Army research institute Peenemünde

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British aerial photo of the Peenemünde Army Research Center from April 1943

The Peenemünde Army Test Center (short: Heeresversuchsanstalt (HVA) Peenemünde , abbreviated as such HVP) was a development and test center of the Army , a branch of the Wehrmacht, established in Peenemünde-Ost from 1936 . Under the command of Walter Dornberger , since July 1935 head of the missile division in the Army Ordnance Department , and the Technical Director Wernher von Braun was in the military zone in the north of the island of Usedom, mainly the first viable large rocket assembly 4 (A4, later in the Nazi propaganda " Retaliation Weapon V2 “) developed and tested. With its first successful flight on October 3, 1942, the ballistic missile was the first man-made object to penetrate the border area with outer space . In general, Peenemünde is therefore considered the "cradle of space travel ".

The HVA Peenemünde ("Werk Ost") was supplemented from 1938 by the facilities in Peenemünde-West ("Werk West", later a test center of the Air Force Karlshagen ). The research area was designated as a development plant . At the beginning of 1942 the HVP was renamed Heeresanstalt Peenemünde (HAP), from mid-1943 to further camouflage in Heimat-Artillerie-Park 11 Karlshagen (HAP 11) . In the course of the transformation of HAP 11 into a private company in July 1944, the development plant was renamed Elektromechanische Werke Karlshagen (EW) and placed under the management of General Director Paul Storch, a board member of Siemens & Halske AG, with Wernher von Braun as Technical Director .

As of June 1943, was located on the site of concentration camp . The production of the A4 rocket took place during the last two years of the Second World War in the Mittelwerk in a tunnel system in Kohnstein near Niedersachswerfen with the affiliated Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp .

The Historisch-Technische Museum Peenemünde provides information about the events of that time and the history of the place.

history

Start of an A4 from test stand VII , March 1942

Emergence

German military missile development began as early as the late 1920s in the Weimar Republic . Financed by the Reichswehr , the first secret attempts to build liquid rocket engines were made in German companies . Due to the requirements of the Versailles Treaty , Germany was restricted in the development of large-caliber artillery . Long-range missiles were not foreseeable at the end of the First World War , which is why their development was not expressly prohibited. In the Army Research Center in Kummersdorf  - a demarcated part of the Kummersdorf military training area that is not accessible to the troops  - test stands were set up for burning experiments with rocket stoves.

Since no large rockets could be launched in Kummersdorf, a more suitable site had to be found. Major Walter Dornberger's project department "WaPrüf 11" carried out this search for a location and found it during Christmas 1935. Allegedly, the mother of Wernher von Braun, a native of Anklam, gave the tip for Peenemünde on the northern tip of Usedom. The "Peenemünder Haken", where the Swedish King Gustav II. Adolf landed in the Thirty Years' War , is located north of Zinnowitz near the fishing village of Peenemünde . The area was lonely and offered the possibility of launching rockets along the Pomeranian coast in the east-north-east direction Flight from the island of Ruden up to 400 km to be observed.

In the spring of 1936, after an inspection of the missile project in Kummersdorf, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch was convinced. In April it was also possible to involve the Air Force in the project, since General Albert Kesselring originally came from the Army . With funds from the Reich Aviation Ministry , the site was acquired for 750,000 RM ; The army and air force wanted to share the project and operating costs.

From the summer of 1936 the construction began of the plants in the style of conventional air bases and air bases . The area was infrastructured with 25 km of rails, three ports and numerous roads; Between 1937 and 1940 about 550 million RM were invested in the Army Research Institute. Only through the massive use of forced laborers such as concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war as well as “ Eastern workers ” was the establishment of the research facility possible in such a short time. As part of the armament of the Wehrmacht , 70 percent of the houses were demolished for one of the largest secret military projects during the Nazi dictatorship and almost nothing was left of the old Peenemünde with its thatched fishermen's houses. As early as May 1937, the army was able to relocate the first 90 employees from Kummersdorf to Peenemünde in the "Plant East", and in 1938 the Air Force followed to the "Plant West" . The "South Plant" was used for production and included the test series plant with two large production halls F1 and F2. Hall F1, which was 248 meters long and 120 meters wide, was one of the largest assembly halls at the time without intermediate supports. Hall F2 was still being built, but no longer fully operational. In addition, a material warehouse with a floor area of ​​180 by 95 meters and a height of 18 meters was planned. Due to a shortage of materials and the relocation of production to other locations, only the base plate and siding were completed.

