Betrayed: Secrecy, Lies, and Consequences

by Frederic Martini

  The Dora/Nordhausen camp was now functionally two concentration camps, one housing and supplying slave laborers for the Mittelwerk and the other warehousing exhausted workers incapable of further work or workers rejected as incompetent or unmotivated by the civilian overseers. The warehousing operation was just that — no medical services or support were provided, food was minimal, and the death rate unusually high, even by Dora standards.

  Wernher kept track of such details in his role as Director of CCDC-Mittelbau. The Bleicherode operation was complex, involving both design and production of multiple weapons systems, and he communicated regularly with Sawatski, Rudolph, and Rickhey at the Mittelwerk, with Dornberger at his HQ, with Kammler’s office, and with Sonderinspektion II, the SS division that provided materials and slave labor. He was constantly on the go, driving himself to his limits, visiting subcontractors, dealing with technical issues, approving design changes, attending test firings, and managing quality control. At every stop, he encouraged team members to work harder and longer and more efficiently.

  On 3 March, Wernher circulated a detailed memo outlining his plans for reorganizing and redistributing the production of V-1s, jet engines, and Wasserfall, and for increasing the number of V-2 test sites. The plan coordinated the efforts of 30 corporations with a combined workforce of 7,000, and would require many thousands of additional slave laborers for the construction or enhancement of underground facilities.

  Work on the remodeling of two calcium mines near Bleicherode was well underway. But it wasn’t proceeding fast enough for Wernher. He decided that the original plan had to be modified to suit the realities of the war. Rather than wait for the new facilities to be completed, they would make immediate use of what was available. As Wernher stated in his memo:

  Faced with the current requirement to resume development within the least possible time, waiting for the underground work places to be completed is not practical. In order to quickly resume developmental work, it is necessary to move into existing above-ground facilities, insofar as new facilities are not plentiful. It should be considered that a large portion of the work (for example construction offices and administration, etc.) shall remain for duration above ground.124

  Wernher knew that his plans would succeed only if sufficient laborers could be provided by the SS. In the memo circulated to important figures in the SS, the CCDC, and the Mittelwerk, he requested immediate authorization for the construction of 150,000 square feet of additional barracks space, with the notation that additional requests were pending.

  On 12 March 1945, Wernher left Bleicherode at 0200 in a chauffeured car. He was heading to Berlin for a morning meeting about the new laboratory that he planned to set up in the Mittelwerk. Although the space had already been created through the relocations ordered in his memo of 3 March, he needed funds for the laboratory. He also needed approval to get a significant number of unskilled laborers from the Dora concentration camp for excavation and construction work.

  A chase car followed behind. Sometime before dawn, Wernher’s driver either fell asleep or lost control, and the car went off the road and down a steep embankment. Von Braun dragged himself clear and then got the driver out of the vehicle before passing out. He awakened in the hospital with a broken arm. He spent the next two days in a hospital bed, frustrated, bored out of his wits, and itching to get back to work, before he could browbeat the staff into releasing him. When he left, his left arm was in a heavy plaster cast. He immediately returned to work, visiting launch sites, testing facilities, and the production lines at the Mittelwerk.

  Wernher found that conditions at the Mittelwerk had deteriorated and that the laborers looked worn and tired. The failure rate for operational V-2 launches had been greatly reduced, but there remained evidence that some of the failures were the result of deliberate sabotage — faulty welds, improperly torqued fittings, subtly misaligned tail fins, and so forth. There were more SS guards in the assembly halls than he had seen on previous visits. Rudolph told him that many of the laborers had been transferred from a concentration camp called Auschwitz.125

  Between the death rate in the warehousing area, the executions at Dora and the Mittelwerk, and the death rate among the unskilled labor force, the Dora crematorium could not keep pace. Bodies piled up outside the tunnel entrances, waiting to be dumped into open trenches where they could be burned. Wernher tried not to look at the piles too closely, nor at the trenches by the roadside. He found the news from the front lines almost as grim. After the collapse of the Ardennes offensive, the Reich had been losing ground, and the process was accelerating. Dornberger’s reports indicated that the mobile V-2 launchers were moving farther and farther from their targets, and there had been no time to convert the production lines to handle the A-4b. The last V-2 rocket to reach England, launched on 27 March 1945, missed London and landed in Kent.

