Fantasque Time Line

[Colonel Gaunt]

[mikey1983]

[mikey1983]

Continuing from Building Hitler's Missiles: Traces of History in Peenemünde, here is an extract regarding the end of the V-Waffen program and von Braun's surrender/defection to the Americans. Again, the places and dates are obviously OTL, but I think they could provide a useful reference, especially regarding the actions of von Braun and his team; with Hitler in FTL ensconced in the Berghof, there may consequently be greater scrutiny regarding persons like von Braun in the surrounding region.

<><><>

While rockets were launched from Peenemünde’s Test Stand 7 day after day in January 1945, to test out ingenious new technical systems and improve the weapons’ flight stability and target precision, a terrible flood of war refugees stated arriving from the East. Even this remote corner of Germany was not spared the chaos. On the run from the approaching Soviet Army, tens of thousands of people dragged their last few belongings along Usedom’s country lanes on carriages or handcarts, towards Wolgast. “One of the most frightening things we saw, which brought home what was going on,” notes the engineer Dieter Huzel. By the end of January 1945, all the rocket experts agreed: the war seemed to have been lost for good, and anyone who wanted to survive had to think about what to do next.

Refugees passing through the area had told stories of rape and massacres in the lost villages and towns of the East. If anyone feared retributions, then it was from the Russians most of all. The scientists hoped that the armies of the Western Allies would be gentlemanly and gallant once the war came to an end – even though the Peenemünde rockets had only been targeted at Western European cities.

But for the moment, the Americans were still far off, and the war was still raging. The Peenemünde staff held onto their work until the very last moment, carrying on regardless and doing their duty. “We anaesthetised ourselves with work,” recalls Dieter Huzel. Others, however, such as Huzel’s employer Wernher von Braun perhaps, were not willing to tranquilise themselves in this way, especially as the Peenemünde Research Centre was soon to be evacuated and set up again in central Germany. They were clearly moving closer to the Americans, albeit in gradual stages, and they had to be prepared for meeting them.

As Wernher von Braun’s well-informed fellow travellers and biographers Ernst Stuhlinger and Frederick I. Ordway revealed in 1992, General Dornberger apparently confirmed, 25 years after the end of the war, that there were contacts between American secret service officers and senior Peenemünde officials via neutral middlemen in Switzerland at the end of 1944. As the relevant US archives are still closed, there is no way to confirm or reject this statement. The smooth running of the later American secret operations “Overcast” and “Paperclip” in finding the Peenemünde rocket experts and hastily taking them to the USA, however, would appear to confirm a degree of prior planning on both sides. Nevertheless, it was only Soviet troops that were threateningly close to Peenemünde at the end of January 1945. Their first bridgehead on the Oder River was less than 160 kilometres away from the island as the crow flies.

The Army Research Centre staff lists for this time show there were still over 4,000 employees there. The daily schedules for the test engineers and technicians show they were still carrying out precise inspections of every 30th rocket produced by concentration camp prisoners in the Mittelbau-Dora mass production facilities.

Behind the scenes, another episode in the power struggle between the Wehrmacht and the SS was going on. Following a tough battle with his rival in the SS, Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler, Major General Dornberger was finally promoted to head of a “working group to break the enemy’s aerial superiority”, equipped with full authority, in mid-January 1945. Attached to the Armaments Ministry under Albert Speer, Dornberger was thus authorised to issue directives to industry and all state institutions; military departments were now also subject to his command. The general had reached the peak of his military career on the decline of the Nazi Reich – “too late”, as he later regretted, to affect the upturn for the V-2 programme he had hoped for.

When the last V-2 rocket was shot into the grey winter sky above Peenemünde for series testing on 17 February 1945, the first evacuation transports were already leaving the island by train for Bleicherode and the surrounding area in the centre of Germany. There were further transports by barge and truck in the following days. By mid-March, the Soviets were only 30 kilometres away from Peenemünde. The front was coming nearer by the day.

It appears that few of the senior scientists and engineers were still fully dedicated to their work in the final months of the war. Yet although the decision to evacuate and move to the vicinity of the Mittelwerk had been taken on 31 January, hardly any of them could imagine how to simply relocate a high-technology park from one place to another, especially in a fast-shrinking country riddled with bomb damage.

