Toward the end of March the western front collapsed. After Allied armies crossed the Rhine in large numbers, the last V-2s were fired at Antwerp and London on March 27, and the last V-1 the following day. Kammler then ordered his units to fight as infantry. Around that time he found a large number of East European workers wandering in the chaos of collapsing Germany and personally ordered his soldiers to massacre at least 207 of them. Apparently he did not have enough blood on his hands already.52
Soon the rapidly moving American armored spearheads approached Thuringia, forcing Kammler’s hand. Late in the day on April 1, he called Dornberger’s chief of staff and commanded an evacuation to the Bavarian Alps of about five hundred key people. Von Braun, still burdened by his heavy cast, was driven to the designated site in Oberammergau, where some Messerschmitt people had already been collected. Dornberger’s staff proceeded with its own convoy. On April 6 a sleeping-car train ironically dubbed the “Vengeance Express” (it had been used as a residence in Heidelager, Heidekraut, and Thuringia) departed with the rest of the group. Kammler’s apparent motive was to hold them as a bargaining chip for peace talks with the West, although killing the lot of them if negotiations failed may well have crossed his mind. One thing we do know: The five hundred Peenemünders once again had no control over their destination. Indeed, it would have made more sense for them to stay put and wait for the Americans in Thuringia.53
For the prisoners, evacuation was presaged by yet another horrible tragedy: Two successive RAF night firebomb raids on Nordhausen killed 1,500 of them at the Boelcke Kaserne. Beginning on the morning after the second raid, April 4, about 25,000 to 30,000 inmates of the Mittelbau camp system were then forced into railroad cars and shipped to Bergen-Belsen. Their journeys took days and—like all the camp evacuations—an enormous toll in human lives due to starvation, disease, and wanton cruelty. Even more catastrophic was the fate of thousands from outlying Mittelbau subcamps, who were forced to leave on foot for lack of transports. Many collapsed and died by the side of the road or were shot for straggling. Nothing, however, compares in horror with the worst single massacre in the history of Mittelbau. At Gardelegen, SS guards herded into a barn 1,016 evacuees exhausted from marching and set the building on fire, burning them alive. Any who escaped were gunned down. When the 3d U.S. Armored Division liberated the Nordhausen area on April 11, all that was left were 600 extremely ill survivors in Dora and 405 living skeletons at the Boelcke Kaserne.54
By the best estimate, of the roughly 60,000 unfortunates who passed through the Mittelbau–Dora system, at least one-third did not survive. Perhaps half (10,000) of the deaths can be linked to A-4 production. In addition, more than 8,200 prisoners died at Zement, although most were the victims of mass starvation in the last few months of the war, when the camp was no longer part of the program. A smaller but unknown number of victims must be attributed to Schlier, Lehesten, Rebstock, Zeppelin, and other locations. Attempting an exact total can become a meaningless numbers game, but it is clear that the A-4 was a unique weapon: More people died producing it than died from being hit by it. In round numbers, 5,000 people were killed by the 3,200 V-2s that the Germans fired at English and Continental targets. (More V-weapons were launched at Belgium than at Britain, although one would hardly know that from the literature on the topic.) By that measure, at least two-thirds of all Allied victims of the ballistic missile came from the people who produced it, rather than from those who endured its descent.55
While the concentration camp prisoners suffered and expired in the final catastrophes, the Peenemünders languished in uncertainty in Bavaria and Thuringia. Events were largely out of their control, including the fate of the prisoners. In Oberammergau, von Braun saw Kammler for the last time early in April. From the Berlin bunker, Hitler had bestowed on the SS general his last, highest, and most absurd title, “Plenipotentiary of the Führer for Jet Aircraft.” Kammler set off on a frantic tour around a rapidly shrinking Reich, trying singlehandedly to stave off defeat. According to Dornberger, if he could not sleep, he would “wake the slumbering officers of his suite with a burst from his tommy-gun.” Kammler’s final fate is uncertain, but the most plausible report is that he arranged to be shot by his adjutant in Prague around the time of the final German surrender, rather than be captured by Czech partisans.56
Kammler’s absence from Bavaria proved a boon to the rocket veterans. They succeeded in persuading the local SS to allow a dispersion to various towns instead of a concentration in Oberammergau. A small group around Dornberger ended up in a mountain resort hotel high up on the former Austrian-German border. Von Braun joined them later in April, as did Dieter Huzel and Bernhard Tessmann, who had separately made dangerous Odysseys across the Reich after burying Peenemünde’s archive in a mine northwest of the Mittelwerk. The clear intent of that action was to create the group’s own bargaining chip for use after the war. For the rest of the month there was little to do but stare at the sky, play cards, and worry about the omnipresent SS.57
By then many Peenemünders had been found by U.S. Army Ordnance intelligence officers in Thuringia, where the great majority of the rocket group had remained. Only the five hundred sent to Bavaria were left. A few were found by French troops, but most waited for an opportunity to surrender to the Americans—the only time during the entire evacuation when they had any control over their fate. Among the last to encounter the invaders were Dornberger and von Braun. On May 2, two days after Hitler’s suicide, Wernher von Braun’s English-speaking brother, Magnus, was sent down the mountain on a bicycle to find American troops. He encountered a rather surprised patrol, and soon the arrangement was made. After fifteen amazing and eventful years, the Army liquid-fuel rocket program was over.58
Epilogue
Peenemünde’s Legacy
Peenemünde’s death was followed quickly by its rebirth elsewhere. Even before the war was over, teams from the major Allied powers began searching for the spoils of the Baltic coast center and its revolutionary technology. In central Germany, U.S. Army Ordnance moved quickly to seize parts for one hundred A-4s, as intact missiles were nowhere to be found. Speed was of the essence. Thuringia was to be part of the Soviet zone of occupation, and the Red Army might move forward as early as the beginning of June. Ordnance’s Special Mission V-2 also managed to ferret out the location of the Peenemünde archive from a former manager who had seen Huzel and Tessmann before they disappeared. Trucks whisked the 14 tons of paper out of the mine on May 27, allegedly just as the British began setting up roadblocks in what was to become their zone of occupation. After some delay, the Soviets occupied the Mittelwerk on July 5. Realizing what they had in their hands, a Soviet intelligence team that included Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer of the Soviet space program in the 1950s and 1960s, was sent to investigate Peenemünde. What the Russians found was quite disappointing. The evacuation had stripped the center of much of its equipment, the defending forces had blown up many buildings, and the occupying Soviet units had carried off some of what was salvageable. Eventually the Soviets dynamited the rest.1