Peenemünde Army Research Center

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 2nd of April, 1936, the German aviation ministry paid 750,000 reichsmarks to the town of Wolgast for the entire northern peninsula of the Baltic island of Usedom. That single purchase set in motion the creation of one of the most consequential and chilling research facilities of the twentieth century: the Peenemünde Army Research Center. What would rise on that peninsula was not merely a weapons laboratory. It was the birthplace of modern rocketry, a place where the V-2 rocket was refined and launched, where the world's first closed-circuit television system was installed to track rockets in flight, and where the line between scientific ambition and mass atrocity was crossed without pause. The scientists who worked there would scatter at the war's end, some to America, some to the Soviet Union, carrying with them knowledge that would define the space age. But before any of that, Peenemünde was a facility built on forced labor, bombed by the British in 1943, and ultimately found in ruins by Soviet soldiers who arrived to discover, as one account put it, seventy-five percent wreckage.

• 2. Building the Facility

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  By the middle of 1938, the Army's portion of the Usedom peninsula had been separated from the neighboring Luftwaffe facility and was nearly complete. Personnel arrived from Kummersdorf, bringing with them the institutional knowledge of Germany's existing rocket research program. The Army Research Center, known as Peenemünde Ost, was divided into Werk Ost and Werk Süd. The adjacent Luftwaffe installation, Werk West or Peenemünde West, served as one of four Luftwaffe test and research facilities, with its administrative center at Erprobungsstelle Rechlin. The Army facility was formally founded in 1937 as one of five military proving grounds under the German Army Weapons Office. In November 1938, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch ordered the construction of an A-4 production plant at Peenemünde, complete with a coal-fueled power plant and a second liquid oxygen facility sized to support future field operations. A subsection of Wa Pruf 11 was created in January 1939 by Walter Dornberger specifically to plan the production plant project, and it was headed by a senior Army civil servant named G. Schubert.

• 3. The People Behind the Rockets

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  Major-General Walter Dornberger led the military side of the V-2 programme and other projects at Peenemünde. Wernher von Braun served as technical director, with Dr. Walter Thiel as his deputy until 1943. Beneath them, nine major departments drove the facility's work. Walter J.H. "Papa" Riedel ran the Technical Design Office. Dr. Hermann Steuding led Aeroballistics and Mathematics. Dr. Ernst Steinhoff and his deputy Helmut Gröttrup oversaw Flight, Guidance, and Telemetering Devices. Arthur Rudolph directed the Development and Fabrication Laboratory. Klaus Riedel ran the Test Laboratory, and Ludwig Roth managed the Future Projects Office. Eberhard Rees handled V-2 fabrication and assembly; Erich Apel led a development department; Konrad Dannenberg was Walter Riedel's deputy; and Kurt H. Debus served as the engineer in charge at the critical Test Stand VII. The Measurements Group, led by Gerhard Reisig, operated within the Flight and Guidance department. The chemist Magnus von Braun, the youngest brother of Wernher, worked on anti-aircraft rocket development at the facility, though those efforts never matured into effective weapons during the war.

• 4. Missiles, Rockets, and a Television First

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  Among the weapons developed at Peenemünde were the V-2 rocket, designated the A-4, and a series of guided missiles: the Wasserfall, which underwent thirty-five trial firings at Peenemünde alone; the Schmetterling; the Rheintochter; the Taifun; and the Enzian. Preliminary design work was also done on very-long-range missiles intended for use against the United States, a project sometimes called "V-3" whose existence is well documented. Dornberger described underwater rocket launches conducted in the summer of 1942, led by Ernst Steinhoff, using either launching racks on the deck of a submerged submarine or towed floats in the Baltic. Dornberger recorded his account of launches from depths of 30 to 50 feet, calling it a "staggering sight" when those heavy powder rockets rose from the calm waters. Less dramatic but technically remarkable, Peenemünde installed at Test Stand VII what is documented as the world's first closed-circuit television system, designed to track rockets during launches. The facility also developed an anti-aircraft rocket program housed in a unit called Heimat-Artillerie-Park 11, set up initially as a rocket training battery designated Number 444.

• 5. The Aerodynamic Institute

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  Rudolf Hermann arrived at Peenemünde in April 1937 from the University of Aachen to lead the facility's wind tunnel work. By 1942 or 1943, the supersonic wind tunnel at the Aerodynamic Institute had reached record speeds of Mach 4.4, making it among the most advanced facilities of its kind in the world at the time. The number of technical staff working there reached two hundred by 1943. Hermann Kurzweg, from the University of Leipzig, and Walter Haeussermann were among those working within the institute. An innovative desiccant system was introduced in 1940 to reduce the condensation clouding that had been caused by the use of liquid oxygen in testing. After the war ended, the wind tunnels were moved to Kochel, and then eventually to the U.S. Navy's Naval Ordnance Laboratory at White Oak, Maryland, where their postwar utility continued under American direction.

