemünde were present, one or both executions were seen by Arthur Rudolph and others assigned to the Mittelwerk. Erich Ball, a shop foreman sent south after the 1943 air raid, described the first to an American investigator in 1947:
A large wooden plank was brought into tunnel B and attached to the hooks in the overhead crane…. By this time all work in the factory had stopped. Everybody was ordered to watch the hanging. When the [12 to 16] Haeftlinge who were to be hung came in they had their hands tied behind their backs. They had wooden gags in their mouths. [A] German [prisoner] put a separate rope around each man’s neck[;] the other end of the rope had previously been tied to the plank. The man who normally operated the crane was a French Haeftlinge [sic] and under my control. However, I called [him] down from the ladder. [Chief SD officer] Bischoff asked why… and I said, this man works for me and if he has to hang his friends he will be sick and will not be of use to me…. [H]e was scared and crying. The [executioner] went up the ladder[,] then Bischoff… read the order by Himmler, and gave the order to raise the crane.
A French prisoner, Yves Béon, and his compatriots were forced to file past the still hanging prisoners later that night:
Most of their bodies have lost both trousers and shoes, and puddles of urine cover the floor. Since the ropes are long, the bodies swing gently about five feet above the floor, and you have to push them aside as you advance…. [Y]ou receive bumps from knees and tibia soaked in urine, and the corpses, pushed against each other, begin to spin around…. Here and there under the rolling bridge, truncheons in hand, the S.S. watch the changing of the shifts. They are laughing; its a big joke to these bastards.
This gruesome spectacle was repeated a few weeks later with about thirty condemned, who were once again surrounded by guards carrying “machine guns.”50
Notwithstanding the increased terror and the extreme chaos in the war economy, Mittelwerk apparently kept churning out missiles right up to the end of March, although documentation exists only for 362 A-4s shipped up to the eighteenth. (Total verifiable Mittelwerk production is 5,789; Peenemünde built 150–200 more test-model A-4s, and Mittelwerk also assembled a few thousand much simpler V-1s, beginning about October 1944.) That deliveries continued at such a high rate can only be attributed to the consolidation of parts production in the tunnels and the high priority the ballistic missile retained to the very end. In the last days of the Mittelwerk, even Karl Otto Saur installed himself in the tunnel offices, but a bizarre “Twilight of the Gods” atmosphere hung over the place. Prisoners later reported that empty champagne bottles lay scattered next to the offices in the morning, and women in Saur’s entourage sat around in nightgowns until ten, chatting with the prisoners and giving them bread and cigarettes.51