German Secret Weapons: Blueprint for Mars by Brian Ford
The German character has always respected practical attainments and academic endeavour. To this day, the visiting industrialist who goes to Germany – West or East – finds how helpful it is if he admits on his visiting card that he is ‘Mr Engineer’ or ‘Herr Doktor’ ; education, learning, and academic status have always been important parts of the German tradition.
In the 1930s this tendency was developed to the full. Through the propaganda machine of the Nazi empire-to -be, the academic and the engineer alike were esteemed as never before, and the aim of all successful men was to enter these professions and succeed within their framework. But as the Hitler regime came to power and began to exert its influence, there was a subtle indeed almost barely detectable change of emphasis. The pure scientist began to lose out of the favourable comment; the academic lost a little in favour – but the technician, the practical man, the engineer, these began an unprecedented climb to the greatest heights of status.
The shift of emphasis became out right bias, however, and particularly as more and more German scientists were being discriminated against because of supposed ‘racial inferiority’, many of them uprooted themselves and fled the country altogether. By the late 1930s the change had been almost complete: only Goring remained with any deep respect for the intellectuals of Germany, and he used them to the full. One of his chief co-workers was a General Milch, part-Jewish, who became Head of the Technical Office of the Luftwaffe in due course. In spite of ‘mongrel’ background, as defined by Hitler, Goring had this man kept in a senior position for pure intellectual ability and practical skill.
But to some extent this anti-intellectualism of the Hitler regime did have its desired beneficial effect, for it turned the German people away from their almost slavish acceptance of the need for academic specialisation, and allowed them to assume that (because of the widely-publicised ‘inherent superiority’ of the German race) they were above the need to specialise: they could all be conversant with the problems of technology and the scientific society, and great pains were taken to make them feel that – no matter how superficially – they were in on things. Secondly, because of the drift from academic endeavour, more and more people became technical workers, and the shift from pure research was accompanied to a certain extent by a drift towards applied research, design, and development. The cult of progress became established, and in the German mind it was readily nurtured.
Germany has an equal tradition for good quality workmanship, for discipline and for endeavour. Thus it was that many of their largest firms were in the export field, with singularly up-to-the-minute sales equipment to back them, and this – prophetically – included the development of munitions. The wheels of big business soon allowed this side of the German industrial endeavour to reach large proportions; the Germans were one of the few nations who were in a position to supply modern, effective munitions. Why was this? Quite simply because of their active research capacity: munition supply is one of the branches of industry which, almost more than anything else, relies on being up-to- date – in short, the successful munitions manufacturer must be the most advanced technically. This and the encouragement of militarism by the Nazis as an ideal led inevitably to the upsurge of successful, giant, weapon manufacturing complexes.
And there was another factor, too, which – though designed to put a brake on the Germans’ rearmament and to slow down their capacity to develop new weapons – actually had the effect of greatly intensifying development. This was the Treaty of Versailles which forbade the production of large ships, of high-capacity aircraft, of large-calibre weapons; but the Ger mans quickly overcame these limitations as far as they could by devoting new energies to making effective weapons within these limits. Thus one had convertible firearms, which could quickly be adapted for military use; one had high-velocity guns; one saw the pocket-battleship arise and the perfection of aircraft and gliders – all factors which, between them, enabled the Nazis quietly to evade many of the apparently inevitable restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles.
Factories in the industrial combines of Krupp, Mauser, and many others supplied arms and ammunition to many countries – including, in some cases, entire manufacturing establishments to countries as far away as South America – and including others, such as Russia, later to become her foes.
Even before the First World War there had been an Army Weapons Office, which had a branch known as ‘Wa Pruf’ – an abbreviation of Heeres waffenamt Prufwesen, or Army Testing Office – designed specifically for the testing and improvement of weapons. It was, in essence, a proving ground and from it many important new changes and modifications were de rived. One of the experts in this division, Carl Cranz, later formed a section of the Wa Prdf known as Waffen Forschungs – Wa F for short – which was specifically set up as a research and ballistics institute in its own right. This formed the first basis for further development in the Hitler regime; indeed when Cranz retired (aged over seventy, according to reports) he was replaced by a Professor Schumann and it was he who remained in charge right through to the end of the Second World War.
But here too the trend away from research for its own sake took a toll. For the institute became less prestigious and its leader found he was often left virtually out in the cold; it was the more practical activities of Wa Pruf which seemed to be in greatest demand. Thus it was that the munitions manufacturers who did not wish to incur the labour and expense of establishing their own research institutes, passed their work over to the Waffenamt – but found that the drift away from pure research tended to deny them many of the benefits they might otherwise have derived. So, in essence, the Ordnance did not have the research facility they needed. When eventually things did develop in this sphere, it was almost too late. However the practical experiences of fighters and tacticians using German weapons in the Spanish Civil War did provide some valuable practical trials and experience of the weapons in practice.
