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 theinstitute became less prestigious
and its leader found he was often left virtually out in the cold; it
was themore 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 fight ers 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 Minis ter 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 Ger many, 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 recon naissance 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 Luftfahrtminist erium, 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.
