ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

Chapter 15
In the reading room of London's Imperial War Museum, under a
skylight battered by autumn winds and icy rain, I immersed myself in
books and papers that plotted the SS's gradual takeover of the German
aerospace and weapons industry in the last two years of the war. But
as the evidence mounted, I found myself increasingly distracted by
thoughts of Marckus. Why had he warned me off the German research
angle? Why did Marckus, with his incisive mind and razor-sharp
reasoning, insist on belittling information that seemed more beguiling by
the hour?
It was the intractible aspect of this contradiction that led me to pledge
quietly to myself that from now on I'd be much more careful about what
I told him.
It was in August 1943, just three months after the first successful test
shot of the A-4 rocket, better known as the V-2 vengeance weapon, that
Himmler, head of the SS, managed to wrest the V-2 from the control of
the Wehrmacht, the German Army. Himmler was at the Wolf's Lair,
Hitler's remote headquarters in the forests of East Prussia, when the
Führer, in the company of his deputy Martin Bormann, brought up the
subject of A-4 manufacture and his concerns about program secrecy.
Hitler, as was his wont, was demanding the impossible.
The recent test of the A-4, which had landed just five kilometers offtarget
over a distance of 265 kilometers, had finally convinced Hitler,
after months of vacillation, that the rocket would thwart the Allies'
developing invasion plans and quite possibly bring Britain to its knees.
He demanded that 5,000 rockets should go into immediate production
and be delivered in the shortest possible time.
Himmler saw his chance. Quick to exploit an opportunity, the
Reichsführer knew that neither the Wehrmacht nor Albert Speer,
Hitler's young and energetic minister of armaments and war production,
could deliver the project under existing arrangements. Hitler had
decreed that "only Germans" should be employed in the production of
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