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

NICK COOK 155
more that would die of disease, starvation and the gas chambers before
hostilities were over.
In a perverse reflection of the growth of the camps, the size of the SS
itself surged from an eve-of-war strength of 240,000 to an end-of-war
tally numbering 800,000. Aside from its task to maintain security within
Hitler's state and its brutal administration of the death and labor camps,
the SS also provided 38 fighting divisions alongside the Wehrmacht.
After the abortive bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944, a scheme
hatched by anti-Hitler elements within the German Army General Staff,
the control of the SS and its grip upon Germany would become absolute.
But it was in August 1943, at the Wolf's Lair, that the seeds of the SS's
takeover of the armaments industry were sown. Skilled workers and
scientific specialists, Himmler told Speer, would immediately be transferred
from the camps to begin work on the A-4. Furthermore, the
Reichsführer-SS added, he had asked a "young energetic construction
expert, who had already proved his outstanding ability, to take charge of
the enterprise."
Speer must have had an overwhelming sense of inevitability as to the
identity of this individual, but he inquired anyway. The man who was to
assume direct oversight of the A-4's manufacture, Himmler told him,
was Dr. Ing. (Engineer) Hans Kammler, head of the SS's Building and
Works Division—the entity that had masterminded and built the camps.
Kammler's rise inside the SS had been meteoric. Up until 1941, he
had been an unremarkable civil servant within the RLM, the Reich Air
Ministry, with special responsibility for construction projects—hangars,
barracks, administrative offices and the like. In the autumn ofthat year,
realizing that he was never going to rise to the heights to which he
aspired, he transferred to the SS, where he received the rank of Brigadeführer
and was immediately put in charge of building projects. By the
end ofthat year, Kammler had already drafted a five-year RM13-billion
program of construction for S S barracks and concentration camps
stretching from the newly captured territories of the Soviet Union to
Norway.
The sense that the SS gave Kammler free rein to indulge his ideas and
ambitions—suppressed during his years of obscure service at the
RLM—is unavoidable. No sooner had his appointment taken effect, than
he was drawing up detailed plans for the rapid expansion of the camps,
egged on by Pohl, who had impressed upon him their value as the engines
of growth for his and Himmler's grotesque vision.
To turn it into reality, Kammler immediately saw what needed to be