In the naval field, much important introduction of new technology was undertaken. The limits set by the Versailles treaty on warships was 10,000 tons; but by the maximum use of light-alloy materials and the development of high-rate are welding of a remarkably sophisticated degree of design, the German technologists were able to overcome many of these limitations.
The research effort was largely based on the investment of consider able sums by the German business concerns who stood to make a killing by the production and sale of successful weaponry and equipment. There was an official Marine- Waffenamt (Naval testing office) under the Minister who acted as the Naval Commander - Oberkommando der Marine – and there were several experimental establishments (Versuchsanstalt) too. These included several organisations under the headings of Chemische-Physikana lische (Chemical and Physical Research), Torpedo, Sperr (Mines), and Nachrichen (Radio). Other facilities such as the Forschungsentwicklung Patente took care of patents and legal operations.
However in naval research too, in spite of the restrictions of Hitler’s anti-intellectualism, the German resources were such as to establish a world lead in technical perfection and expertise. But in the Luftwaffe, things were somewhat different.
Here there was strong government research interest and, rather than leave things too much to the individual activities of the business combines, the technical competence of the government’s resources was developed to a state of high activity and production. By shelving off the some what arbitrary demands of the policy coordinators of the government, the German air ministry was readily able to guard its independence of action; it would not be intimidated by anyone, and-probably partly as a result of the haughty, almost arrogant self-satisfaction of the army and navy research workers – it managed to create an aura of superiority for itself. Though Germany, for the reasons we have already outlined, had a justified reputation as a leading producer of artillery and naval equipment, there were many other countries with equal or better air ministries and Germany did not have any unique position of peerlessness in this field. But the high morale of the Luftwaffe paid off handsomely and indeed it enabled the Germans to achieve very advanced aims indeed. The rocketry research and development, as a case in point, was, as we shall see, remarkable and indeed quite unique as an exercise in the application of technology on an unprecedented scale.
It was in 1935 that Germany managed to escape from the strictures of the Treaty of Versailles and set about the redevelopment of her air force in a big way. Not that she came to the problem completely cold: a secret (and quite illegal) arrangement had been under way for some years before – exactly how many is by no means certain – by which German airmen had been instructed and aided by the Russian air force in a reciprocal agreement. The Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe at about this time, General Wever, was fanatical about the potentialities of larger and longer-range aircraft as part of the expansionist policy of the Nazis. It must have been with great satisfaction that Germany built and flew the first all-metal air craft of any size at this time – the Dornier X – and many international trophies and prizes went to German aeroplanes in the late 1930s. It is said that a record speed of 469.22 mph was reached in April 1939 by a Captain Wendel, flying a Messerschmitt 109(R) – a speed not to be reached again until after the war’s end, at least by air screw-propelled aircraft.
Even in this field the Germans were working secretly on a number of projects which were later to surprise the Western world at large; jet-propulsion was at this stage very much more highly developed than the Allies knew, and rocket-powered aircraft were already on the drawing board. The most terrible of all of the German secret weapons were the rockets, of course – and these were beginning to be developed too, behind closed doors; as early as 1931 the first of the modern liquid fuelled rockets took to the air and reached a height of perhaps 1,000 feet from a base in Dessau and within two years secret teams were investigating the possibilities of manned rocket flight. The quickest way of reaching the enemy is through the air, and it is only natural that it was the Luftwaffe research establishments that were amongst the most progressive in forging these new, surprising weapons of war.
And so whilst the military and naval specialists worked for much of the war effort through the independent, business-backed organisations designed to develop new – and thence marketable – weapons, the Luftwaffe research remained close to the government. It would have been sense less to set up governmental establishments, when there were such clear risks of duplication of the independent laboratories, and in addition it would have been financially difficult to tempt away the industrial research workers – who were by this time amongst the most highly-paid technologists and designers in Europe, and probably in the world.
But, with no traditional aircraft industry, the government became the only real supporter of aerial research; the men were trained, appointed, and distributed by a central machinery run by the Ministry at a senior level; their ultimate head, Goring, was as we have seen an admirer of brain power and what it could attain; and as the years ticked by the developments themselves set a precedent which (though badly-organised and too spasmodic to be effective by modern standards) had not been seen before in the history of warfare. For its time it was incredible – and it worked.
But where were the establishments, and what were they like? Perhaps as important, just how was the organisation arranged for this mammoth task?
