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V-2 / A-4

Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) was one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration during the period between the 1930s and the 1970s. As a youth he became enamored with the possibilities of space exploration by reading the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and from the science fact writings of Hermann Oberth, whose 1923 classic study, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (By Rocket to Space), prompted young von Braun to master calculus and trigonometry so he could understand the physics of rocketry. From his teenage years, von Braun had held a keen interest in space flight, becoming involved in the German rocket society, Verein fur Raumschiffarht (VfR), as early as 1929. As a means of furthering his desire to build large and capable rockets, in 1932 he went to work for the German army to develop ballistic missiles. While engaged in this work, on 27 July 1934, von Braun received a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering.

Von Braun is well known as the leader of what has been called the "rocket team," which developed the V-2 ballistic missile for the Nazis during World War II. In the early 1930's, rocket clubs sprang up all over Germany. One of these clubs, the Verein fur Raumschifffahrt (Rocket Society), had the young engineer Wernher von Braun as a member.

During this same period of time the German military was searching for a weapon which would not violate the Versailles Treaty of World War I, and at the same time defend Germany. Artillery captain Walter Dornberger was assigned to investigate the feasibility of using rockets. Dornberger went to see the VfR and, being impressed with their enthusiasm, gave them $400 to build a rocket. Wernher von Braun worked through the spring and summer of 1932, only to have the rocket fail when tested in front of the military. However, Dornberger was impressed with von Braun and hired him to lead the military's rocket artillery unit.

By 1934 Hitler had taken over Germany and Herman Goering ruled the Luftwaffe. Dornberger held a public test of the A-2 which was greatly successful. Funding continued to flow to von Braun's team, developing the A-3 and finally the A-4.

Not everything went smoothly at Peenemünde. Early rocketry was an inexact science, with progress registered through trial and error. Von Braun recalled that "Our main objective for a long time was to make it more dangerous to be in the target area than to be with the launch crew." Hundreds of test firings from 1938 to 1942 brought improvements in stability, propulsion, gas stream rudders used for steering, the wireless guidance communication system, and instruments to plot flight paths.

The brainchild of von Braun's rocket team operating at a secret laboratory at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, the V-2 rocket was the immediate antecedent of those used in space exploration programs in the United States and the Soviet Union. A liquid propellant missile extending some 46 feet in length and weighing 27,000 pounds, the V-2 flew at speeds in excess of 3,500 miles per hour and delivered a 2,200 pound warhead to a target 500 miles away.

Hitler's role in this whole thing is nebulous, and would require a great amount of research to clarify. After the War, no two German scientists agreed concerning him, though he was much in the forefront even at PeenemiInde. In publications, they consistently regarded him with dis-favor. In private, they seemed to regard him as considerably more practical than generally thought. At any rate, Hitler was a Peenemiinde enthusiast from 1942 on, and before that he caused no serious curtailment there.

On 31 July 1941, Dornberger drafted a memorandum for presentation to Hitler. On von Brauchitsch’s order, he emphasized that the A-4 could, “in addition to the material damage, have a particularly large impact on morale, even when air superiority is no longer present.” The memorandum included a novel argument for the ballistic missile. It is the first extant Ordnance document that clearly advances a terror bombing rationale for the A-4, which corresponds to Dornberger’s own recollection that he began to think in those terms only after the Luftwaffe’s costly losses over Britain in 1940–41. He now presented the missile as “significant relief for the employment of aircraft against England, and especially London and the port cities.” The lack of any “means of defense,” the “accuracy” of the missile, and the ability to launch “day and night at irregular times and regardless of weather” would make it a particularly effective contribution to “the defeat of England.”

On August 20, 1941, Dornberger, von Braun, and Steinhoff met the Führer at his Wolfsschanze (“Wolf’s Lair”) headquarters in East Prussia. Shown a propaganda movie about the rockets, the Führer said that “this development is of revolutionary importance for the conduct of warfare in the whole world". Hitler decided to use the A-4 as a "vengeance weapon" [Vergeltungswaffe] and the group found themselves developing the A-4 to rain explosives on London. First flown in October 1942, it was employed against targets in Europe beginning in September 1944.

In response to the V-1 "Buzz Bomb", British Intelligence Service became interested in Peenemunde in October 1942. In August 1943 the Royal Air Force launched a large scale raid, with Peenemunde suffering 815 casualties. The raid destroyed the V-2 test stands and assembly hangers; yet mass production of A-4 began in October 1943 only one month after Hitler" deadline of 1 September.

