Antwerp was Belgium’s bustling, northernmost port city, located just 137 miles away from the V-2 launch pads at Castle Varlar. For a thousand years it had been a strategic city in Western Europe, conquered and liberated more than a dozen times. In this war Belgium had suffered terrible losses under four long years of brutal Nazi rule. Three months prior, on September 4, 1944, the Allies liberated Antwerp. There was joy in the streets when the British Eleventh Armored Division rolled into town. Since then, American and British forces had been relying heavily on the Port of Antwerp to bring in men and matériel to support fighting on the western front and also to prepare for the surge into Germany. Now, in the second week of December 1944, Hitler intended to reclaim Antwerp. The Führer and his inner circle were preparing to launch their last, still secret counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest, and for this the German army needed Antwerp shut down. The job fell to the V-2. The party at Castle Varlar was to be a night of warfare and celebration, with one 42,000-pound liquid-fueled rocket being fired off at the enemy after the next, while the guests honored four of the men who had been instrumental in building the wonder weapon for the Reich.
The man at the scientific center of the V-2 rocket program was a thirty-two-year-old aristocrat and wunderkind-physicist named Wernher von Braun. Von Braun was at Castle Varlar to receive, alongside Dornberger, one of Hitler’s highest and most coveted noncombat decorations, the Knight’s Cross of the War Service Cross. Also receiving the honor were Walther Riedel, the top scientist in the rocket design bureau, and Heinz Kunze, a representative from the Reich’s armaments ministry. These four medals were to be presented by Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production.
Armaments are the aggregate of a nation’s military strength, and as minister of weapons, Speer was in charge of scientific armaments programs for the Third Reich. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931, at the age of twenty-six, and rose to power in the party as Hitler’s architect. In that role he created buildings that symbolized the Reich and represented its ideas and quickly became a favorite, joining Hitler’s inner circle. In February 1942 Hitler made Speer his minister of armaments and war production after the former minister, Fritz Todt, died in a plane crash. By the following month Speer had persuaded Hitler to make all other elements of the German economy second to armaments production, which Hitler did by decree. “Total productivity in armaments increased by 59.6 per cent,” Speer claimed after the war. At the age of thirty-seven, Albert Speer was now responsible for all science and technology programs necessary for waging war. Of the hundreds of weapons projects he was involved in, it was the V-2 that he favored most.
Like von Braun, Speer was from a wealthy, well-respected German family, not quite a baron but someone who wished he was. Speer liked to exchange ideas with youthful, ambitious rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun. He admired “young men able to work unhampered by bureaucratic obstacles and pursue ideas which at times sounded thoroughly utopian.”
As for General Dornberger, the Castle Varlar celebration was a crowning moment of his career. The pomp and power thrilled him, he later recalled. “It was a scene,” Dornberger said after the war—the excitement of the evening, “[t]he blackness of the night.…” At one point during the meal, in between courses, the lights inside the castle were turned off and the grand banquet hall was plunged into darkness. After a moment of anticipatory silence, a tall curtain at the end of the long hall swung open, allowing guests to gaze out across the dark, wintry lawns. “The room suddenly lit [up] with the flickering light of the rocket’s exhaust and [was] shaken by the reverberations of its engines,” remembered Dornberger. Outside, perched atop a mobile rocket-launch pad, the spectacle began. An inferno of burning rocket fuel blasted out the bottom of the V-2, powering the massive rocket into flight, headed toward Belgium. For Dornberger, rocket launches instilled “unbelievable” feelings of pride. Once, during an earlier launch, the general wept with joy.
On this night the excitement focus alternated—from a rocket launch to award decoration, then back to a rocket launch again. After each launch, Speer decorated one of the medal recipients. The crowd clapped and cheered and sipped champagne until the banquet hall was again filled with darkness and the next rocket fired off the castle lawn.
