The Führer’s endorsement, in combination with the Army’s decline, greatly strengthened the role of the Armaments Ministry, but it also brought another power into the program: the SS. Heinrich Himmler, in his relentless empire-building, tried and eventually succeeded in grabbing large pieces of the rocket program. But not all the impetus came from the SS. Problems finding a production labor force in the face of severe manpower shortages also drew the program’s senior managers quite voluntarily into the exploitation of SS concentration camp labor. That fact raises a final key question about the rocket program: How “Nazi” was it or, less crudely put, how much influence did the ideology and practices of National Socialism have on Peenemünde and the program?
The most “Nazi” aspect of the Army rocket program was, in fact, the employment of slave labor in A-4 production, even though the decision to do so was a 1943 improvisation. The exploitation of concentration camp prisoners in the war economy was entirely typical of the Third Reich after 1942, and it was rooted in a Nazi racial hierarchy that many Germans took for granted. By contrast, nothing in the original conception of the program or its technology had identifiably National Socialist ideological roots; Becker’s and Dornberger’s military ideas originated in the thinking of the ultraconservative Weimar officer corps, and their technological enthusiasm for rocketry was bolstered by the spaceflight movement of that era. The rapid adoption of Peenemünde’s technology and even its engineering management structures by foreign powers after World War II also suggests that slave labor was the one uniquely “Nazi” aspect of the rocket program.
Yet looking at the problem in this way would be misleading. The leap at such an early date from small-scale rocket research to a massive program would not have occurred without National Socialism; Peenemünde grew and flourished under Hitler because of the very nature of his regime. As a result, the rocket program built an institution and a weapon that made little sense, given the Reich’s limited research resources and industrial capacity—a perfect symbol of the Nazis’ pursuit of irrational goals with rational, technocratic means.
The top leaders of the program also compromised themselves thoroughly with National Socialism in order to achieve their technical goals. Immediately after the seizure of power, Becker and his subordinates quite willingly used the new police state to suppress the amateur rocket groups, with the aim of creating, in modern military parlance, a super-secret “black program.” Another case was Wernher von Braun, who essentially made a pact with the devil in order to build large rockets. Although he became disillusioned toward the end of the regime, that did not alter his basic motivations; after the war he bore proudly the nominal reasons for his arrest—putting spaceflight before military missile work—but there is no evidence that he ever stuck his neck out for the concentration camp prisoners before his arrest, nor did he show any obvious pangs of conscience about their fate until the 1960s and 1970s, when protests by French prisoner survivors forced him to confront the issue more directly.
The German Army rocket program was thus greatly influenced by—and integrated into—the structures and practices of the Nazi regime, whatever its ideological and technological origins. The ease with which its military and civilian leadership became involved in mass slavery in order to achieve technical and military ends is certainly one of Peenemünde’s most troublesome legacies to the world. But a much more ambiguous legacy was the big rocket itself. The A-4/V-2 was and is the grandfather of all modern guided missiles and space boosters. Some of its successors—the Redstone, the Saturn V, the R-7 Semyorka, and the Ariane—have put application satellites into space, scientific instruments on the planets, and humans on the face of our nearest celestial neighbor. At the same time, the A-4’s successors have threatened us for fifty years with nearly instantaneous nuclear destruction, and will continue to do so, despite the end of the Cold War. Starting from unlikely, even utopian origins in the Weimar spaceflight movement, and ending even more strangely with ineffective weapons and emaciated slaves, the German Army rocket program and its Peenemünde center without a doubt changed the face of the twentieth century.
Appendix 1
The German Army Ordnance Liquid-Fuel Rocket Series
A-1
The first Aggregat was Wernher von Braun’s initial attempt at building a liquid-oxygen/75% alcohol rocket vehicle. Powered by a nominal 300-kg-(660-lb)-thrust engine, it featured a large stabilization gyro in the nose. It was abandoned in favor of the A-2 in early 1934.
A-2
The redesign of the A-1 entailed moving the gyro to the middle of the rocket in order to increase stability in flight and to separate the two propellant tanks. Two A-2s, Max and Moritz, were successfully launched in December 1934. Their initial weight (107 kg, or 235 lb), length (1.61 m or 5.3 ft), and diameter (31.4 cm, or 1 ft) were about the same as the A-1.
A-3
Designed and built 1935–37, four A-3s were launched in December 1937, but all failed because of guidance system inadequacies. Powered by a nominal l,500-kg-(3,300-lb)-thrust engine, they were 6.5 m (22 ft) long and 0.7 m (2.3 ft) in diameter, with a fueled weight of 750 kg (1,650 lb).
A-4
Better known by its 1944 Propaganda Ministry designation V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2), the A-4 was first proposed in 1936 on the basis of a projected 25 metric-ton-(56,000-lb)-thrust engine. It was designed in detail in 1939–41. The warhead was one ton (2,200 lb), of which three-quarters was explosives. Nominal range was 270 km (156 mi), although special test models flew as far as 385 km (239 mi) in late 1944. Length was 14 m (46 ft), maximum body diameter was 1.65 m (5.42 ft), and maximum fin diameter was 3.56 m (11.7 ft). For the production (Baureihe B) version, empty weight was 4 metric tons (8,800 lb), and fueled weight was about 12.8 tons (28,200 lb). First launched in June 1942, about 6,000 were built and about 3,200 fired in anger.
A-4b
See A-9.
A-5
The A-3 was redesigned in 1938 with new tail fins and no high-altitude instrument package. Its function was solely to test guidance systems. First fired without guidance in October 1938, from October 1939 to mid-1943 about three dozen A-5s were launched with three different guidance systems: Kreiselgeräte’s, Siemens’s, and the so-called Rechlin or Möller system.
A-6
The improved version of the A-5, with a much shortened engine, was canceled in September 1939 in order to concentrate resources on the A-4. None were ever built. In one December 1939 document, Dornberger used the designations A-6 and A-7 to indicate successor vehicles to the A-4, but this usage was not standard.
A-7
This subscale A-9 was an A-5 with wings. In October 1942 the project was canceled before any powered versions could be completed. Two engineless models were drop-tested from aircraft in late 1942, but neither glide was notably successful.
A-8
On February 5, 1941, Thiel and von Braun inspected Helmut von Zborowski’s nitric acid/diesel oil rocket-engine development at BMW in Berlin-Spandau. That summer Thiel began his own testing of this hypergolic (self-igniting) and noncryogenic propellant combination. The designation A-8, which probably had already been assigned to an improved A-4 concept, was reconceptualized as a simplified A-4 with a projected 30-ton-(66,000-lb)-thrust hypergolic engine of this type. Range could have been improved to 450 km (280 mi), but the concept fell out of favor in mid-1942 for engineering and political reasons.