Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Buried Evil: V2 Rocket (Part 3)

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

As US troops approached a Nazi prison camp, they could hear agonized wailing. The stench of rotting flesh filled their nostrils. Moments later they discovered a pile of smoldering corpses, alongside emaciated survivors. Next to the concentration camp they found something else: tunnels filled with tools — and partially assembled rockets. The soldiers had hit upon the evil heart of the V2 manufacturing program: enslaved laborers, imprisoned underground. And the rocket program's director? Wernher von Braun had already fled. He now had just one concern: persuading the Americans to let him switch sides… For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Do you have a question for Tim? Send it to [e-mail] and we'll do our best to answer it in a Q&A episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin This is the final episode of a three-part series. You can appreciate it on a standalone basis, but if you've not heard episodes one and two, you might prefer to listen to them first. And please be aware that this episode of Cautionary Tales contains some upsetting descriptions of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. and please be aware that this episode of Cautionary Tales contains some upsetting descriptions of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. As the men from the US Third Armoured Division approached the prison camp at Nordhausen in central Germany,

they knew that something terrible awaited them. They could smell it, rotting flesh. They could hear it, the strange groaning, rising and falling. But nothing could truly have prepared them for what they would see that April day in 1945. Emaciated ragged shapes whose fever-bride eyes waited passively, even in the same beds with their dead and dying comrades, too weak to move. The combined cries of these unfortunate was a fabric of moans and whimpers, of delirium and outright madness.

Here and there a single shape tottered about walking slowly like a man dreaming. There was no sign of the guards, just a pile of smoldering corpses and a few, very few, survivors. As the scale of the atrocity began to dawn on the American soldiers, the division commander radioed for medical assistance and gave orders for the photographers to gather as much evidence as they could of the hellish scene.

And evidence of something else too. Because next to the concentration camp, the American soldiers found a network of large tunnels full of tools and partially assembled rockets. The soldiers had discovered the evil heart of the V2 manufacturing program. Enslaved laborers worked to death or left to starve. Verne von Braun's rockets, as we've heard over the course of this series, were the culmination of a decade-long mega-project for Hitler's new German army.

The rocket programme had sucked an ever greater share of Germany's scarce resources into the effort. It was the largest weapons project of the Nazi regime. Technologically, the V2 rocket was a miracle. Economically and militarily, it was a disaster. A hugely expensive way to deliver one tonne of explosive at a time, usually missing military targets and often missing any target at all. The V-2 bombings killed about 5,000 civilians,

housewives queuing for a saucepan at a Woolworth store in London, movie lovers watching a film at the Rex Cinema in Antwerp, revelers at an engagement party in an Islington pub. It was a cruel, spiteful weapon which actually hurt Germany's chances in the war. But there's a striking claim about the V2. Indeed, hearing this statistic

is the reason I started researching this story. It's that far fewer people died in V2 attacks than died building the rocket in the first place. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Caution Retails. The original base for building the V2 rocket, Penawunder, founded in 1937, had been a workers' paradise. With modern family homes, sports facilities, leisure clubs, well-kept paths through the nearby forest and a beach resort, Pei was excellent. When the German war effort began, the normal stringency didn't apply to the Pena Wunder workers. They were sent home for Christmas and New Year.

In February 1943, when the Nazi regime announced total war and decreed that German industrial working hours would run from 6am to 6pm, Pena Wunder's scientific director, Verna von Braun, ignored them. One, Painemunda engineer recalls von Braun's response. Painemunda would run on shorter shifts. We are involved with research, not mass production. Von Braun sounds like the kind of enlightened boss anyone would want. But his declaration was totally disingenuous. Pena Munda was a research centre, but it was also home to the single largest factory yet built in Europe. Of course they were involved with mass production. So how did the V2 manufacturing system change from the utopia of Panamunda to the hell of

the concentration camp the US Army found near Nordhausen? The British bombed Panamunda in August 1943. After that, the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler got involved. The SS was Nazi Germany's paramilitary organisation, with a leading role in the regime's reign of terror and the Nazi genocide. And Himmler hoped to bring the V2 program under his control. He proposed that V2 manufacturing