This particular party would end, but the celebrations continued elsewhere. The team returned to Peenemünde, the isolated island facility on the Baltic Coast where the V-weapons had been conceived and originally produced, and on the night of December 16, 1944, a party in the Peenemünde’s officer’s club again honored the men. Von Braun and Dornberger, wearing crisp tuxedos, each with a Knight’s Cross from Hitler dangling around his neck, read telegrams of congratulations to Nazi officials as the group toasted their success with flutes of champagne. In the eyes of the Reich, Hitler’s rocketeers had good reason to celebrate. In Antwerp at 3:20 p.m., a V-2 rocket had smashed into the Rex Cinema, where almost 1,200 people were watching a Gary Cooper film. It was the highest death toll from a single rocket attack during the war—567 casualties.
The Allies were obsessed with the Nazis’ V-weapons. If they had been ready earlier, the course of war would have been different, explained General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. “It seemed likely that, if the German had succeeded in perfecting and using these new weapons six months earlier than he did, our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible,” Eisenhower said. Instead, circumstance worked in the Allies’ favor, and by the fall of 1944, Allied forces had a firm foothold on the European continent. But back in Washington, D.C., inside the Pentagon, a secret, U.S.-only rocket-related scientific intelligence mission was in the works. Colonel Gervais William Trichel was the first chief of the newly created Rocket Branch inside U.S. Army Ordnance. Now Trichel was putting together a group of army scientists to send to Europe as part of Special Mission V-2. The United States was twenty years behind Germany in rocket development, but Trichel saw an opportunity to close that gap and save the U.S. Army millions of dollars in research and development costs. Trichel’s team would capture these rockets and everything related to them for shipment back to the United States. The mission would begin as soon as the U.S. Army arrived in the town of Nordhausen, Germany.
The British had the lead on intelligence regarding V-weapons. Their photo interpreters had determined exactly where the rockets were being assembled, at a factory in central Germany in the naturally fortified Harz Mountains. Trying to bomb this factory from the air was useless, because the facility had been built underground in an old gypsum mine. While the Americans made plans inside the Pentagon, and while von Braun and his colleagues drank champagne at Peenemünde, the men actually assembling the Reich’s V-2 rockets endured an entirely different existence. Nazi science had brought back the institution of slavery all across the Reich, and concentration camp prisoners were being worked to death in the service of war. The workers building rockets included thousands of grotesquely malnourished prisoners who toiled away inside a sprawling underground tunnel complex known by its euphemism, Mittelwerk, the Middle Works. This place was also called Nordhausen, after the town, and Dora, the code name for its concentration camp.
To average Germans the Harz was a land of fairy tales, of dark forests and stormy mountains. To those who read Goethe, here was the place where the witches and the devil collided at Brocken Mountain. Even in America, in Disney’s popular film Fantasia, these mountains had meaning. They were where forces of evil gathered to do their handiwork. But at the end of the Second World War, the Reich’s secret, subterranean penal colony at Nordhausen was fact, not fiction. The Mittelwerk was a place where ordinary citizens—of France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, Poland, and Germany—had been transformed into the Third Reich’s slaves.
The underground factory at Nordhausen had been in operation since late August 1943, after a Royal Air Force attack on the Peenemünde facility up north forced armaments producti
on to move elsewhere. The day after that attack, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, paid a visit to Hitler and proposed they move rocket production underground. Hitler agreed, and the SS was put in charge of supplying slaves and overseeing facilities construction. The individual in charge of expanding Nordhausen from a mine to a tunnel complex was Brigadier General Hans Kammler, a civil engineer and architect who, earlier in his career, built the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The first group of 107 slave laborers arrived at the Mittelwerk in late August 1943. They came from the Buchenwald concentration camp, located fifty miles to the southeast. The wrought-iron sign over the Buchenwald gate read Jedem das Seine, “Everyone gets what he deserves.” Digging tunnels was hard labor, but the SS feared prisoners might revolt if they had mining tools, so the men dug with their bare hands. The old mine had been used by the German army as a fuel storage facility. There were two long tunnels running parallel into the mountain that needed to be widened now for railcars. There were also smaller cross-tunnels every few meters that needed to be lengthened to create more workspace. In September 1943 machinery and personnel arrived from Peenemünde. Notable among the staff, and important to Operation Paperclip, was the man in charge of production, a high school graduate named Arthur Rudolph.