At the head of the army research was the Supreme Commander, who – through Speer’s Ministry of Arms and War Production – controlled the general policies of the Wa Pruf. On a par with this department stood the Waffen Forschungs, weapons research section, which tended always to teeter on the brink of prominence but which (probably due to poor organisation and conflicting policy decisions as the war progressed) never came to hold the same degree of prominence as Wa Pruf. Many students of the war years have in fact imagined that Wa F was a sub-division of the Wa Pruf itself, but in organisational terms the two were of equal status. Both were controlled in a single office known asHeereswafjenamt, or Weapons Office, under the control of General K Becker until his death early in the war years, when General Leeb took over. And finally, working alongside the departments Wa Pruf and Wa F, was the Beschaffung, or purchasing and production section. This was the commercial division responsible for obtain ing tenders for production, the buying of raw materials and the letting of production contracts to outside firms.
Subdivisions were set up to investigate such separate branches of research as ammunition and weapons, engineering – in the broadest sense – signalling, optical and communications equipment, and rocketry. This somewhat anomalous state of affairs arose because rockets were regarded (as they still are, by some military men) as having a split personality. Some say they are in essence artillery shells, which happen to take their cartridge charge with them; others argue that they are really aircraft but with shorter wings and without the pilot.
And so two divisions of the army’s Wa Pruf were set up: one for solid -fuelled rockets, the other for liquid -fuelled. With an enthusiastic Major General Dornberger at the head, a team of some 250 of Germany’s best young scientists was assembled before the outbreak of the war and they were given money, status and equipment to – simply – develop world shattering rockets. From the pre-war site of Kummersdorf, the group moved in 1937 to Heeresrersuchsstelle (army testing ground) Peenemunde and began work in earnest. Later the facility was dispersed to Bliecherode and Kochel, after the Allied forces had learned of the Peenemunde centre and begun to attack it.
Kummersdorf proving ground – situated near the capital Berlin – was then developed purely as a proving ground for rockets and guns. There were said to be fifteen separate test areas, but throughout the war period the facility was not stretched to capacity. Many of Germany’s most up-to- date and secret weapons were tested here until their every characteristic was known and understood, and as the war went on much of this assessment and proving analysis was carried out at a similar ground at Gottow.
Chemical warfare, which might well have provoked the most appalling consequences of conflict ever seen in warfare, was also in the Nazis’ minds at this time. As we shall see, they spent much time and effort in the pursuit of faster, deadlier poisons and developed, among other less sophisticated secret materials, several potent nerve gases by the war’s end. The centre of development and testing was at a proving ground near Raubhammer. The whole enterprise was carefully controlled and the camouflaged buildings were often virtually undetectable to even the closest aerial reconnaissance by the Allies.
And backing the whole set-up were the educational establishments and colleges (the Hochschulinstituten) – over 200 of them – and the independent companies or Firmen, on whom much of the research depended.
The organisation in the navy was basically similar: here too there were separate sub-divisions of the parent Ministry office, and as in the army research, much of the effort relied on the cooperation and support of the independent companies. The relevant head office here was the Marine -Waffenamt (Naval Weapons Division) under Speer. The various specialised sub-divisions were similar to those of the army and they were in turn backed by the experimental and proof divisions. These provided a cybernetic feed-back link to the development divisions, since teething troubles and suggested improvements that came out of the proving tests were rapidly and efficiently absorbed into the rationale for the following phases of development and in this way – a form of mechanical evolution by `survival of the fittest’ – the quality was not only maintained but steadily and consistently improved.
The organisation of the air ministry was immense. In the very beginning of the preparation for war there was a change away from the organisational machine of the army and navy re search in that Reichsmarschall Goring took a prominent personal stand at the top of the tree and had overall control of policy and development (even above the level of authority of the Ministerium Speer). Immediately below him there was a split into two functions: the Reich Luftfahrtministerium, or Air Ministry proper, and the scientific and technical branch, responsible for secret weapon development amongst other tasks.
One of the main divisions here was the Berlin-based Technisches Amt, the chief technical office of the Ministry itself. Initially at the head of this important division was General Udet; he was replaced by General Milch for the bulk of the wartime period and, later, by General Diesing. Most of the staff of this division were, in fact, military men and their task was basically to organise and co-ordinate research and development of aircraft, aerial weapons, communications equipment, and the like – all of it done under conditions of top security.
