Storming the Eagle's Nest (23 page)

The increasing tempo of Allied bombing and the vulnerability of the Augsburg plant nevertheless dictated dispersal. The company’s first solution was Sankt Georgen an der Gusen, a small town on the Danube a few miles upstream from
Mauthausen
. The inmates of the KZ camp started work on this site on 9 March 1944. Here they constructed a 50,000-
square-metre
tunnel system under the auspices of a joint venture set up between the Luftwaffe, Messerschmitt and one of the more imaginative enterprises of the SS: DESt, Deutsche Erde-und Steinwerke (German Earth and Stonework). Me 262 fuselages were produced in the complex for final assembly further north in Leipheim, Bavaria. The heat and dust of the tunnels added to the extreme brutality of the SS captors made Gusen 2 one of the worst of the work camps. According to Rav Yechezkel Harfenes, who had survived a number of such iron maidens, ‘Compared to Gusen, however, one might almost say that those camps were paradises … It was unknown simply because very few of the tens of thousands of prisoners sent there remained alive to tell the story of its horrors.’
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The problem with this – other than gross inhumanity – was that it involved the movement of these aircraft assemblies at a time at which transportation problems caused by air raids
began to stifle the dispersal system. A better idea seemed to be to move the entire manufacturing process underground, in effect a process of recentralisation. This was first mooted in 1943 but given greater impetus by the bombing by the USAAF of the main dispersed Me 262 assembly plant in Leipheim on 25 April 1944.

The destruction of nine jets almost ready for service
concentrated
minds. Huge bombproof bunker factories of 500,000 to 600,000 square metres were envisaged, around the size of sixty football pitches. Here the whole of the airframe as well as the engines would be manufactured and assembled in one place. Plans under the existing dispersal system were to produce a hundred Me 262s a month; a thousand would spew from these huge sites. Hitler, always interested in architectural schemes, was shown the plans on 14 April 1944, a couple of weeks before the Leipheim raid. He made several suggestions for their improvement. The underground factories were initially planned for Kaufering and Ottmarshausen, just outside Landsberg, the Bavarian town where Hitler had been imprisoned after his conviction for leading the failed Beer Hall Putsch. Yet more ambitious schemes were hatched for Landsberg itself. This was the Ringeltaube (‘woodpigeon’) project, comprising three huge bunkers of identical design. Here 90,000 workers were intended to produce 900 Me 262 fighters a month. These bunkers were five storeys (28.4 metres) high, 400 metres long, with a floor space of 95,000 square metres. Construction of the first (Weingut 2 – Vineyard 2) was beginning just as Speer and Hitler were taking
Kaffee und Kuchen
in the Obersalzberg teahouse on 23 May 1944.

No one could reproach the Reich, Speer or Messerschmitt for a lack of industry or initiative, merely of humanity. The only real difficulty was that any number of Me 262s would not fly very well without fuel.

Meanwhile, for its design centre and head office, Messerschmitt AG had settled on the 2,746-foot Alpine resort of Oberammergau. This was conveniently located in the Oberbayern region of the
Bavarian Alps, just sixty miles south of Augsburg, fifty
south-west
of Munich.

It was a resort of much Alpine charm, a medieval village where the houses were graced with the Luftmalerei frescos that were such a feature of Berchtesgaden. There was also a tradition of woodcarving. Here, an existing military emplacement could form the nucleus for the HQ. This was a barracks of the signals section of the 1st Mountain Regiment, the Gebirgs-
Nachrichten-Abteilung
54. Overlooking a meadow and close to a pine forest, the surrounding peak of the 4,403-foot Kofel and dozens of higher peaks in the locality made it a very difficult target to Allied bombers – even if the RAF and USAAF intelligence staff discovered it was there. By way of cover, the HQ was given the suitably bland name of the Upper Bavarian Research Institute. As to the symbolism of Oberammergau, this the authorities ignored.

In 1633 the villagers had made a public vow. Should the bubonic plague raging in the region pass them by, they would stage in perpetuity a play of Christ’s life. Oberammergau went sufficiently untouched for the villagers to believe they had been spared, and a great tradition was gradually established. Beginning in 1634, every ten years the villagers staged the Passion Play. Admission fees were instituted in 1790, package tours using the new railway line from Munich in 1870, and by 1930 the play was attracting something approaching half a million visitors from all over the world. In 1934, Hitler himself had attended the celebrations marking the 300th anniversary of the first performance. He was not enthusiastic. The play revealed, he declared, ‘the muck and mire of Jewry’. Nine years later it was said that he felt the Passion Play theatre was peculiarly appropriate for armaments production, so – loosely – inverting the principle of turning swords into ploughshares.