Rudolph’s specialty was rocket engine assembly. He had worked under von Braun in this capacity since 1934. Rudolph was a Nazi ideologue; he joined the party before there was any national pressure to do so, in 1931. What he lacked in academic pedigree he made up for as a slave driver. As the Mittelwerk operations director, Rudolph worked with the SS construction staff to build the underground factory. Then he oversaw production on the assembly lines for V-weapons scientific director Wernher von Braun.
The prisoners worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, putting together V-weapons. By the end of the first two months there were eight thousand men living and working in this cramped underground space. There was no fresh air in the tunnels, no ventilation system, no water, and very little light. “Blasting went on day and night and the dust after every blast was so thick that it was impossible to see five steps ahead,” read one report. Laborers slept inside the tunnels on wood bunk beds. There were no washing facilities and no sanitation. Latrines were barrels cut in half. The workers suffered and died from starvation, dysentery, pleurisy, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and phlegmasia from beatings. The men were walking skeletons, skin stretched over bones. Some perished from ammonia burns to the lungs. Others died by being crushed from the weight of the rocket parts they were forced to carry. The dead were replaceable. Humans and machine parts went into the tunnels. Rockets and corpses came out. Workers who were slow on the production lines were beaten to death. Insubordinates were garroted or hanged. After the war, war crimes investigators determined that approximately half of the sixty thousand men eventually brought to Nordhausen were worked to death.
The Mittelwerk wasn’t the first slave labor camp created and run by the Third Reich. The SS recognized the value of slave labor in the mid-1930s. Humans could be selected from the ever-growing prisoner populations at concentration camps and put to work in quarries and factories. By 1939 the SS had masterminded a vast network of state-sponsored slavery across Nazi-occupied Europe through an innocuous-sounding division called the SS Business Administration Main Office. This office was overseen by Heinrich Himmler but required partnerships. These included many companies from the private sector, including IG Farben, Volkswagen, Heinkel, and Steyr-Daimler-Puch. The most significant partner was Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production. When Speer took over as armaments minister in February 1942 his first challenge, he said, was to figure out how to galvanize war production and make it more efficient. Speer’s solution was to get rid of bureaucracy and use more slave laborers. He himself had been connected to the slave labor programs with the SS for years, including when he was an architect. Speer’s buildings required vast amounts of stone, which was quarried by concentration camp laborers from Mauthausen and Flossenbürg.
The SS Business Administration Main Office specialized in engineering dangerous and fast construction projects, as was the case with the V-2 facility at Nordhausen. “Pay no attention to the human victims,” Brigadier General Hans Kammler told his staff overseeing construction in the tunnels. “The work must proceed and be finished in the shortest possible time.” In the first six months of tunnel work, 2,882 laborers died. Albert Speer praised Kammler for what he considered to be a great achievement in engineering, setting things up so efficiently and so fast. “[Your work] far exceeds anything ever done in Europe and is unsurpassed even by American standards,” wrote Speer.
There were other reasons why the use of slave labor was so important to wonder weapons production, namely, the secrecy it ensured. The V-2 was a classified weapons project; the less Allied intelligence knew about it, the better for the Reich. When Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler met with Hitler in August of 1943 to brief him on the benefits of using slave labor, Himmler reminded the Führer that if the Reich’s entire workforce were to be concentration camp prisoners, “all contact with the outside world would be eliminated. Prisoners don’t even receive mail.”