  During the campaign, 1,300 V-2 missiles had been fired at London. Of that number, 518 hit that target and the rest struck outlying areas. The death toll in the UK was 2,700. Another 1,265 V-2s struck Antwerp, at a cost of 3,565 lives. To produce those weapons, an estimated 20,000 prisoners from the Dora camps died while working at the Mittelwerk and related facilities of the Bauvorhaben X complex. Thus the V-2 had the singular distinction of killing roughly four times as many people during production as it did in combat.

  On 3 April, SS-General Kammler ordered all key members of the rocket group, including Wernher and his team at Bleicherode and Working Staff Dornberger at Bad Sachsa, to relocate to the Messerschmitt jet aircraft design center in Oberammergau, a small village at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. There they were to become part of Kammler’s official staff. Over the next two days, Wernher learned that Hitler had promoted SS-General Kammler to SS-Obergrupenführer,126 the highest commissioned rank in the SS. He was put him in charge of all jet aircraft and airfields. For all practical purposes, from now on, Göring would be reporting to Himmler. Wernher wasn’t surprised that Himmler had finally won that political battle — he was certainly deft at political maneuvering. It wouldn’t affect him at all, given that he was already managing the super-weapons programs for the SS and reporting directly to Kammler.

  While ferreting out these details, Wernher was thinking about his longterm future. He knew that the war was nearly over and that the Reich was on its last legs. There was no question that it was time to leave Bleicherode behind, and Oberammergau, 400 miles from Nordhausen, was suitably far away. American tanks were only twelve miles south of his office, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near Mittelbau or Dora when those facilities were overrun. He shuddered to think what the Americans would think about the condition of the workers. If he was to lead a group to Oberammergau, who should he take? What should they bring with them? What should be left behind for the Americans to find? What steps could he take to ensure that he would emerge unscathed when the war ended?

  Once he came up with a plan, he lost no time setting it in motion. All of the equipment at the Mittelwerk would be abandoned, but they would take the gear from the Bleicherode facility. The key engineering documents and paperwork would be hidden in a secret location from which they could be retrieved at some later date. If Hitler worked some miracle, they could be retrieved. If the war ended as he feared it would, that cache would be his bargaining chip or insurance policy as needed. All nonessential paperwork would be burned.

  Wernher called in his technical assistant, Dieter Huzel, who had replaced Magnus von Braun when Magnus was sent to the Mittelwerk. He told Dieter to begin collecting and crating the documents, and that he would be responsible for hiding them in a suitable location once one was selected. The next day, 7 April 1945, Wernher arranged for Bernard Tessman to assist Dieter, along with a 3-ton truck and an Army corporal with eight men to do the heavy lifting. As to a location for the cache, he suggested that Dieter contact the local mining businesses for information concerning suitably remote and abandoned tunnels.

  Oberammergau was the location of the A
lpine Redoubt, an imposing and dignified name for an old army base. With the Allies continuing to advance, 400 members of his team headed to Oberammergau by train, accompanied by 100 uniformed SD guards. Wernher left by car the same day (7 April 1945) in convoy with 20 truckloads of gear. Dieter Huzel, Bernd Tessmann, and their soldiers quietly drove their truck in another direction, loaded down with 14 tons of top secret documents. They were going to store the crates in an abandoned mining tunnel near the village of Doernten.