The inhabitants of the village were naturally more cautious about their Christian resort cum shrine being turned into an armaments factory. None were more so than the mayor, Alfred Bierling. A local man who had himself performed in the play, he was determined to stand up for the Catholic traditions of the
village. When the dispersal scheme was first mooted, a number of arms manufacturers had expressed interest in the Passion Play theatre. This was a building dating from 1890, originally capable of holding an audience of 4,000, in 1930 enlarged. BMW was amongst the enthusiastic bidders. The Munich works of the firm supplied engines for a number of the Luftwaffe’s fighters and bombers. These included the rival of the Bf 109, the
Focke-Wulf
190, together with prototype versions of the Me 262 itself. Bierling managed to discourage BMW, arguing that ‘the theater is in its way a house of God; similarly, they could seize and desanctify a church’.
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He failed with Messerschmitt AG, perhaps on account of Hitler’s own influence.

By the autumn of 1943 there were already 1,000 Messerschmitt workers in the village; by the time of Speer’s crisis meeting with Hitler in May 1944, 3,000. Work had by then begun on a
twenty-three
-mile complex of tunnels that would comprise production facilities that included sub-assemblies for the Me 262. On the design side Messerschmitt was working on the variants of the Me 262 that Hitler had recently insisted on, turning it from a fighter into a light bomber; on the Me 264, a four-engine bomber with a range to reach New York; on the Me 323, a six-engine heavy transport; on the Me 163 rocket-powered fighter; and on the Me P1101, a variable-sweep-wing ramjet fighter. It was a portfolio of futuristic projects that might well have excited the jealousy of Boeing, creators of that icon of US military power, the B-17 Flying Fortress.

As to Bierling, he was then saddled with the consequences of accommodating a workforce that tripled the population of the village. Needless to say, tensions arose. They boiled over just after Speer’s meeting in the Berghof when two USAAF aircraft crashed in the vicinity of Oberammergau. Their American crews were seen as murderers pulverising the German cities, death-dealers that the company was working flat out to destroy. Feelings naturally ran high.

The first incident involved a fighter. The pilot of this aircraft was killed but the navigator parachuted down to the steep
little fields of the village, where the hay grew high. Bierling was obliged to rescue the survivor from a mob intent on lynching him. The following day a bomber crashed in the vicinity, all the crew safely parachuting to earth. Once again the lynch mob assembled and once again Bierling was forced to intervene. ‘If we in Oberammergau permit the fliers to be hurt,’ he told the villagers, ‘then we could never more play the Passion in good conscience.’
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The aviators survived, Bierling was investigated by the Gestapo, and Messerschmitt’s good work went on.

While Mayor Bierling played the good Samaritan in
Oberammergau
, 150 miles due east, his compatriot Obersturmführer Otto Riemer was taking a rather less charitable line.

The forty-seven-year-old was the commandant of another Alpine armaments centre. This was the resort of Ebensee in the Salzkammergut mountains, Upper Austria. Riemer was an enthusiast for wine, women and song in the popular Bavarian tradition. On 18 May 1944, just as Speer was inspecting the damage to the fuel plant in Leuna, Riemer was setting out on an evening session of carousing with a dozen younger and more virile members of the SS camp guard. The party finally returned to the camp the following morning, still roaring drunk and brandishing their pistols. As they entered the Ebensee precincts they fired wildly at the inmates, the shots forcing the prisoners to scuttle for cover. The echoes rang around the 5,331-foot Feuerkogel mountain, as – soon enough – did the screams and cries. Between eight and fifteen captives appeared to have died.

It was an incident that even the SS thought worthy of censure. Riemer was duly demoted and a marginally less brutal man put in his stead: SS-Lagerführer Anton Ganz.