be moved somewhere safer from attack. Pena Mundo was a coastal facility, a good place to test rockets, and a very pleasant place for von Braun scientists to spend their time, but vulnerable to more bombing raids. Himmler's alternative was the opposite, an underground site near Nordhausen, right in the centre of Germany. This new site came to be called Mittelwerk, or central works. It was an old gypsum mine, dramatically expanded by the addition of two huge tunnels, each

big enough to accommodate twin railway tracks right through the mountain. And the workers in this secret underground lair? Slave labour. Prisoners from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp nearby. The camp that the 3rd Armoured Division would eventually liberate. In the previous episodes I described the extraordinary cost of the V2 program in money, fuel, liquid oxygen, aluminium and other scarce resources. But let me quote for a moment the historian Michael Neufel in his book The Rocket and the Reich.

The real cost must be measured in human lives and suffering. By October 1943, there were 4,000 prisoners in the tunnel, all male and predominantly Russian, Polish and French. By the end of November, there were perhaps 8,000 prisoners living underground. The supervisor of the Mittelwerk construction was a monstrous SS officer named Hans Kamler. He was the man who built the gas chambers at Auschwitz, in which more than a million Jews had been murdered. Now, Kamler was in charge of blasting the tunnels to build an underground rocket factory. He blocked the construction of accommodation barracks

for these enslaved men. Pay no attention to the human cost, Kamler told his staff. The work must go ahead and in the shortest possible time. French resistance leader Jean-Michel was imprisoned at Dora, Middlebow, and put to work in the tunnels. Jean-Michel later described the vicious abuse and the beatings that the terrified prisoners suffered at the hands of their guards, and

he recalled the deafening sound of the underground factory. The noise bores into the brain and shears the nerves. The demented rhythm lasts for 15 hours. Arriving at the dormitory, we collapse onto the rocks, onto the ground. The capos press us on. Those behind trample over their comrades. Soon over a thousand despairing men at the limit of their existence and wracked with thirst lie there hoping for, which never comes. There were no toilets. The men had to sit instead on planks, resting on half-oiled drums.

Despite the frequent addition of chlorine as the drums filled up, the spread of disease was inevitable, and the stink was appalling. Before long, 20 to 25 men were dying each day in the tunnels, from exhaustion, disease, cold, starvation or beatings. The chief of Nazi munitions, Albert Speer, visited at the end of 1943. In his memoirs, he claims to have set everything straight, improving the

food and sanitation in order to reduce what he describes as an extraordinarily high mortality rate. But while Speer liked to take credit for making improvements at Mittelwerk, at the time he was quick to write to the murderous Hans Kamler to congratulate him on getting the underground factory running in just two months, which far exceeds anything ever done in Europe, and is unsurpassed even by American standards. The better conditions didn't last anyway. Soon enough, the SS guards were killing prisoners, suspecting rebellion or sabotage. In January 1945, according to later evidence... The mass hangings began. Up to 57 deportees a day were hung.

An electric crane in the tunnel lifted 12 prisoners at a time, hands behind their backs, a piece of wood in their mouths. All prisoners had to watch these mass hangings. It was a hellish place. By early in 1945, the number of Jewish prisoners at Dora began to increase. Dead or dying prisoners were being brought in as Auschwitz and other camps further east were closed down.

Supplies of food were patchy, and the conditions had deteriorated so badly that the crematorium couldn't keep pace with the death toll. The SS guards started burning the corpses on outdoor pyres. By the time the US 3rd Armoured Division reached the Dora-Mittalbaug camp in April 1945, the SS guards had fled. A fire was still burning, heaped with partially cremated corpses. A final, bitter tragedy was that the camp had been hit by an Allied bombing raid, which killed an unknown number of prisoners,

possibly hundreds. At least 12,000 people had died in the camp and even more on forced marches towards or away from it. Only 250 prisoners remained alive. Nearby was the underground factory of Mittelwerk, still full of partially assembled missiles. But where was the scientific director of the V2 program, Venne von Braun? Cautionary tales will return after the break. At the start of 1945, Von Braun had still been based at Peinemunde,

far from the underground factory and the concentration camp. But as the Soviets closed in from the East, and the Americans, British and French from the west, that would change. He would later say, Ten orders lay on my desk. Five threatened me with immediate execution if we moved ourselves from that spot.

