Free Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s by Norman Longmate

flying-bomb, put the best face on events that he could, clapping Dornberger jovially on the back, as he remarked: ‘Congratulations! Two-nought in your favour.’ Albert Speer was equally encouraging. ‘I was convinced you would succeed,’ he told Dornberger. Even more remarkable was the conversion of an old enemy, the head of the central office of Speer’s ministry, as Dornberger described:
    On the way to the reception room I ran into Saur. He shook hands with me.
    ‘I never knew, I never even dreamed you’d get so far! . . . You have convinced me. From now on I shall be one hundred percent behind you. . . . Come and see me if you want anything, either alone or with Degenkolb.’

    Saur’s support was to prove more embarrassing than his opposition, for he now began to out-Degenkolb Degenkolb in his efforts to increase A-4 production. At a conference in (somewhat inappropriately) huts erected in the Berlin Zoo in July, Saur astonished a conference of 250 managers and technical staff from the major firms assigned contracts for A-4 components, by announcing that the Degenkolb programme, which Dornberger thought impossible to achieve, was to be raised dramatically ‘from 800 to 2,000 units a month as from December’. While ‘Degenkolb, beaming, shook hands with me,’ wrote Dornberger, ‘Professor von Braun . . . was giving me imploring and despairing looks, shaking his head again and again in incredulous astonishment’ – as well he might. Even if, by some near miracle, the three existing factories, and a fourth now under construction at Nordhausen, could produce 2000 rockets a month, another great bottleneck, that of fuel supply, would remain, for ‘oxygen-generating plant could not be conjured from nowhere’, so that liquid oxygen ‘could not be guaranteed even for 900 units a month’, while ‘how much alcohol we should have depended on the potato harvest’. But Degenkolb, in the chair, and Saur, now his ardent supporter, were deaf to all entreaties. Dornberger tried to reintroduce a note of realism by stressing that any increase in the supply of components at the expense of reliability would be worse than useless. ‘Better’, he urged, ‘fewer rockets of first-rate quality than masses of inferior ones that cannot be used except as scrap.’ But Degenkolb and Saur were interested only in production figures; they, after all, would not have to use the rocket in action. One manufacturer who attempted to explain his difficulties in increasing output of a key piece of equipment, the mechanism for feeding liquid oxygen to the A-4, was rudely interrupted. ‘I am not interested in your difficulties,’ Degenkolb told him, and when the industrialist replied that he must consult his staff before undertaking to meet the new schedule Saur also intervened, threatening to dismiss him from his post and to hand the firm over to trustees. Others who raised similar points met with the same treatment until, as Dornberger observed, ‘opposition and objections grew weaker and weaker until finally the heads of firms, when asked whether they could meet the schedule, merely nodded resignedly’. They were, he decided, demoralized by being publicly reproved like naughty schoolboys and ‘so completely convinced of the impossibility of meeting Saur’s requirements that they believed there would be no harm in agreeing’.
    Peenemünde now acquired an even more powerful and even less welcome friend than Saur, Heinrich Himmler, Minister of the Interior and head of the Gestapo, who invited himself for a brief visit early in April 1943. To Dornberger Himmler looked, as they talked in the Mess, ‘like an intelligent elementary school-teacher’ and he ‘possessed the rare gift of attentive listening. Sitting back with legs crossed, he wore throughout the same amiable and interested expression. His questions showed that he unerringly grasped what the technicians told him.’ Less reassuring, however, was Himmler’s offer to protect