During 1944-1945, four main locations replaced Peenemünde: Nordhausen (Mittelwerk), a former gypsum mine in Thuringia which had been expanded steadily since 1936 for oil and chemical weapons storage (becoming the primary V-2 production plant); a site in the Austrian Alps east of Salzburg (code-named Zement), physically surveyed and scouted out by Walter Riedel immediately after the raid on Peenemünde (becoming the center for guided missile development and the location of Riedel’s late war work); a brewery in central Austria with underground facilities (code-named Schlier), adapted as a LOX plant (and implied to have had engine test stands of some type); and a quarry near Lehesten south of Nordhausen on the Thuringian-Bavarian border (with engine test stands).

By July 1944 the Eastern Plant fell into Soviet hands; the plant in Vienna was damaged by Allied raids to such an extent that only partial assembly was possible there; and the Friedrichshafen Plant also suffered severely from air attacks. Thus the Central Plant remained alone to do most of the assembly work. By September 1943 the production of A-4s for research purposes reached about 20 missiles per month.

The construction and production of A-4 missiles at Mittelwerk near Nordhausen was perhaps one of the darkest and most tragic pages in the history of German rocket technology. Foreign workers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp prisoners were used to build and produce the missiles under the supervision of German specialists and Gestapo overseers. By the fall of 1944 there was a critical need for manpower, so foreign workers and political and war prisoners began to work under skilled German employees, the Central Plant utilizing 9,000 foreign nationals of 10,000 employees. Before work began underground, the workers were brought to the Dora concentration camp, which had been set up especially for this purpose next to a picturesque wooded mountain. Between December 1943 and March 1944 about 2,500 inmates died.

Inside the mountain factory, the most rigid regime was established — the slightest violation of order and discipline was punished by death. Smoke billowed from the chimney of the crematorium at the Dora camp around the clock. Camp workers died from beatings, torture, diseases, exhaustion, and execution for the slightest suspicion of sabotage. Very few of the Dora prisoners who worked on the top-secret vengeance weapon would get out alive. Nevertheless, an underground center of the anti-Nazi resistance was active at the camp.

Nine thousand skilled German workers were sent to Mittelwerk as conscripted workers by the companies AEG, Siemens, Rheinmetall Borsig, Dynamit AG, Krupp, and Thiessen-Hitton. The Gestapo sent more than 30,000 prisoners from various concentration camps. Boris Chertok reported "The camp underground committee, which consisted of Russians, Czechs, French, and communist Germans, organized sabotage at the factory under the motto The Slower You Work, The Closer to Peace! The prisoners found ways to make the most delicate rocket assemblies useless.

"The Gestapo managed to pick up the scent of the underground anti-Nazi committee, which was led by German communist Albert Kuntz. Among those arrested and thrown into the Gestapo torture chamber for interrogation were French officers, Polish partisans, Czech scientists, German communists, and Soviet prisoners of war. The names of these heroes of the rocket underground remain unknown to us. But the sabotage continued in spite of the reprisals and executions."

Fourteen months after Hitler ordered it into production, the first combat A-4, now called the V-2, was launched toward western Europe on September 7, 1944. When the first V-2 hit London, von Braun supposedly remarked to his colleagues, "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet."

The oft-delayed V-2 production program staggered into low gear in the fall of 1943. Production built steadily through the early months of 1944, peaking in late 1944 and early 1945 at rates of between 650 and 850 V-2s per month.

But the V-2 was a military disappointment. As many as two-thirds of the rockets exploded in mid-air before reaching targets. However, after October 1944, 85 percent of the launchings were successful, 20 percent reaching the specified target, and the remainder doing considerable damage.

The campaign against England perhaps did more to rally the British people than to inflict damage. So disappointing was the campaign that some Nazi officials regretted the decision to concentrate on the V-2 at the expense of the anti-aircraft rockets. Some historians have estimated that by the end of World War II, the Germans had fired nearly 3,000 V-2 weapons against England and other targets. By the end of the war, 1,155 had been fired against England and another 1,675 had been launched against Antwerp and other continental targets. The guidance system for these missiles was imperfect and many did not reach their targets, but those that did struck without warning.

According to the testimony of German Minister of Armaments and Munitions Speer before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, in technical production and economic terms, the war had been lost as early as early summer 1944. Total production was already insufficient to meet the demands of the war. Speer commented, “The Germans cannot recall without pain the astounding achievements of their researchers, engineers, and specialists during the war and how these achievements proved to be in vain, especially since their enemies could not oppose those new types of weapons with anything remotely comparable to them in the least.”