Five stated that I would be shot if we did not move. Von Braun liked to tell this story of escaping under cover of contradictory orders. But the truth was that Hans Kamler, now one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, instructed him to relocate to the underground factory at Mittelwerk. Von Braun obeyed. Von Braun also liked to weave a tale of daring bluffs and intrigues. He and his team smuggled equipment and secret documents away from Pena Munda and to a hidden location. He said much

less about how that manoeuvre was accomplished. The shipment was accompanied by documents on SS-headed stationery signed by a senior SS officer, namely, Werner von Braun. Professor von Braun also bore the title of Major von Braun of the SS, and wearing his SS uniform he wielded his full authority as an officer of one of history's most murderous organisations. On arrival at the Mittelwerk, Major von Braun took lodgings in a beautiful house ten miles south-west of the underground factory. The house had previously been the home of a Jewish factory owner. von Braun crisscrossed the region, searching for and confiscating workshops and factories and even schools to accommodate a last push in the manufacture of the V2.

On the 12th of March 1945, the pressure of work caught up with him and his chauffeur. My driver, out of exhaustion after having driven through two nights, fell asleep at the wheel at the speed of about 100 km an hour. The car flew through the air and landed after about a 40-metre flight. I was sleeping and awoke only during the flight because the tyre noise suddenly stopped. Von Braun broke his arm in two places and shattered his shoulder. The wreck was spotted by a passing car, which by sheer coincidence contained two colleagues from Peinemunda. Von Braun and his chauffeur were rushed to hospital, where Von Braun remained for several weeks before returning to the Mittelwerk. By now, the American army was closing in.

Von Braun and his army boss, Walter Dornberger, received orders from Hans Kamler to evacuate again. The SS showed up to enforce the order, and Von Braun, Dornberger, and the rest left the Mittelwerk and the concentration camp behind them, a week before it was liberated by the 3rd Armoured Division. The top 500 people from the V2 project were to rush south to the beautiful and remote little town of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps, ostensibly to keep them safe from the

American forces. But von Braun and Dornberger realised that Kamler might have something else in mind. If he murdered the top 500 scientists, managers and engineers who'd worked on the V-2, the rocket's technological secrets would be forever hidden from the Americans and the Soviets. After the V-2 leadership arrived at the scenic mountain town, their fears only grew. They were housed in a barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and SS guards. But Kamler himself soon dashed off on some mission, leaving Von Braun to work his charm on Kamler's deputy. Are you not worried, Stormbound Fuhrer, that these barracks are an easy target for the American bombers?

What do you mean, Professor? Just imagine! It is clearly a military target, and the Luftwaffe is no longer able to protect us. One or two bombs in the right place could kill us all. And end the Fuhrer's dream of a superweapon. Indeed. You don't want to be the man in charge when the Führer's dreams are frustrated, do you? Surely not. It might be cleverer if we were to disperse to nearby homes. There is plenty of accommodation in Et al, Farhant and Garmashpartenkirchen, and when Obergruppenführer Kamler returns, we can all be ready for duty with an hour's notice.

Much safer, don't you think? The hapless deputy hesitated for a long moment. And then, as if sent by von Braun's guardian angel, a group of American fighters roared low over Oberammergau. That swung it. He nodded, and the scientists were given permission to disperse, wearing civilian clothes. They didn't come back. von Braun, Dornberger and a few hand-picked colleagues gathered discreetly at Haus Ingeborg,

a hotel still operating high in the German Alps, and a safe distance from Kamla, from the oncoming Allies, and from the chaos of the collapsing Nazi regime in Berlin. von Braun was still in considerable pain from his broken shoulder, but was otherwise well satisfied. I was living royally in a ski hotel on a mountain plateau, the French below us to the west and the Americans to the south. But no one of course suspected we were there. So nothing happens.

