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

Peenemünde ‘against sabotage and treason’ once Hitler had finally endorsed the A-4 programme, since the last thing the army wanted was a Gestapo presence there. The mere threat brought General Becker’s successor as head of the Army Weapons Department, General Leeb, hurrying to Peenemunde, and Himmler was, for the moment, bought off by the tactful suggestion that he should declare ‘a prohibited zone round Peenemunde’ and should order ‘a tightening up of security measures in northern Usedom and the adjacent mainland’, a task entrusted to the police commissioner for Stettin, himself an SS general. For the moment the army was allowed to retain responsibility for security at Peenemunde itself, though Gestapo spies were installed in the nearby town of Zinnowitz, where the scientists went for recreation, with instructions, Dornberger suspected, to ‘watch us rather than . . . local inhabitants and strangers’. More seriously, the official commandant of the whole establishment, Colonel Zanssen, was, on SS instructions, relieved of his duties on 26 April, after various vague but alarming charges had been made against him, and transferred back to Berlin.
    On 29 June Himmler paid his promised second, and longer, visit to Peenemunde, entertaining the assembled scientists until four in the morning with an account of Hitler’s racial theories and the Nazi plans to colonize Russia and Poland. Although Dornberger claims to have ‘shuddered at the everyday manner in which the stuff was retailed’ – ‘We hardly ever discussed politics at Peenemunde,’ he insisted – he and his colleagues seem to have been untroubled to discover the sort of New Order their work was helping to establish and to have been undismayed by Himmler’s promise of ‘severe punishments’, at the first hint of sabotage or spying, for the foreign, forced labour he wished them to employ. Nor was he deterred from laying on the demonstration planned for Himmler’s benefit next morning, a grey, overcast day on which everything went wrong. By now thirty-seven A-4s had been fired, twenty-three of them since the first major success on 3 October 1942, but number 38 proved what the launching team had nicknamed ‘a reluctant virgin’. It had hardly left the ground when it plunged back to earth, this time on the Luftwaffe airfield at Peenemunde West, two miles away, where no one was hurt, though three aircraft were destroyed. Himmler, still in a good humour despite his late night, joked that he could now recommend the A-4 as a close-combat weapon, while one of the men from Peenemünde, not to be outdone in wit, commented that it had also justified its description as a revenge weapon; only a few days before, one of the Luftwaffe’s flying bombs had landed near the army’s Development Works, also without casualties. A second test that afternoon, 4 however, went off perfectly, and Himmler parted from Dornberger on good terms, promising ‘to put our point of view to Hitler’, though adding ‘that he could help us only if Hitler’s decision were favourable.’
    At last, on 7 July 1943, came the opportunity, promised months earlier by Albert Speer, for Dornberger and his colleagues to demonstrate their progress before Hitler in person. Dornberger prepared for the great occasion carefully, taking with him a whole range of visual aids that might capture Hitler’s interest, including ‘coloured sectional drawings . . . the manual for field units’ and a large-scale model of the massive storage and launching site already planned for the Channel coast, complete with ‘models of the vehicles one detachment required’. The star item was a film of a successful launching, for Dornberger attributed Hitler’s lack of enthusiasm for the rocket so far to his never having seen, ‘even in a photograph, the ascent of a long-range rocket’ or ‘experienced the thrill provided by the huge missile in flight’. To support him, Dornberger selected von Braun, the