The most important launch pad for the A4 was test stand VII , managed by Kurt Heinrich Debus . Only test starts were made from Peenemünde, since both the Fieseler Fi 103 "V1" missile and the A4 ballistic missile had too little range to be able to reach suitable enemy targets from Peenemünde.

Construction of the Karlshagen II concentration camp labor camp

A satellite camp of the Ravensbrück concentration camp existed in Peenemünde from June to October 1943 . The assembly of the A4 rockets was to take place with the support of concentration camp forced laborers in the production hall F1 of the Peenemünder test series plant, in the basement of which 600 prisoners were housed. The technical director of the institution, Wernher von Braun, referred to this camp as prisoner camp F1. For this purpose, appropriate skilled workers were selected in the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps , who were to be employed in the A4 series production planned in Peenemünde from October 1, 1943. Since these workers were considered “qualified”, they were treated much better here than their fellow sufferers in other camps. In addition, there was a second concentration camp work camp (Karlshagen I) for the Luftwaffe , a prisoner of war camp in Karlshagen and one in Wolgast . A total of around 1,400 forced laborers were housed there, at times even more. There were more than 3000 “ Eastern workers ” from Ukraine and civilian workers from Poland . In addition, Czech, Dutch and Italian contract workers and French civil workers were used. The concentration camp labor camps were guarded by state riflemen and, in 1943, at times by SS guards.

Memorial plaque on the Greifswald New Cemetery

At least 171 prisoners from Peenemünde who died between November 1943 and September 1944 were cremated in the Greifswald crematorium ; other bodies were buried on site.

Divided into work details, inmates of the Karlshagen I concentration camp had to work, among other things, in the following areas: auxiliary work following the shooting of the Fi 103 flying bomb ("Retaliation Weapon 1"; V1), work on the runway to test the Me 163 , earthworks, building protective walls Covering of aircraft, defusing bombs and duds , repairing bomb damage, isolating the district heating and loading work at the boat harbor in Peenemünde.

HVP head Walter Dornberger on the use of forced labor in the institution in the minutes of the meeting of August 4, 1943, signed by him: "The ratio of German workers to concentration camp prisoners should be 1:15, at most 1:10".

Bombing and underground relocation

British plan of attack for Operation Hydra, target point F: sleeping and living quarters

The British, who had already become aware of the project after Hitler's speech on September 19, 1939 in Artushof in Danzig about a new type of attack weapon, tried late, with " Operation Hydra " on the night of August 17-18 Destroy 1943. One of the main goals was the killing of the scientists in their accommodation, as evidenced by the goal drawn in the attack plan, point F: “sleeping and living quarters”. The RAF bomb carpet missed the target area a little and partially hit the “Plant South”, but mainly the area of ​​the Karlshagen housing estate and the Trassenheide I and Trassenheide II concentration camps . In the vicinity of the research facility in the Trassenmoor camp between Karlshagen and Trassenheide, mostly Soviet prisoners of war were imprisoned for forced labor; here there were many fatalities from British bombs and the guards who killed fleeing inmates. Although the camp was badly hit in the air raid, the forced laborers immediately had to clean up the HVP, which increased the number of victims.

Production of the "V2" relocated underground, tunnel in Kohnstein , Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp , Mittelwerk GmbH , A4 missile hulls 1945

After the British air raid, parts of the test facilities were quickly relocated to underground production facilities (mainly the tunnel system in Kohnstein in the Harz Mountains ), where series production began. "Director Rudolph takes over the establishment of the Mittelwerk" is the entry in the chronicle of the test series plant in Peenemünde on September 8, 1943. First the machines were removed from the assembly hall. Chronicle note on October 13, 1943 laconic: "Withdrawal" also of the prisoners.

The rockets that were later manufactured there were taken to Peenemünde on the Reichsbahn and their functionality was tested there. There was a final, varying camouflage painting and delivery to the Wehrmacht and, to a lesser extent, to the Waffen-SS .

The general production facilities for parts of the A4 were scattered all over Germany and Austria: under the cover name " Lager Rebstock " near Dernau an der Ahr, ground systems and vehicles for the rocket were produced underground in the former railway tunnel, further examples are the Gustav Schmale companies in Lüdenscheid , in which parts of the combustion chamber were manufactured, and Accumulatoren Fabrik AG (AFA) in Hagen- Wehringhausen , which supplied special accumulators . At the beginning of 1944, an engine test bench started operating in the Redl-Zipf subcamp in the municipality of Neukirchen an der Vöckla .