• 6. Operation Crossbow

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  Two Polish janitors working at Peenemünde's Camp Trassenheide provided maps, sketches, and reports to Polish Home Army Intelligence in early 1943. By June of that year, British intelligence had received two such reports identifying a rocket assembly hall, an experimental pit, and a launching tower. The Austrian resistance group around the priest Heinrich Maier also passed information about the V-1 and V-2 rockets and their production sites to Allen Dulles, the head of the U.S. secret service OSS in Switzerland, before the Gestapo discovered and dismantled that group. The bombing campaign that followed, Operation Hydra, struck the HVP on the night of August 17/18, 1943. The attack deliberately targeted the scientists' sleeping and living quarters first, then the factory workshops, and finally the experimental station. The Polish janitors were warned in advance. The prisoners working at the facility could not leave because of SS security, and there were no air raid shelters for them. Fifteen British and Canadian airmen killed in the raid were buried by the Germans in unmarked graves within the secure perimeter. Soviet authorities prevented their recovery after the war, and the bodies remain there. A year after Hydra, on July 18, August 4, and the 25th of August 1944, the U.S. Eighth Air Force conducted three additional raids on Peenemünde targeting suspected hydrogen peroxide production.

• 7. Evacuation and Dispersal

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  The aerial bombing prompted both the relocation of V-2 production and the dispersal of development work away from Usedom. On the 26th of August 1943, Albert Speer convened a meeting with Hans Kammler, Dornberger, Gerhard Degenkolb, and Karl Otto Saur to negotiate moving A-4 main production underground into the Harz mountains. By early September, machinery and personnel from Peenemünde, including Arthur Rudolph and Alban Sawatzki and roughly ten engineers, were moved to the Mittelwerk facility. On the 13th of October 1943, prisoners from the small F-1 concentration camp at Peenemünde boarded rail cars bound for Kohnstein mountain. A parallel plan emerged to move the development works to an underground site in Austria. Kammler assigned it the code name Zement in December 1943, and in January 1944 tunneling began into a cliff at Ebensee near Lake Traunsee, using prisoners from a sub-unit of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. Speer ultimately halted that evacuation because Ebensee was needed for other war priorities. Other components of the facility scattered across Germany: a valve laboratory moved to a castle near Leutenberg; a materials testing laboratory relocated to an air base at Anklam; engine testing moved to underground facilities at Lehesten and Zipf. The wind tunnels went to Kochel. Kammler's order to relocate to Thuringia arrived by teleprinter on the 31st of January 1945. At the last organizational meeting at Peenemünde on the 3rd of February 1945, the HVP's headcount stood at 1,940 people in A-4 development, 27 in A-4b development, 1,455 in Wasserfall and Taifun development, and 760 in support and administration. The first train departed on February 17 carrying 525 people, and the evacuation was complete by mid-March.

• 8. Aftermath and Legacy

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  The last V-2 launch at Peenemünde took place in February 1945. On the 5th of May 1945, soldiers of the Soviet 2nd Belorussian Front under General Konstantin Rokossovsky captured the seaport of Swinemünde and all of Usedom Island. Soviet infantrymen under Major Anatole Vavilov stormed the Peenemünde installations and found the facility in near-total ruin, its research buildings and rocket test stands demolished. At the end of April 1945, more than 450 rocket scientists from Peenemünde had been captured by the U.S. Army in Oberammergau. Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger surrendered in Reutte on the 2nd of May 1945. As part of Operation Paperclip, 127 engineers from the group were eventually contracted to continue their work at the White Sands Proving Grounds in the United States. A smaller number, including Helmut Gröttrup and Erich Apel, signed contracts with the Soviets and were forcibly transferred to the USSR as part of Operation Osoaviakhim in October 1946. Further destruction of the Peenemünde technical facilities continued between 1948 and 1961. By the end, only the power station, the airport, and the railroad link to Zinnowitz remained functional. The Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum opened in 1992 in the former shelter control room and the area of the power station, and now serves as an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. In 2022, the main turbine hall of the Peenemünde plant hosted a performance by the New York Philharmonic and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic as part of the Usedom Classical Music Festival.