PEENEMUENDE (dpa) – Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels used to maintain that the V-1 and V2 missiles which killed more than 5,500 people in London during World War II were “retaliation weapons” for the allied bombing of Germany which left many cities in ruins.
But as an exhibition in Peenemuende on the northern German island of Usedom now reveals, scientists and engineers were already at work on the so-called Nazi wonder weapons – dubbed “doodle-bugs” by the British – from 1938 onwards, well before the start of World War II.
Dirk Zache, the director of the Peenemuende “missile site” Museum where the rockets were built, hopes the new exhibition, staged in the former “Kraftwerk” test plant facility, will help dispel some of the “misleading legends” surrounding Hitler’s so-called “wonder weapon”.
“For the first time we are relying on authentic documents,” he points out, indicating that earlier information about the pioneer rocket research might not always have been 100-per-cent correct.
Besides original documents secured from the German Military Archive at Freiburg and the German Museum in Munich, the exhibition which recently opened makes use of microfilm and wartime documentary film sequences secured from Washington and London.
Covering 750 square metres of exhibition space, rocket models, and other missile artefacts can be viewed on display tables and in glass cabinets.
In one room, visitors are able to hear performer Zarah Leander rendering a wartime German song designed to keep up spirits: “Es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen” (A miracle is bound to happen) and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels making a fiery speech to Nazi fanatics.
Peenemuende’s development is placed in a realistic political and economic context, backed by witness accounts, some from scientists, concentration camp guards and prisoners made to work there.
When the museum was first opened in 199l it was mired in controversy, with critics claiming the displays glorified Nazi wartime weapons research. More than 16,000 engineers, scientists and technicians worked on the secret weapons.
Packed audiences listened to the story of how rockets pioneered by scientist Wernher von Braun were conceived there. Dramatic music accompanied a report of the first Nazi rocket launch at Peenemuende on October 3, 1942.
Visitors learned how the first missile soared 90 kilometres into the hemisphere before toppling into the sea some 190 kilometres away.
The V-1 was a primitive unguided missile while the V-2 had a preset guidance system which could not be corrected in flight. Around 8,000 of the first type were launched against London with 4,000 V-2s deployed against Britain and the Low Countries.
Hitler dreamed of the rockets terrorizing London and changing the tide of World War II in his favour.
Appointed director of the museum in 1996, Zache admitted that not enough attention had been paid to the darker side of Peenemuende’s history.
A working group under the leadership of Munich-born historian Johannes Erichsen was formed to correct the misleading picture that had grown about activities at Peenemuende.
“There were many facets to Peenemuende’s history, explains Erichsen. “It was pure hell for concentration-camp prisoners and maybe a ‘paradise on earth’ for those involved in the construction of the rockets.”
“Now, through original documents, we are able to show what really went on there,” he says, noting that research carried out in the 1990s confirms that serious production of the V-2 rocket was being planned as early as 1938.
“The V-2 was planned as a terror weapon, and conceived purely for military use,” insists Erichsen, who thus contradicts claims made by the two main postwar rocket pioneers, Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger.
After the war both men maintained their research was “instrumentalized” by the Nazis.
In the new exhibition, special attention is given to the consequences of Nazi weapons technology, and the fate of thousands of prisoners forced to work in grim conditions at wartime underground rocket production plants.
“What you had here was a typical phenomenon of modern technology: rockets that could be deployed for very useful purposes, but equally for very evil means,” said Erichsen.
In October 1992, celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the first Peenemuende rocket launch were cancelled at the last minute after a howl of international disapproval.
Many prisoners-of-war and concentration-camp inmates died at Nordhausen in Thuringia state after being forced to work in gruesome conditions in a former mine used for rocket production.
V-2 production was switched there after British bombing raids crippled the Peenemuende test research centre in 1943.
Despite the protests, former Peenemuende scientists still went ahead with a reunion. Arthur Rudolph, a key figure in the manufacture of the Saturn V rocket for the American Apollo programme in the 1950s and 1960s was the star guest.
A production manager at the Nordhausen plant, he was a close friend of the late Wernher von Braun, who masterminded the American space programme in the 1950s and 1960s after being taken to the United States because of his rocket research knowledge after the Nazi defeat.
When word leaked in the early 1980s about Rudolph’s wartime role, he hastily left the United States to escape prosecution. Returning to Germany, he settled in Hamburg, where he died, aged 84, in 1995.