The separate specialised organisations themselves were varied. Zelle was the division concerned with airframe design; Motor handled the production and research into aero plane engines of all kinds. Gerate(instrumentation) and Funk (radio- communications and radar equipment) supplied the most up-to-date equipment for the flying forces, and Waffen, or weapons, carried out a prodigious amount of development into armoury of all kinds, with the exception of bombs. This was the responsibility of the Bomben division, who also had the assignment of developing new bomb sights and aiming equipment. Boden handled ground-based equipment and Torpedo included the research into mines dropped from aircraft of all kinds. The Fernsteuer Gerate embraced the rocketry that led to the development of the V-1 flying bomb. This was simply because, as described earlier, some of the rockets were regarded as being ‘pilotless aircraft’ and, as such, clearly they ought to be placed under the Air Ministry rather than those which (like the V-2) were essentially wingless missiles. This did mean, though, that there was a fundamental division between the two activities.
The whole operation was coordinated through the Forschung Fuhrung (literally meaning research-guidance) division, generally known as Fo-Fd. Its team of four scientific chiefs was always on hand for discussions with the Berlin powers and the degree of co-ordination effected between research and requirements was great – too great, as it turned out, for changes of emphasis at governmental level were often rapidly transmuted into a sudden alteration in a research programme which, whatever might be argued about its short-term expediency, cannot have done any good at all to the progress of the overall effort.
And finally, acting as the workhorse of the whole machine, there were several Anstalt establishments under the supervision of a director who controlled the several separate units in each institute. The Fo-Fu had laid down a policy on the establishment of such institutes, which laid stress on congenial fraternal control, good living standards, and a dignified working environment; plenty of finance and material backing and an opportunity for the frequent exchange of ideas on the interdisciplinary basis so necessary for effective furtherance of high-rate research.
The Zentralstelle fur wissenschaftliche Berichterstattung (Centre for Scientific Records) acted as a centre for the co ordination of publications of new discoveries. All scientists – even those working in secret fields – like to see their work in print, and numbers of reports were produced and circulated to personnel who were involved. A number of special yearbooks were instituted to bring the recognition of leading scientists to the attention of their more distant colleagues. Much was done to raise morale and efficiency – and it paid off handsomely in many respects. So, come to that, did the positions held by the scientists: salaries equivalent to $5,500 (£1,830) were paid annually to a typical research-worker, and that was worth vastly more in Germany at that time than it seems to be in today’s terms.
Let us take a look back at the kind of surroundings that these scientists worked in – they were remarkable, even by today’s standards, and have a distinctly James Bondian aura about them.
On the outskirts of Braunschweig lay a large area of woodland, surrounded, in the more open countryside, by a few scattered farm buildings. At least, that is how it appeared to aerial reconnaissance. But this innocuous little corner of Germany was actually something quite different – underneath the camouflage. This was the Luftfahrtforschungsanstalt Hermann Goring, the Goring Aerial Weapon Establishment, and it was one of the leading centres of top-secret developments. None of the central buildings was visible from the air, as they were all below tree level and the branches of the forest covered them completely. There were at least forty secret weapons establishments in this one unit, most of them devoted to the improvement of armour and the testing of ballistic projectiles. A large supersonic wind tunnel was built, and – for topographical reasons – the air intake had to be on open ground. So the German specialists erected a dummy farm-house to occupy the site, complete in every detail; and on one end (where the air intakes were) was a small out-house. Its roof slid sideways in its entirety to reveal the jet ducts when the device was going to be in use, and then they were quietly and unobtrusively slid back again after wards, leaving the supporting beams standing rather conspicuously along side. But no-one ever noticed.
And so it was that this immense establishment was erected and kept in full operation throughout the war without anyone knowing about it; two bombs did fall near the site during the entire war, but they were errors on bombing raids aimed at the town nearby.
At Ruit, eight miles or so from Stuttgart, another such institute (also named after a leading aviation leader) was established, the Luftfarht forschungsangstalt Graf Zeppelin; but this had more of the traditional appearance of a German research centre. As such it was soon located by Allied Intelligence, and bombed.
This institute was basically concerned with the then new science of aerodynamics. Models of secret weapons – rockets, missiles, and so on – were tested under extremely sophisticated conditions.
At Peenemunde an immense establishment was erected at a cost of over $120,000,000 (£50,000,000) to house, eventually, over 2,000 scientists. They were there to study rocketry, and particularly to build the A-series which gave rise to the V-2 (or A-4, as it was known to the scientists). The centre was built on an island at the mouth of the Oder, now the border between East Germany and Poland, but at the time still in Germany itself. The island is called Usedom and to fly over the area today, as I have recently done, demonstrates how unlikely it was that the British reconnaissance authorities would ever show much initial interest in the site as a centre for top-level secret developments. It was too far out from the centre of things: too much out on the limb. And the scattered buildings that did show up on routine pictures were quite typical of settlements dotted all over the German countryside. But this was where much of the most revolutionary of all the secret weapon development was centred. At the far north of the small island were the main test area and launching pads; along the coast lay the production plants and at the south of this stretch were the personal quarters of the staff. Behind this area were the barracks housing the military in the region.