From Speer's SBS Interview: "V-2 cost approximately 20 times as much as V-1. The cost is very difficult to figure out for new production processes because there isn't a real mass production and the value factor cannot be calculated as yet. One V-2 used to cost one million marks in the beginning. I believe it then went down to 250,000–300,000 marks, but I don't want to quote any figures that I do not know exactly . . . . About 70,000 to 80,000 people worked on V-2, that is very much in proportion to the figures of 600 projectiles produced per month . . . "

In December 1944, General Kammler conducted a review of the A-4 missile’s reliability. Over the review period, 625 missiles were delivered to troop units. Of these, 87, or 12.3 percent, were immediately returned to the factory due to defects in the control system. Of the 538 remaining missiles, 495 were launched. Of this number, 44 launches were recorded as failures. Here, 41 percent of the failures were attributed to the control system, 13 percent to the propulsion system, 13 percent to fires in the tail section, and 2.9 percent to explosions upon launch. Thus, out of the 625 missiles, 131 were clearly unfit for launch. The Germans did not have data concerning missile crashes and breakups during the descending atmospheric segment. According to subsequent Soviet experience launching A-4 missiles at Kapustin Yar in 1947, crashes during the latter segment of the trajectory occurred at least 15–20 percent of the time. Consequently,one should consider that no more than 400 of the 495 missiles launched reached their target, or 64 percent of the missiles delivered from the factory.

By the beginning of 1945, it was obvious to von Braun that Germany would not achieve victory against the Allies, and he began planning for the postwar era. The SS and the Gestapo arrested von Braun for crimes against the state because he persisted in talking about building rockets which would go into orbit around the Earth and perhaps go to the Moon. His crime was indulging in frivolous dreams when he should have been concentrating on building bigger rocket bombs for the Nazi war machine. Dornberger convinced the SS and the Gestapo to release von Braun because without him there would be no V-2 and Hitler would have them all shot.

On arriving back at Peenemunde, von Braun immediately assembled his planning staff and asked them to decide how and to whom they should surrender. Most of the scientists were frightened of the Russians, they felt the French would treat them like slaves, and the British did not have enough money to afford a rocket program. That left the Americans. After stealing a train with forged papers, von Braun led 500 people through war-torn Germany to surrender to the Americans. The SS were issued orders to kill the German engineers, who hid their notes in a mine shaft and evaded their own army while searching for the Americans.

Finally, the team found o Private First Class Fred P. Schneikert of Sheboygan, Wisconsin and surrendered to him. Realizing the importance of these engineers, the Americans immediately went to Peenemunde and Nordhausen and captured all of the remaining V-2's and V-2 parts, then destroyed both places with explosives. The Americans brought over 300 train car loads of spare V-2 parts to the United States. Much of von Braun's production team was captured by the Russians.

On April 11, 1945, soldiers of the 104th Infantry Division liberated Nordhausen, a concentration camp filled with slaves who labored in the Schutzstaffel’s (SS) underground missile construction facility. The Allies had destroyed the northern and southern missile factories, and after the summer of 1944, the Mittelwerk facility in Nordhausen was the only one still in operation.

For fifteen years after World War II, von Braun would work with the United States army in the development of ballistic missiles. As part of a military operation called Project Paperclip, he and his "rocket team" were scooped up from defeated Germany and sent to America where they were installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. There they worked on rockets for the United States army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun's team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the Army's Redstone ballistic missile.

With the McCarthy-style manhunt of the 1980s that threatened to export German rocket scientists long after the heyday of man's first achievements in space, the German scientists and their families closed ranks, not talking to historians, scholars or the media about their days at Peenemunde, Germany, where they launched the first rocket into space; their transfer to the U.S., where they worked for the Army and then NASA, and where they became citizens and heroes of the space program; and their accomplishments that are still very much part of the nation's space program.

In 1982, German rocket scientist Arthur Rudolph - who was responsible for the development of the Army's Pershing missile as well as being the project director for NASA's Saturn V that took man to the moon and who received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and NASA Distinguished Service Medal -- was investigated by the Office of Special Investigations, which claimed he was in the U.S. illegally.

In 1983, under duress and fearful for the welfare of his wife and daughter, Rudolph agreed to leave the U.S., return to Germany and renounce his U.S. citizenship. He was investigated in Germany for possible prosecution. Eventually, it was concluded there was no basis for prosecution and Rudolph was granted German citizenship. When the investigation surfaced in the American public, Medaris, Huntsville city officials, the American Legion and former NASA associates called for an investigation of the OSI's activities regarding Rudolph. The scientist tried to regain his U.S. citizenship, but died in Germany in 1996.

Michael J. Neufeld [Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994)] argued that the V2 failed because it was conventionally armed. Had it been combined with a nuclear warhead, it would have been the revolutionary weapon the Germans had hoped for. Even if the Germans had this insight and had developed the bomb, the German rocket was not powerful enough to lift the nuclear weapons of the era. The bombs built by the Manhattan project weighed four times as much as the V2's warhead.