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Rockets and People
missile had been shipped, often during its tests, before launch, or in flight. Someone
had taught them to solder the electrical connections unreliably.This was very
difficult to check. The German control personnel were not capable of checking
tens of thousands of soldering points per day.The Gestapo asked the Peenemünde
engineers to devise a way to automate control.
As far as Rosenplänter knew, they had not come up with anything. Up to
twenty percent of the missiles were rejected during the final tests at Mittelwerk.All
of the rejected missiles were sent to a small “rehabilitation” factory, Werk Drei
(Factory Three), to determine the cause of the failure and make repairs. Werk Drei
was located near the village of Kleinbodungen, not far from Bleicherode. There
would still be electrical equipment there for horizontal tests if the Americans had
not hauled it away.
In a sort of justification, Rosenplänter said, “Only Germans worked at Werk
Drei.There weren’t any prisoners there. If the Russian command is interested in
the reconstruction of an A-4 missile, it would be best to use this small factory for
that purpose.” Later we did just that. Especially after dozens of our process engineers
and dismantlers subsequently descended on Mittelwerk.Their primary objective
was to disassemble and haul away processing equipment that was of any value.
Much later—in early 1946 as I recall—a German artist came from Erfurt to
speak to General Gaydukov, chief of the Institute Nordhausen. He brought a large
collection of watercolors and pencil drawings depicting subterranean production
activity at Mittelwerk. According to the artist, any photography or filming of the
factory and the surrounding areas was forbidden on the threat of death. But the
leaders of the A-4 program believed that a creation as great as Mittelwerk should
somehow be immortalized.
They had sought out the professional artist and caricaturist, and with the help
of the Gestapo, had brought him to the factory to draw the entire primary missile
assembly process and do as many sketches as possible in color. He labored diligently,
but at times he got so carried away that drawings appeared of prisoners
being beaten, executions, and visits to the factory by high-ranking guests such as
Ernst Kaltenbrunner himself. 3 We looked intently at these drawings filled with
doomed individuals in striped uniforms, among whom were certainly dozens of
heroes whose names humankind will never know.
How did he manage to keep these pictures? “Very simply,” he explained. “A
special officer of the Gestapo took some pictures from me. But he wasn’t interested
in a lot of them. I was supposed to hand them over to the factory management,
but I wasn’t able to—and now I would like to offer them as a gift to the
Russian command.” General Gaydukov accepted this unexpected gift with gratitude.
Eventually the album of these pictures was sent to Moscow. But as to its
3. From 1942–45, Kaltenbrunner was head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), overseeing both the Gestapo and
the system of Nazi concentration camps throughout Europe.
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