The most momentous events were being broadcast over the radio. Hitler was dead. And the hotel service was excellent. Back at the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, local German civilians were ordered by American soldiers to bury the dead. Piles of emaciated corpses, men who'd simply starved as they tried to work. Haus Ingeborg had a superb wine cellar and a gifted chef. In fact, von Braun had only one thing to worry about.

How would he persuade the Americans to let him switch sides? Verner's younger brother, Magnus von Braun, was sent out on a bicycle to find some Americans and surrender on behalf of the group. Magnus spoke a little English, and the hope was that as a lone cyclist, it'd be sufficiently un-intimidating to have time to talk. Verna, Falter Dornberger, and the others waited nervously for Magnus to return. Had he been taken prisoner? Shot?

But after a few hours, Magnus arrived with a set of safe conduct passes and an invitation to head over and surrender. In delight, Fairner, Dornberger and the rest jumped into a trio of BMWs and drove down to meet the Americans. Von Braun was confident that they'd get a warm welcome rather than be prosecuted for war crimes, as he later told an American interviewer. No, it all made sense. The V2 was something we had and you Americans didn't have. Naturally, you wanted to know all about it.

And he was right. The US Army soon realised what a prize they had and laid out another fine spread for Fawn Brown and his colleagues to enjoy. The newspapers breathlessly reported the story, as the leadership of the V2 programme were questioned about their rocket technology. A bold future awaited. Who cared about the past? Just weeks before Von Braun surrendered to the US Army, the 3rd Armored Division had reached the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp and radioed for help. I saw rows upon rows of skin-covered skeletons. Men lay as they had starved, discoloured and lying in indescribable human filth. Their striped coats and prison numbers hung to their

frames as a last token or symbol of those who enslaved and killed them. I noticed one girl I would say she was about 17 years old. She lay where she had fallen, gangrene'd and naked. I choked up. I didn't quite understand how and why anyone could do these things. 250 people were rushed to emergency hospitals, but it was clear that many of the camp inmates were so badly starved as to be beyond help. Enraged, the Americans rounded up the men of Nordhausen to dig graves on a plot of ground overlooking the town, carry the dead up the hill, and bury them. The locals claimed they had no knowledge of the camp. They always said, well, we didn't know,

said one American soldier. And I'd say, you could smell it, couldn't you? So what did Werner von Braun know? We can dismiss immediately the idea that he was unaware of the use of slave labor, or the conditions at Mittelweg. Even at Peinemunder, the scientist's playground, slave labour was used.

Von Braun wrote letters discussing the administration of slave labour. Not just at Peinemunder, but at Mittelweg too. Towards the end of Von Braun's life, he gave an interview about the underground mines. Their working conditions there were absolutely horrible. I saw the middle work several times, once while these prisoners were blasting new tunnels in there, and it was a pretty hellish environment.

So yes, he knew. But how culpable was he? Cautionary tales will return in a moment. If von Braun were alive today and trying to defend his reputation, here's what he might say. He only ever wanted to go to the moon, and his plan all along was to exploit the German army's gullibility. His V2 rocket was technologically brilliant, but far too complex to be a useful weapon in the 1940s.