Ebensee was a child of the V-2 rocket programme. In the late thirties a young German aristocrat called Wernher von Braun had persuaded the army to fund a research programme into a
long-range
rocket with a payload of high explosive. Born in 1912, von Braun was the second son of a high-ranking civil servant who
had served as minister for agriculture in the Weimar Republic. The son was a visionary who dreamed of space travel. Attending a talk by the balloon pioneer Auguste Piccard, he remarked to the lecturer, ‘You know, I intend travelling to the moon at some time.’
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Official enthusiasm for his work, eventually carried out by the Heeresversuchsanstalt (Army Research Centre) at
Peenemünde
on the remote island of Usedom on Germany’s Baltic coast, blew hot and cold. Speer described it as ‘my favorite armaments project’ and wrote of the rocket’s ability to ‘graze the frontiers of space’ as ‘like the planning of a miracle’.
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Hitler at first was sceptical, pointing out with some justice that the rocket was really nothing more than a long-range artillery shell with a much higher cost. In the autumn of 1939, with his mind more on targeting Paris and London than the Sea of Tranquillity on the Moon, Hitler had axed the project’s funding. Speer, by then a figure of some influence and power in the Reich, made tacit arrangements with the Heeresversuchsanstalt to continue the work. The result by late 1941 was the solution of the main
technological
challenges and a thirteen-ton, forty-five-foot rocket. Its official designation was A-4.

On 13 June 1942, Speer flew to Peenemünde to witness the first firing. He was joined by Hermann Göring, who sported for this special occasion an opossum-skin coat teamed with bright red riding boots tricked out with silver spurs. Speer noted,

It was a splendid demonstration, only slightly marred by a malfunction in the guidance system that brought the rocket and most of its fuel quite noisily back to earth only half a mile from where Speer’s party stood. The armaments minister was unnerved. Not so von Braun and his team. Speer continued,
‘the technicians were satisfied, since the thorniest problem had been solved: getting it off the ground’. In October a second test flight took place during which the guidance system worked as intended, taking the rocket 120 miles down-range. On 22 December 1942, Speer induced Hitler to sign an order for the rocket’s mass production. Seven months later on 7 July 1943, Speer presided over a meeting at which the thirty-one-year-old von Braun showed a colour film of an A-4 launch to the Führer. ‘For the first time Hitler saw the majestic spectacle of a great rocket rising from its pad and disappearing into the stratosphere.’ Now the Führer was completely won over, indeed quite ecstatic. ‘The A-4 is a measure that can decide the war,’ he enthused to his rising young minister. ‘And what encouragement to the home front when we attack the English with it! This is the decisive weapon of the war.’ Yet even on that happy day, Hitler added a caution: ‘In this project we can use only Germans. God help us if the enemy finds out about the business.’

The difficulty was that they already had, courtesy of a series of intelligence sources, not the least of which was Allen Dulles in Berne. Just six weeks later on 17 August 1943 came Operation Hydra, the RAF raid on Peenemünde carried out by 600 heavy bombers. The production of the V-2s was delayed, and the implications of the raid were the same as those for the rest of the Reich’s armaments industry. It was essential to move the production lines to somewhere less vulnerable to the Allied bombers.

A number of possible locations were identified, several of which seemed to share particular promise. One was an old anhydrite mine in the Harz mountains near Nordhausen in Thuringia. The other was a smaller site in the Salzkammergut tourist district of Salzburg. This was an Alpine region of outstanding natural beauty, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The location itself was just outside the market town of Ebensee on the southern tip of the Traunsee. Both sites had the potential for providing the great caverns needed to build the rockets. Both were within fairly easy reach of the concentration camps that would provide
the labour: in the case of what came to be called Mittelbau-Dora, Buchenwald; in that of Ebensee, Mauthausen.

After the Peenemünde raid Hitler and Speer were even more sensitive to security issues, and the bespectacled – but not particularly learned – head of the SS Heinrich Himmler made an excellent point. If the entire workforce were concentration camp prisoners, all contact with the outside world would be eliminated. For despite the uncertain efforts of Switzerland’s International Red Cross, such prisoners were almost completely isolated: they were not even allowed to send or receive mail. Himmler appointed SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler to oversee the movement of the production facilities to the new sites. The forty-two-year-old civil engineer had already distinguished himself by managing the transition of Auschwitz-Birkenau from a concentration camp to an extermination camp, duly installing the cremation facilities for the industrialisation of death. His new role involved creating dispersed production facilities for various advanced weapons, including the Me 262.