In the spring of 1944, V-2 production had accelerated to the point where the SS provided Mittelwerk managers with their own concentration camp, Dora, which in turn grew to include thirty subcamps. The man in charge of “personnel” at the Mittelwerk, its general manager, was a forty-six-year-old engineer named Georg Rickhey, an ardent Nazi and party member since 1931. On Rickhey’s résumé, later used by the Americans to employ him, Rickhey described himself as “Mittelwerk General Manager, production of all ‘V’ and rocket weapons, construction of underground mass-production facilities, director of entire concern.” As general manager of the sprawling, subterranean enterprise, Rickhey was in charge of “renting” slaves from the SS. As a former Demag Armor Works executive, he had already overseen the creation of more than 1.5 million square feet of underground tunnels around Berlin, all dug by slaves. With this experience Rickhey had become a veteran negotiator between private industry and the SS Business Administration Main Office in the procurement of slaves. “The SS began, in effect, a rent-a-slave service to firms and government enterprises at a typical rate of four marks a day for unskilled workers and six marks for skilled ones,” writes V-weapon historian Michael J. Neufeld. The slaves were disposable. When they died they were replaced. At Nordhausen the SS gave Rickhey a discount, charging the Mittelwerk between two and three reichsmarks per man, per day.
On May 6, 1944, days after becoming general manager of the Mittelwerk, Rickhey called a meeting to discuss how best to acquire more prisoners for slave labor. Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and Arthur Rudolph were all present. It was decided that the SS should enslave another eighteen hundred skilled French workers to fill the shoes of those who had already been worked to death. The record indicates that von Braun, Dornberger, and Rudolph showed no objection to Rickhey’s plan.
In August, the same problem was again at issue. This time Wernher von Braun initiated the action himself. On August 15, 1944, von Braun wrote a letter to a Mittelwerk engineer, Albin Sawatzki, describing a new laboratory he wanted to set up inside the tunnels. Von Braun told Sawatzki that to expedite the process, he had taken it upon himself to procure the slave laborers from the Buchenwald concentration camp.
“During my last visit to the Mittelwerk, you proposed to me that we use the good technical education of detainees available to you [from] Buchenwald,” wrote von Braun. “I immediately looked into your proposal by going to Buchenwald [myself], together with Dr. Simon [a colleague], to seek out more qualified detainees. I have arranged their transfer to the Mittelwerk with Standartenführer [Colonel] Pister,” the commandant of Buchenwald.
In December of 1944, with slave laborers dying by the thousands in the Mittelwerk tunnels and V-2 rockets crashing into civilian population centers, causing mayhem and terror across Europe, it would have been hard to
imagine that some of those directly responsible would ever be regarded as individuals of great value to the United States. And yet in less than a year Arthur Rudolph, Georg Rickhey, Wernher von Braun, Major General Walter Dornberger, and other rocket engineers would secretly be heading to America to work. In the last days of World War II few would ever have believed such a thing.
But the war’s last days were coming. Just three weeks after the celebration at Castle Varlar, Albert Speer found himself with a lot less to celebrate. Visiting the Belgian border town of Houffalize, accompanied by an SS armored force commander named Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, Speer had what he would describe in his 1969 memoir as a realization. Gazing upon the bodies of hundreds of dead German soldiers killed in a recent Allied bomber attack, Speer decided the war was over for the Reich. The German war machine could no longer compete against the force and will of the Allied offensive. “Howling and exploding bombs, clouds illuminated in red and yellow hues, droning motors, and no defense anywhere—I was stunned by this scene of military impotence which Hitler’s military miscalculations had given such a grotesque setting,” Speer wrote. Standing there in Houffalize, Speer—Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production—decided to flee from the danger zone.
At 4:00 a.m. on the morning of December 31, under cover of darkness, Speer and an aide climbed into a private car and hurried east, headed for the comforts of a sprawling mountaintop castle outside Frankfurt called Schloss Kransberg, or Castle Kransberg. Built on a steep, rocky cliff in the Taunus Mountains, the castle was one of Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe (German air force) headquarters. Just as many of Hitler’s scientists would soon become American scientists, so would many of the Reich’s headquarters and command posts become key facilities used for Operation Paperclip. Castle Kransberg also had a storied past in the history of warfare. The structure dated from the eleventh century, but its original foundation had been built on top of the ruins of a ring-wall fortification constructed in the time of the Roman Empire. Battles had been waged in this region, on and off, for over two thousand years.