  As soon as he arrived in Oberammergau, Wernher was called to a meeting with SS-General Kammler at the Hotel Alios Lang. When he got there, Kammler was otherwise occupied, preparing for an urgent trip, and one of his deputies, SS-Major Kummer, had been placed in charge. Kummer had no idea why von Braun had been called in, but Wernher took the opportunity to ask permission to disperse key members of his team into the surrounding communities, using the vehicles in his convoy. Such a move, he explained, would increase security and decrease the possibility that an air strike would kill the entire team. Kummer seemed unconvinced until Allied fighters made several strafing runs over the compound, whereupon Wernher received permission to proceed.

  While Wernher was deciding who to take and working out the logistics, Huzel and Tessmann returned and reported the success of their mission. Since they knew the location of the hidden paperwork cache, Wernher took them with him on 15 April, when he shifted from Oberammergau to the town of Weilheim, closer to Munich. It was a very small group that slipped away — just Wernher, Huzel, Tessman, Wernher’s brother Magnus, and a few others.

  123 The privatized corporation at Peenemünde, established in August 1944

  124 Fort Eustis microfilm collection, Roll 40, NASM, Chantilly, Virginia

  125 The number of executions for suspected sabotage increased when the SS guards from Auschwitz arrived. Many of the executions were performed at the production facility in the area just outside of Arthur Rudolph’s office; it was Rudolph who signed the papers authorizing their execution. An estimated 300 skilled laborers were executed for sabotage on the factory floor in March 1945.

  126 The equivalent of a three-star general in the Army

  CHAPTER 16

  Revelations

  NORDHAUSEN

  AMERICAN TROOPS LIBERATED THE DORA Concentration Camp on 11 April 1945. It was the first slave labor camp to be liberated by the US Army, and the officers leading the troops had difficulty believing what they found. The SS had been given orders to kill all of the prisoners before leaving, but they had lacked the time and equipment to obey. Most of the prisoners had been marched, trucked, or taken away by boxcar, to be killed elsewhere. The prisoners left behind were either near death or otherwise incapacitated by injury or disease.

  It was a sight that left the soldiers stunned, sickened, and speechless. There were scattered bodies, mounds of corpses, and trenches filled with bodies. The sense of horror only grew as they approached the Mittelwerk. There were 6,000 bodies stuffed in the trenches on either side of the roadway leading into the tunnels. The stench was appalling. Many of the bodies showed signs of repeated, severe beatings. The condition of the few surviving prisoners found in the tunnels defied description — skeletons dressed in rags, often unable to stand or even sit up. Later the same day, US troops liberated Buchenwald, finding conditions equally horrific.

  The liberating troops would be haunted by what they witnessed at Dora, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps. But the technical discoveries at the Mittelwerk provoked a very different reaction within the US intelligence community. By 1944, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had become deeply concerned, if not outright spooked, by the German technological advances their spies were hearing about. Late that year, the intelligence was confirmed as anti-aircraft rockets, jet aircraft, flying bombs, and rockets that flew too fast to detect and counter made their combat debuts. Equally unsettling were the rumors about weapons yet to be brought online, such as intercontinental rockets, super-artillery capable of shooting more than a hundred miles, and — most chilling of all — atomic bombs that could be carried by those rockets and flying bombs.

  The pre-D-day plans to seize intelligence on these weapons to further the war against the Nazis and the Japanese had been reassessed and enhanced. There were now multiple teams assigned to specific intelligence programs under the direction of the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS). That group included representatives of the US War Department, Army, Navy, State Department, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Office of Research and Development, and Foreign Economic Administration, plus the UK Foreign Office, Admiralty, Air Ministry, and other ministries concerned with the funding and production of war-related materials.

  The CIOS set up intelligence teams embedded in special military units known as T-Forces or Tiger Teams. The T-Force units were responsible for capturing and interrogating Nazi scientists, and seizing scientific paperwork and equipment. The teams contained a mix of specialists, each with an assignment and an agenda. For example, Project Alsos personnel worked to assess Nazi progress on the atomic bomb. Chemical Warfare Service teams looked for research data on poison gas, nerve gas, poisoned bullets, and biological weapons. Aeronautical teams searched for design documents, engineering and manufacturing details, and test equipment associated with rocket- and jet-powered aircraft. Chemical engineering teams looked for data on synthetic fuels, synthetic rubber, and glass with special properties. Teams had physicians looking into Nazi medical advances that had military applications, and reporting atrocities that would be the subject of discussion at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. And last but not least, there were teams tasked to secure launchers, rockets, testing and manufacturing equipment, and to locate and interrogate the engineers and scientists responsible for the related programs. These teams reported to the Army Ordnance Department, under the command of Colonel Holger Toftoy.

