I started with Gravity’s Rainbow, which I had read at UC Irvine for Mike Clark’s graduate seminar on the modern novel, and which was the (accurately researched, it turned out) source of most of the little I had ever known about the V-2. I spent an hour flipping through and skimming the relevant passages, starting with the book’s epigraph, then following its secondary character of Franz P?kler, a young engineer whose career traces the history of spaceflight in Germany: the Weimar period of “Rocketport Berlin” and the starry-eyed Verein für Raumschiffahrt,* Frau im Mond and the rocket craze, the militarization of rocket research that came with Hitler’s rise, Peenemünde, and—I was jolted to discover—Nordhausen, where the book’s protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, also turned up at one point. I remembered having read these passages—some absurd, some harrowing—set in and around the rocket’s mountain lair, but the name of the site in the Harz Mountains had gone out of my memory completely. I wondered if my grandfather knew or had ever tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow. I wondered how he would have felt about the book’s depictions of the European theater of operations, the horror of Nordhausen, the experience of rocket attacks, and so many other things Pynchon had never lived through or seen. It all felt convincing to me, but what did I know? Apart from so-called hard science fiction, which he read (as with The Magic Mountain) for its artful packaging of big ideas, my grandfather regarded most fiction as “a bunch of baloney.” He thought reading novels was a waste of time more profitably spent on nonfiction.
Beyond the Pynchon there was not a lot. A brief Britannica entry on Nordhausen and its Mittelwerk rocket factory, cross-referenced to entries on the V-2, the facility at Peenemünde, and the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. Mentions of Peenemünde, the Mittelwerk, and KZ Dora-Mittelbau in a few general histories of World War II. Some of the grimmest pages, toward the end, in a book about the 3rd Armored Division’s yearlong slog from Normandy to Dessau. A Pentagon-approved 1971 book on Operation Paperclip that made careful reference to the 1947 acquittal, on charges of war crimes, of a V-2 project middle manager named Georg Rickhey. Finally, the jackpot, an article in The New York Times from March 1984, which I read on microfilm. It summarized an exposé of Operation Paperclip in the latest issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The author of the exposé, the Times said, had made extensive use of formerly classified documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to establish in detail that the postwar history of American technological accomplishment, particularly in the realm of biological warfare, aeronautics, and spaceflight, had been rooted in heinous Nazi war crimes and an elaborate American cover-up of those crimes. Following decades of inaction and denial, the article said, the U.S. government had stripped the citizenship of a prominent rocket scientist, Arthur Rudolph, and deported him to his native Germany. Rudolph had declined or been unable to contest direct evidence linking him to numerous atrocities during his tenure as managing director of V-2 production at Nordhausen. Along with Wernher von Braun, the article said, Arthur Rudolph had been the lead designer of the mighty Saturn V, the rocket that had borne the Apollo missions toward the Moon.*
Altogether it was not a lot, but I got the general drift.
Until August 1943 the plan was for V-2 rockets to be manufactured, once they became operational, at the same top-secret facility, on the remote island of Peenemünde off the German Baltic coast, where their research and development had been carried out. The prototypes and test rockets had all been manufactured in Peenemünde’s workshops by hundreds of “foreign workers”—prisoners, housed in an adjacent concentration camp, most of them Poles. The prisoners had already begun construction of a new factory when, during the full moon of August 17, Peenemünde became the target of a massive Allied air raid. The secret of Peenemünde had been discovered, intelligence gathered, reconnaissance carried out. The aim of the raid, code-named HYDRA, and the hope of its planners—among them Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys—was to strangle the V-2 (or A4, as it was known then) in its cradle. To that end, six hundred Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Stirlings dropped two million kilograms of high-explosive bombs in what was believed to be the general vicinity of the workshops, the experimental stations, and the living quarters of the scientists and engineers.
At that time the science of bomb targeting was less than precise. As the raid unfolded over Peenemünde, errors—navigational, calculative, aeronautical—compounded. While measurable damage was done to the workshops and experimental stations, the greatest part of the bombs that did not fall harmlessly fell onto the adjacent concentration camp. Seven hundred of the “foreign workers” died within a few minutes; German researchers killed by the bombs of HYDRA numbered two. Afterward both Allied and German damage assessments agreed that the raid—which also cost the lives of two hundred British airmen—had set the rocket program back by eight weeks at most.
If HYDRA had been ineffective, it was not without result. The V-2 program was now demonstrably vulnerable, and Heinrich Himmler seized on that vulnerability to bring it under control of his SS (in which Wernher von Braun had risen to the rank of Sturmbannführer). Clearly, the projected factory was at grave risk. It could not be built on an expanse of open seacoast at coordinates well known to the enemy. It must be moved and protected against further attack. It would be kept secret, as Peenemünde had been, but that was insufficient; the factory must be hidden as well.
A new site, the Mittelwerk, was commissioned and constructed in the Harz Mountains, just outside the town of Nordhausen. In a display of the kind of inventive audacity that characterized German military research, the new rocket factory was constructed inside of a minor mountain.* Fresh gangs of Poles, along with Frenchmen, Russians, Czechs, and Ukrainians—prisoners of war, political prisoners—were conscripted from KZ Buchenwald fifty miles away and detailed to excavate and expand a tunnel system under the Kohnstein, site of a disused gypsum mine. The Mittelwerk’s lattice of tunnels served as factory floor, administrative offices, staff dormitory, and at first as a subterranean concentration camp for the laborers who worked, ate, slept, and died in them. When they died, their bodies were shipped back to Buchenwald for cremation.
A steadily increasing rate of V-2 production demanded more inmates than the Mittelwerk could accommodate. The SS forced the prisoners to build a camp for themselves outside the south entrance to the tunnels, code-named Dora, which in time spawned further subcamps, centered around the Mittelwerk and known collectively as Mittelbau. A subcamp in the town of Nordhausen, called the Boelcke-Kaserne, was used as a dumping ground for inmates too enfeebled or sick to work. From the start of excavation and the first shipments of Buchenwald prisoners in September 1943 until the capture of the Mittelwerk and the liberation of Dora-Mittelbau in April 1945, an estimated sixty thousand prisoners were put to work building the seven thousand V-2s that eventually rolled off the line.