It actively damaged the German war effort by diverting resources away from more efficient weapons. He couldn't have done anything much to oppose the Nazi atrocities, and never forget, von Braun was once arrested by the Gestapo and accused of treason. But this case for the defence is full of holes. The idea that von Braun viewed the German army merely as an expense account is tempting, but the main source for that claim is von Braun himself. von Braun understandably liked to talk about his Gestapo interrogation as backing up his account. As we heard in the previous episode, he'd

ostensibly been arrested after an indiscretion at a drunken party. being arrested after an indiscretion at a drunken party. My feeling about the weapon is that it is aimed at the wrong planet. Rockets are not designed to conquer Britain or Russia. They are designed to conquer space. After the fall of the Nazis, that brush with the Gestapo must have felt like such a blessing in disguise. But serious scholars of the Nazi regime

know that he was arrested as part of a power grab, not because any treason had been proven. Michael Neufeld, von Braun's biographer, says that the Gestapo arrest proved to be one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him in the Third Reich. After the war, his defenders were able to credit him with an anti-Nazi record that he never had. Let's be clear.

Von Braun was a high-ranking SS officer who worked tirelessly to make a deadly weapon that he knew could only be intended to obliterate large targets, namely civilian populations. He was intimately involved in the use of slave labour, and in correspondence he discussed the ratio of concentration camp labourers to German specialists. In a letter written in 1944, von Braun describes visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp to hunt for skilled workers he could transfer to the Mittelwerk.

Von Braun's biographer Michael Neufeld says that we simply cannot know quite how sympathetic he was to the Nazi regime. There's little evidence of genuine enthusiasm, but little evidence of reluctance either. What we see instead is complicity. Von Braun writes Neufeld was a very specific type of opportunist. He was a patriotic opportunist, willing to accept the necessity of joining various Nazi organizations if it would advance his career. As Neufeld explains, there were thousands of these opportunists.

Von Braun was just one of the most senior and the most famous. No, it wasn't that von Braun was a passionate believer in firing missiles at civilians, or using slave labour, or any of the grotesque crimes of the SS, it was that he didn't seem to mind much either way. He never wanted to hurt anybody. He just didn't care how many people were hurt. He wanted to reach the moon, the hellish environment of the Mittelberg, and the smoking corpses at the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp,

they were atrocities he was willing to ignore. And after the war, he found others willing to ignore those atrocities as well. Within months of his VIP surrender to the Americans, a new chapter in Verne von Braun's life began. He travelled to the United States, not as a prisoner of war, but to take up the offer of a job with the US Army. He wasn't the only German scientist to be recruited. He was simply one of the most prominent in a cohort of 1600. As the war in Europe came to an end, US Army Ordnance Officers interviewed scientists like von Braun. And there's a story it's widely told and impossible to verify,

that if the American officers decided that they wanted to recruit a scientist, they're attached a paperclip to his file. This was the coded signal to investigators that any inquiries into the expert's background should be brief and should reach a favorable conclusion. Ignoring uncomfortable facts was baked into that practice from the start. And if the paperclip story is true, then someone had a dark sense of humour, because the recruitment operation was eventually formalised, and named Project Paperclip. When President Truman approved Project Paperclip, he explicitly excluded anyone

who was a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities or an active supporter of Nazi militarism. It's hard to see how von Braun clears that hurdle. He was a high-ranking SS officer and the designer of German's most expensive weapon, one targeted almost exclusively at civilians. But like von Braun himself, the paperclip team clearly decided it would be better to look the other way. Von Braun was asked about his SS membership.

First, he denied it. Then, he admitted it, and then the subject was dropped. Months earlier, Von Braun had been held by the Gestapo, pampered, briefly interrogated, and then released to get on with his rocketry, thanks to friends in high places. History was repeating itself. Some of Von Brown's American interviewers wanted to get at the truth, but higher powers decided that his expertise was simply too valuable. And this soft touch approach wasn't uncommon. Project Paperclip was always controversial in America, both within and outside the US government.