As it was SS Obergruppenführer Kammler who had ordered the evacuation, the Peenemünde management had considerable freedom in determining the scenario and practical implementation of the move. The former Assistant Manager Dieter Huzel recalls that Wernher von Braun added his own personal instructions to Kammler’s command at a staff meeting on 3 February. He decided that the evacuation was only to take place “as an organisation as a whole”, so as to maintain the complete structure and administration as far as possible. The aim was to keep the key personnel and machinery together despite the expected chaotic conditions at their destination, so that the precious “think tank” did not fall apart. The plan also signalled allegiance to the SS, thus creating leeway for any planned actions in the Peenemünde team’s own interest.

All the testing and inspection equipment, the most important machines and appliances, office furniture and household items were packed and prepared for transport from 3 February onward. Drawings and documentation were gone through, with anything that appeared superfluous being destroyed. There was no time left to pull down the buildings or fixed technical equipment.

Only around half of the 4,325 people still employed on the development of the V-2 and other rockets and in the Peenemünde workshops and administration on 2 February ended up relocating to Bleicherode. At least a thousand of them – engineers, medium-level employees and skilled workers – remained on the island with their families, awaiting the end of the war.

Nevertheless, the Third Reich’s one-time “research paradise” was still subject to the strictest security system and SS terror to the very end, as reports from concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war indicate. And many of the remaining Luftwaffe and Heer officers are unlikely to have lessened their blind zeal to serve their “Volk und Vaterland” to the very last.

Along with the continuing evacuation of staff and equipment, the various groups of forced labourers started being moved at the end of February and beginning of March. The Polish prisoner Włodzimierz Kuliński recalls: “There were transports of about 800 Poles and the same number of Russians to Mittelbau concentration camp. There was also a small group of French prisoners and prisoners of other nationalities. Nearly 1,000 prisoners remained behind, mostly young people deployed to dismantle and evacuate the facilities.” According to Kuliński, these transport groups were still loading engine parts and rocket segments onto freight trains and ships in March and April. The ships apparently left the harbour for an unknown destination and sank their cargo somewhere in the Baltic.

As the front was coming audibly closer in April, many of the foreign prisoners attempted to draw out the transport and loading work. They finally stopped work between 26 and 28 April. “We were ordered to line up with our belongings and march to the main harbour in columns of one hundred men. We were loaded onto coal barges. There was no escape, because there were guards with machine guns all around us. Anyone who even raised his head could reckon with being shot at the last moment. A tugboat pulled us out to sea and then unloaded us near Barth. Our destination was the local concentration camp, which was a little way outside of the town. There were trenches being dug and roadblocks being erected everywhere. Just as we were eating turnip soup a few days later, the sirens went off – Soviet troops were apparently on the advance. When the SS wanted to force us to move on again at that point, my comrades and I decided to escape.” Włodzimierz Kuliński lived to tell the tale. That was at the beginning of May 1945.

The machines at Peenemünde had come to a standstill by then – apart from the power plant. “We told ourselves we couldn’t just disappear, the turbines had to keep working because everyone needed electricity,” recalls the engineer Walter Petzold. He also thought the best form of life insurance for when the Russians arrived was to keep on working. All his men who lived on the other side of the Peene Estuary in Kröslin wanted to carry on like him. And many of the conscripts who came from the far edge of Pomerania and had just lost their home were happy to stay on, especially as their wives had just found roofs over their heads in Peenemünde. It was only the skilled workers, many of them electricians, who had come to Peenemünde from all over Germany and wanted to return home. The workforce at the power station fell from 80 to 40 men.

For the engineer Hartmut Küchen, who had been head of Test Stand 7 for a long time from September 1943 onward, the relocation of Peenemünde-Ost to the south Harz mountains and from there to the Alps had a sole objective: to create the necessary conditions for “the long-range rocket project to be steered into the harbour where it belonged, by its nature, size and potential for the future: the USA.” There had been two stages of preparations for this “event we all wished for,” Küchen confirms. Firstly, he writes, Wernher von Braun had already commissioned Dr. Debus at the beginning of the relocation “to move his mobile P 7 launch platoon into the Cuxhaven area – officially for the purpose of continuing the test launches for the Mittelwerk production – but along with a number of P 7-tested A-4 rockets.” One can assume that von Braun wanted to secure this arsenal at the Altenwalde navy training grounds near Cuxhaven as a kind of technological pledge for a possible defection to the Americans. It appears, however, that none of these rockets ever actually arrived. When the British launched Operation “Backfire” on the training grounds only a few weeks later, all they found was a few V-2 components.

