This website concerns itself primarily with the history, technique and technology of the liquid-fueled V2 rocket. By concentrating our efforts on presenting the technical considerations of development, we risk the accusation of selective incompleteness and worse, the willful disregard of the suffering of countless victims of Nazi Germany’s V weapons program.
It must always be remembered that much of the production work of the V weapons, as with other armaments vital to Nazi Germany’s war effort, was carried out by forced labour in murderous conditions. The prisoner-slaves came from across Germany and the occupied countries. And it is well known and confirmed that hundreds died every month from the combined effects of neglect, malnutrition, and brutality, all inflicted wilfully by their captors. The criminally warped logic that allowed a seemingly vital workforce to be abused to the point of ruin, to the very obvious detriment of the production volume it was deemed to enable, defies rational explanation. It is an extraordinary fact of the V weapons program that more people perished in the manufacturing of the weapons than as a result of their use in combat. The figures are uncertain, but at least 12,000 and perhaps as many as 18,000 people died as a direct result of forced labour in the V weapons production plants. This unprecedented situation speaks of a systematic breakdown of rational, civilised values and basic human decency.
And Peenemünde?
What is less well known is that the pathological cruelty that begets the later horrors, seen large in the underground factory halls of Nordhausen, can be found earlier in the V weapon development programs initiated in Peenemünde on the island of Usedom.
It is a common trope in the V2 literature that the cruelty did not infect the missile program until Himmler’s SS became involved. Initially, the German V weapons program was carried out almost entirely by the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht, only at the production stage did the armament ministry, and Himmler’s SS become heavily involved. But there was prisoner cruelty on the island of Usedom, and neglectful deaths, much earlier. Ruthlessness was not the unique preserve of the SS, and many of the abused and overworked prisoners were, at this stage, still in the hands of the Luftwaffe.
To give just one example, the malnourished prisoners were forced to search the marshlands of Northern Usedom for the steam pistons used to launch the Feislar V76 or V1 flying bomb. It was viewed as a cost-saving exercise by the Luftwaffe.
The ruthless ideological cruelty that could so readily justify exploiting ‘enemies’ of the state – to death if necessary – came to the island of Usedom much earlier than the SS. The prisoners, all classed as criminals by the research facility’s leadership, were reduced to just material for the cause and viewed as utterly expendable. Their deaths and suffering should never be overlooked or marginalised.
Robert J Dalby FRAS Editor in chief, www.v2rockethistory.com