Not only the production plant was to be relocated from Peenemünde in autumn 1943. In September, Kammler received the order to have a tunnel system built near Ebensee in the Salzkammergut , which the Peenemünder development plant was to house (code name “Kalk”, later “Cement”). Thousands of concentration camp prisoners were employed as workers for the expansion, which began in November 1943, as was the case with the tunnels in Kohnstein . The Ebensee concentration camp was set up for this purpose . However, as there were repeated delays in the shaft works, the plan to relocate the development plant from Peenemünde to the Alps was dropped in the summer of 1944. Instead, the armaments ministry decided to use the “cement” plant for the production of armored gearboxes and the construction of an underground oil refinery .

In 1943 there were a total of four locations for A4 series production ; the concentration camp prisoners came for the HVA-Peenemünde (from June) from the Buchenwald concentration camp , at the Friedrichshafener Zeppelinwerke (from June / July) from the Dachau concentration camp , at the Rax-Werke in Wiener Neustadt (from June / July) from the Mauthausen concentration camp and the Demag armored factory on the outskirts of Berlin, former RAW Falkensee / Albrechtshof of the Deutsche Reichsbahn (from March) from Sachsenhausen concentration camp . The military head of the HVP Dornberger signed the minutes of a meeting with Gerhard Degenkolb and Kunze stating that the series production in all four plants was "basically carried out with convicts".

With the increasing danger from air raids, the Peenemünde plants were attacked three times by USAAF bombers on July 18, August 4 and August 25, the prisoners of the HVP had to build an air raid shelter made of reinforced concrete. The "Bunker Construction" command consisted of 400 prisoners. The use of this command is described by contemporary witnesses as the most brutal. A total of 295 deaths are documented.

From 1943 the American OSS or British SOE was in contact with the Austrian resistance group around chaplain Heinrich Maier . As a result, the exact drawings of the V2 rocket as well as sketches of the location of weapons manufacturing facilities were sent to Allied General Staffs in order to enable Allied bombers to perform precise air strikes. On May 20, 1944, parts of a crashed A4 were seized by members of the Polish Home Army . The most important components, together with the evaluations carried out in Poland, were flown to Brindisi on the night of July 25th to July 26th 1944 by a Douglas DC-3 Dakota of the RAF , which had landed near Żabno ( Operation Most III ). From there, the secret material came to London - long before the first A4 rocket hit there. In Peenemünde, A4 rockets - soon also called "V2" - were still being tested, despite the three further air raids on the HVP in 1944.

Hope in the silver bullet

In his last radio speech on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler still promised final victory through an increased use of " wonder weapons ", which also included the "V2" , despite the looming war defeat . As early as 1943, in response to the Allied air raids on German cities, the Nazi propaganda had announced the bombing of England with "weapons of retaliation" in order to maintain the morale of the German population and the fighting spirit of the soldiers. With constant invocations of the effectiveness of the new "miracle weapons", the Nazi regime propagated the belief that the Wehrmacht had a technological means in hand with new, superior weapon systems in order to be able to bring about a turning point in the war. However, the euphoric mood of the population that briefly arose after the use of the “weapons of retaliation” soon turned into skepticism in the summer of 1944, when the V missiles failed to achieve the expected noticeable successes.

Size comparison of the various planned aggregates, with the largest variants of which should be possible to attack America

Walter Dornberger's statements at the end of March 1942, long before the first “V1” hit London , show why the term “retribution weapon” propagated by Joseph Goebbels for the A4 rocket was a deliberate deception : The use of the rocket was planned in such a way that “at Day and night at irregular intervals, regardless of the weather, worthwhile destinations such as London, industrial areas, port facilities, etc. be put under fire ". Previously, when he was promoting the new weapon in July 1941, he had already pointed out the “no longer existing air superiority”. He was making a clear reference to the lost Battle of Britain . As early as the end of 1939, the draft was about a war missile.

On February 8, 1945, the Soviet prisoner of war Michael Dewjatajew and a group of ten prisoners managed to escape from the site of the Army Research Center in a German He-111 aircraft . Up to the cessation of launch operations on February 21, 1945, 282 rockets had been launched in Peenemünde and on the island of Greifswalder Oie , which belongs to the test site , 175 of them from test stand VII (see list of test starts ). Mainly for the purpose of training the rocket units and for camouflage reasons, numerous test launches of the A4 rocket were carried out in Blizna and in the Tucheler Heide . Walter Dornberger then looked for other places to set up a test station and to train soldiers in rocket weapons, including in the woods near Wolgast , in the Weser Uplands and near Liebenau near Nienburg , but it came near this place at the beginning of April 1945 to only two test starts.