Von Braun took the second step towards preparing for a possible defection to the American side in Bleicherode. An unforeseen stay in hospital, however – he had broken his arm after a road accident – put him severely off schedule. He planned to get hold of a secret archive, allegedly containing a complete documentation of the V-2 technology and mode of operation, to be handed over to the Americans at an opportune moment. On 1 April he instructed his assistant Dieter Huzel to hastily compile the archive and arrange for its transport. According to Huzel, however, he assumed that von Braun wanted to protect the documents from being seized by the enemy. In Huzel’s graphic description, the archive, weighing 13 tonnes and loaded onto three trucks and two trailers, ended up near the village of Dörnten, close to Goslar just outside the Harz mountains. Following an almost endless odyssey in search of a home for the documents, the former explosives store of the Georg Friedrich Mine seemed an ideal storage place. The undercover operations was completed towards midday of 6 April, and the mine entrance was blocked by an explosion. Only five people knew about the secret.

Only one day later, American troops reached Hildburghausen south of the Thuringian Forest, starting to cut off the only escape route to South Germany. Under these circumstances, SS Obergruppenführer Kammler apparently gave new orders to the Peenemünde managers in Bleicherode to leave for the “Alpine fortress”.

That same day, a special train carrying 500 rocket experts departed via Leipzig, Chemnitz, Weiden and Regensburg to Murnau. Finally, the train reached its destination of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps on 13 April.

Oberammergau seemed to be firmly in the hand of the SS. As Stuhlinger and Ordway describe in their biography of Wernher von Braun, the Peenemünde leadership had anticipated being held there as Kammler’s “personal hostages”, ideal for buying his way out when the Allies arrived.

As General Dornberger had meanwhile also arrived in Oberammergau to stock up the Peenemünde representatives with his staff, they succeeded in deceiving the SS. In order to prevent the “irreplaceable Peenemünde specialists” from being wiped out by an enemy air raid, the SS agreed to accommodate them in different locations. In the last days of April, therefore, von Braun and General Dornberger were safely holed away with their closest staff in the Hotel “Haus Ingeburg” in the mountain village of Oberjoch. They even had a “little party” there to celebrate Hitler’s 56th birthday on 20 April. As Dieter Huzel recalls, “the mood was of course highly oppressive”. But it seems that the reality of the Third Reich was already taking a back seat to upcoming events. In the remote winter sports resort, von Braun and Dornberger were busily planning how to continue the Peenemünde developments under a new flag.

The 7th US Army reached Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen on 30 April. When German radio announced the news of Hitler’s death on 1 May, held back until then, von Braun must have seen it as a final signal to change sides and offer himself and his immediately available group of high-technology experts to the Americans. At least since the beginning of February 1945, all his steps had secretly been heading in this direction, and he seems to have tried very hard to find allies among his fellow scientists. Even on his arrival in the tunnels of the factory in Kohnstein Mountain early April, as the aerodynamics engineer Rudolf Wackernagel later recalled for example, von Braun had called on the scientists “to join him towards the Americans”. Wackernagel refused, as he was planning to look for his family in the devastated city of Leipzig. However, von Braun must have managed to persuade over a hundred other senior scientists and engineers from his Peenemünde team, whereby most of their interests presumably tacitly coincided with his own.

On the morning of 2 May, according to von Braun’s biographers, his brother Magnus, who spoke the best English, took the initiative and drove out to meet the approaching Americans. The Peenemünde scientists thus not only evaded otherwise inevitable imprisonment, but also gave the Americans a signal that may or may not have been previously arranged. Magnus von Braun came across American soldiers from the 44th Infantry Division near the town of Schattwald. As it soon transpired, the Americans had also started searching for the remaining Peenemünde team.