  T-Forces accompanied ground troops at the front lines, often in the company of Special War Crimes Investigation Units who debriefed repatriated US military personnel and collected evidence of war crimes as POW camps and concentration camps were liberated. William Donovan, head of the OSS, was thinking more expansively. On 1 December 1944, Donovan asked President Roosevelt for permission to bring certain SS intelligence officers into the US after the war ended. In his 18 December response, Roosevelt categorically ruled that out, saying:

  We may expect that the number of Germans who are anxious to save their skins and property will rapidly increase. Among them may be some who should properly be tried for war crimes or at least arrested for participation in Nazi activities.127

  At the time Roosevelt sent that letter, the Battle of the Bulge was still raging and the outcome uncertain, but by 25 January 1945, the German offensive had collapsed. The T-Force teams then pushed farther into Europe, hunting for Nazi scientific knowledge and wondering “Where are the Nazi scientists at the top of the T-Force wish lists?” and “What should we do with them after we capture and interrogate them?”

  While the liberating troops were dealing with the survivors of Dora and Buchenwald, a T-Force team and a war crimes investigation unit were dispatched to Nordhausen. Two of Col. Toftoy’s subordinates, Major James Hamill and Major Robert Staver, were ordered to gather technical intelligence on the Nazi rocket program, while Major Herschel Auerbach of the Command Judge Advocate128 (CJA) looked for evidence of war crimes.

  For Hamill and Staver, Christmas arrived early. All of the heavy equipment, the machinery for manufacturing and assembly, and the testing facilities were intact and undamaged. There were vast rooms filled with the parts needed to build V-2 rockets, V-1 flying bombs, jet planes, and anti-aircraft rockets. There were also — to their great joy — fully assembled V-2 rockets ready for transport and launching. Although they found no paperwork other than charred scraps in 55-gallon burn barrels, they had intact rockets and all of the assembly components in hand. The main problem they faced was that Nordhausen and its environs would be part of the Russian sector after t
he war ended, and there were agreements in place not to destroy any potentially useful hardware prior to turnover. Time was short if they were to pack up and ship out everything of value, find any surviving paperwork of importance, and locate and interrogate the engineers who had designed such advanced weapons.

  At first it was thought that there was little overlap between Auerbach’s team, collecting information on the deaths of Dora prisoners, and the Ordnance team working on missiles and advanced technologies. But it became apparent that the two investigations were completely intertwined when Dora survivors told of the abuses at the hands of administrators, engineers, and production managers at the Mittelwerk.

  The technical director of the Mittelwerk, Albin Sawatski, featured prominently in those reports, and he was being held in custody by the Army. Sawatski was quite talkative, providing information about the organization and staff of the underground factory. He spoke of Georg Rickhey, the general manager, and Arthur Rudolph, the production director, and said that Rudolph was the person who set the work hours for the prisoners. But Arthur Rudolph was nowhere to be found, as he was off in Weilheim with the others in von Braun’s core group.

  WEILHEIM TO OBERJOCH

  The rocket group was blissfully unaware of the chaos in their wake. In fact, none of the turmoil being experienced elsewhere in Germany managed to filter through the Alps to affect the resort community that sheltered what remained of the rocket team. Life was settled and peaceful in the resort community, and the rocketeers had nothing to do. Wernher had been told that because his arm wasn’t healing properly, it should be rebroken and reset. He decided that this was as good a time as any, so he checked into a private hospital in Sonthofen, 30 miles away, for the operation.