Some almost routine bombing was carried out in 1943, when much of the area was shattered; but the main guidance control systems building – where much of the most vital research was going on – escaped undamaged. Even so, over 800 of the people on the island were killed when the raid took place, in the middle of August. After this, it was realised that some of the facility had better be dispersed throughout Germany; thus the theoretical development facility was moved to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, development went to Nordhausen and Bleicherode, and the main wind-tunnel and ancillary equipment went down to Kochel, some twenty-four miles south of Munich. This was christened Was serbau Versuchsanstalt Kochelsee (experimental waterworks project) and gave rise to the most thorough research centre for long-range rocket development that, at the time, could have been envisaged.
They built a wind tunnel in which the air speed could be raised to the order of 3,000 mph, far better than anything else envisaged elsewhere in the world at that time. To many scientists the very idea of such an air velocity would have seemed impracticable without a vast fan unit to propel it: but the Kochel team designed instead a system which made the atmospheric pressure do the work for them. They constructed a vast pressure vessel of nearly 10,000 cubic feet and equipped it with a fairly powerful exhausting pump. In this way it could be reduced to near-vacuum in a very short while. At the moment that the test was to take place, a valve was opened admitting the atmosphere through an experimental chamber one and a half feet across and the model projectile inside was photographed during a whole range of air speeds, to show exactly how it would behave; and small pressure tubes were situated all over the models, flush with the surface, to measure the pressure changes produced by supersonic flight. The results were not perfect in some respects (for instance, there were problems of erosion of the chamber by the high-velocity air-flow, and-because it was working in a partial vacuum – the chamber was always below air pressure and this in itself introduced discrepancies of a minor order).
The Kochel apparatus was, then, a supreme example of advanced apparatus; yet in one respect ‘at least it suffered from a fault often found in German war-time secret research. This was a simple lack of effort in the field of making instruments for taking experimental readings: the pressure tubes, for example, ran to small u- tubes filled with fluid. During a test, a dozen or so technicians would cluster around, all taking notes feverishly and memorising what took place. At no time, apparently, did anyone make an automatic plotter to do the job mechanically so that the recorded results, drawn on a roll of paper, could be examined later; indeed no-one even thought of taking photographs of the tubes for examination and accurate interpretation afterwards.
This failure to provide good instrumentation for experimental work is often clear from a perusal of the reports of the time. However this did not apply to the apparatus for the test itself, which was always of a high quality. The shock-wave photographs at Kochel, for example, were taken by the most sophisticated apparatus specially developed by companies such as the Zeiss organisation.
So good were the results that the Germans envisaged an even better tunnel, with a peak air velocity of 8,000 mph; they were going to construct a tunnel through more than a mile of rock to an industrial reservoir several hundreds of feet higher than the establishment itself; the water pressure, they felt, would drive high -speed turbines and produce a positive air flow of the order required. But this tunnel was never built before the war came to its end.
Even more grandiose in some respects was a gigantic tunnel, twenty -five feet across, capable of working at up to the speed of sound which was under construction at Otztal, Bavaria, when the war ended. Here too turbines driven by falling water from a nearby source were to have been the motive force for its operation.
Much useful work was done in ballistics at the Technische Akademie der Luftwafe – the technical academy – under Schardin, one of the leading ballistics experts of the time. There were altogether thirteen institutes in the Akademie, covering subjects as diverse as physical arid mechanical sciences, aircraft performance and control, and the performance of engines. It also carried out much definitive work on the functioning of explosives in shaped charges: depending on whether the charge is flat, spherical, or concave, the effect of the blast of a given amount of contact ex plosive can vary enormously – this is how it is that the slow, ponderous shell of a bazooka can blast a hole through the armour of a heavy tank.
This, then, was where the research was done. The conditions and pay were excellent, morale was high, and results were widely acclaimed. Not only that, but the deployment of this varied, vast conglomeration of facilities was intelligently done in view of the war situation, and the ingenious camouflage employed for many of them, the false buildings and sliding roofs, kept their work and even their existence a complete secret – not only to the Allies, but indeed even to the Germans themselves. Such a set-up is ideal for the furtherance of secret work, and the German secret weapon programme pressed steadily ahead as a result with incredible and in some cases devastating results.
