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

156 The Hunt for Zero Point
done and requested to expand the capacity of the camps to four million;
three months later, he increased this figure again to 14 million.
While the building program got under way, he set about industrializing
the existing camps, but progressively found himself thwarted by
Speer, who, irrespective of any feelings he may or may not have had
about the moral consequences of such a scheme, believed that the camps
were not the answer to Germany's manufacturing needs. Yet it was a
confrontation that Speer was bound to lose, as he tacitly admitted in his
memoirs; for, in Kammler, he was essentially battling against a twisted
image of himself.
"He too came from a solid middle-class family, had gone through
university, had been 'discovered' because of his work in construction,
and had gone far and fast in fields for which he had not been trained."
Speer, it is clear, was jealous of Kammler, but while Speer patently
wrestled with his conscience, especially during these years, there is no
sign of any moral doubt on the part of the 40-year-old SS officer.
Kammler was cut from the same cloth as SS-Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich, the author of the "Final Solution of the Jewish
Problem," who was assassinated by Czech agents in Prague in 1942.
"Both were blond, blue-eyed, long-headed, always neatly dressed, and
well bred. Both were capable of unexpected decisions at any moment,
and once they had arrived at them would carry them through with a rare
obstinacy," Speer noted.
With Heydrich dead, Himmler had found in Kammler a cold, ruthless
and energetic executor of his wishes; the man who would carry though
his simple, yet grandiose vision.
Kammler set about his task as overseer of the A-4 manufacture
program with clinical zeal. One week after Himmler's fateful meeting
with Hitler at the Wolf's Lair, he dispatched the first group of
concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald to Nordhausen in the
Harz Mountains of central Germany, where work on a giant underground
construction facility for the A-4/V-2 commenced.
Within a month, Kammler and Speer, the latter in his new capacity on
the project as junior partner to the SS, established the low-profile
Mittelwerk GmbH (Central Works Ltd.) to run the rocket venture.
By the end of the year, 10,000 Buchenwald prisoners—mostly Russians,
Poles and Frenchmen—had been dispatched into the limestone
cliffs of the Kohnstein, the mountainous ridge close to the village of
Nordhausen into which the facility was tunneled, to bring about the
impossible: the construction of the largest underground factory in the
world, a facility a kilometer and a half long containing 20 kilometers of