We're hiring Nazis. We're giving them a path to citizenship. We're involving them in cutting-edge military projects. There were plenty of people raising concerns. But the rising threat from the Soviet Union was soon seen as more important. After all, if the Americans didn't recruit these men, wouldn't the Soviets do so instead? The atrocities at Dora-Mittelbau were well known. They featured in propaganda at the time. But over the years, people began to lose interest in the dreadful crimes of the past. And it wasn't widely known until much later just how closely some of these newly-Americanised

scientists were involved in monstrous crimes. Not only the concentration camp at Dora-Mittelbau, but in developing chemical and biological weapons, or participating in grotesque human experiments. With those dark truths buried deep, the conventional wisdom was summarized in a 1948 article by the US Senator Harry Byrd. The question discussed is not whether we like or hate the Germans. It's a question of what and how much these particular Germans

can contribute to our scientific progress and a highly scientific age. In my opinion, we are entitled to exploit these talents to our best possible advantage. Or as Wernher von Braun might have put it, it is simply a case of milking the golden cow. von Braun threw himself into life in America with his typical energy.

At first, he was disheartened by how primitive and poorly funded the US rocket program was. But over time, it became clear that he'd finally backed the right course. The US launched more than 60 V2 rockets from White Sands, New Mexico, as they tried to understand and perfect the technology. One high point of this operation

was the first ever photographs taken from space. Less successful was the time a misfiring V2 struck a cemetery on the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico, much to the outrage of the Mexicans. But von Braun no longer limited himself to military matters. In the 1950s, he worked on a series of articles about space exploration for the popular magazine Colliers, which reached an audience of millions.

That, in turn, reached the attention of Walt Disney, who had already hired the one-time head of the German Society for Spaceship Travel, Philly Le, the man whom von Braun had impressed back in 1929 with his rendition of the Moonlight Sonata. Le called Von Braun, and soon enough, a deal was on. Von Braun presented a series of educational Disney films about space travel, which reached tens of millions when they were broadcast on television. I believe a practical passenger rocket

could be built and tested within 10 years. And he still had the same swashbuckling charm in 1955 as he'd had in 1929. After an exhausting script session with the Disney team, one of the producers recalls, when he was through, he threw down his pencil and turned around to a piano and for 10 minutes played Bach wide open. He just rattled it off, flawless. He was a genius. He could do anything.

Indeed he could, it seemed. Von Braun went on to take a leading role at NASA, as did several of his former colleagues from Peinemunda. Von Braun met President Kennedy several times. One photograph shows them sharing an open-top limousine in 1962. In another, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, looking up at the structures of Cape Canaveral. Kennedy wearing dark brown shades, while von Braun directs the president's gaze. Sam Phillips, the director of the Apollo program, declared that the US would not have reached the moon so quickly

if not for Verna von Braun. Years later, Phillips changed his mind. On reflection, he said, without von Braun, the US would not have reached the moon at all. Von Braun was a genius, no doubt about it. But his ability to reshape the perceptions of those around him is as remarkable as any of his gifts as an engineer or a technical director. He persuaded the Nazi regime to fall in love with an impossibly sophisticated solution

to a simple problem, how to make bombs explode in London. Despite his youth, he controlled the largest megaproject in the Nazi wartime economy, and, as with all megaprojects, delivered well over time and over budget. And despite his senior rank in the SS and his intimate knowledge of the crimes against humanity at the Middleverk, he ended up palling around with Disney and JFK. After leaving NASA,

Von Braun took a well-paid corporate job near Washington DC. He had a swimming pool at his home in Alexandria, a corporate driver, even a backyard observatory. He died of cancer in 1977 at the age of 65. A few years later, people finally started to ask serious questions about the Mittelberg and about whether von Braun and his V2 team had been complicit in the most appalling crimes. But the biography of Werner von Braun on NASA's website notes simply that his responsibility for the crimes connected to rocket production is controversial. Von Braun had moved beyond justice.

A pioneer. A Disney star. A millionaire. A genius. A man who led a charmed life in the 20th century's darkest hours. His gravestone reads, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. It's a nice thought. The divine truths of the universe are plain for everyone to see. But there are some truths which are far

from divine. And though they're plain to see, all too often, we decide not to look. A key source for this episode was Michael Neufeld's book, Fawn Brown, Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. MUSIC Corrosionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice

Fiennes with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Kohn, Litao Moulard, John Schnars, Erich Sandler, Carrie Brodie and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardall Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show, add free. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at

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