Evacuation and post-war years

On February 17, 1945, the evacuation of the site began and the evacuation of employees and material could be completed by the beginning of March with extensive transports to the area around Mittelwerk GmbH in the southern Harz region. a. to Nordhausen , Bleicherode and Bad Sachsa . At the same time in February the SS began to clear the prisoner camps and organized transports to the subcamps of Mittelbau-Dora, Barth and Ellrich-Juliushütte. From April onwards the SS forced the remaining men on death marches. Peenemünde and the Army Research Institute were occupied by Soviet troops on May 4, 1945. These dismantled the mostly preserved systems by 1946 and transported them mainly via the port of Swinoujscie to the USSR . Non-dismantled plants were blown up by a German company in accordance with a resolution of the Allied Control Council . The "Soviet Military Administration" for Mecklenburg stipulated that the building materials were made available to the new farmers free of charge.

From 1945 to 1952 Peenemünde was a Soviet naval and air force base. In 1952, the handover of the base on which took place NVA the GDR , among others, as a naval base of the first flotilla of NVA.

Until 1990, the entire north-western area of ​​the island of Usedom down to Karlshagen was a restricted area of ​​the NVA, which operated an important military airfield there . The airfield, which already belonged to the former air force test site, was expanded in 1961 so that it could be used by jet planes of the “ Jagdfliegergeschwader 9 ” of the NVA air force . After the reunification of Germany, the military base was dissolved in 1993. The Armed Forces operating a rocket technically similar tracking means with the test site Technical Center 91 on the former Krupp 'rule firing Meppen . Rheinmetall AG operates private, technically comparable facilities on the company's own shooting range in Unterlüß .

investment

Assembly hall for "V2" engines in the Peenemünde test series plant
V1 in the outdoor area
Launching pad of the V1

The area of ​​the research institutes in Peenemünde on the Peenemünder Haken is part of the militarization of the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, which was promoted at the time. Test sites for remote control bombs near Zinnowitz and Garz belonged directly to the research institute. In addition, there were outsourcing near Neuendorf and Pudagla.

To secure the HVP, coastal and anti-aircraft batteries were built on the outer coast in Peenemünde, Karlshagen, Zempin, Ückeritz, Swinemünde and on the Zerninsee , in Korswandt and Neuendorf as well as anti-aircraft guns in Ahlbeck, Garz / Neverow, Dargen, Pratenow, Katschow and Mellenthin. The Reich Labor Service provided logistical support in Karlshagen, Bannemin, Zinnowitz, Ahlbeck, Korswandt, Kaseburg, Usedom, Mellenthin and Labömitz. Munitions plants ( Munas for short ) were set up in the Mellenthiner Heide , in Swinoujscie and in Kaseburg.

On the two highest lake-side elevations - the Streckelsberg near Koserow and the Langen Berg near Bansin - observation points were set up, from which the trajectories of the remote control bombs could be recorded and measured with special cameras with 1000 mm lenses. The Langer Berg observation bunker was blown up after the war, and the remains of the bunker on Streckelsberg that had survived the attempted demolition were removed in the mid-1990s.

The Zinnowitz – Peenemünde railway line is still in operation and once served as a means of transport for the employees of the Army Research Institute. However, it is no longer (as from 1943 to April 21, 1946) electrically operated with direct current of 1200 volts and overhead lines. The cars came to the Berlin S-Bahn as Peenemünder Schnellbahnzüge and were integrated into the existing series by 1952. A railcar came to the Isar Valley Railway in 1945 and subsequently to the Deutsche Bundesbahn . After extensive restoration, this railcar can be seen in the outdoor area of ​​the Historical-Technical Museum Peenemünde .

You can still see the former platforms of the works railway. They are preserved in the form of concrete walls made of prefabricated elements next to the railway line. Some of them had to be tipped to allow the wider modern trains to pass through.

The ruins of the oxygen plant are located at the entrance to Peenemünde . In this plant, the liquid oxygen required as an oxidizer for the A4 was extracted from the air using the Linde process . From test stand VII , the area of ​​which is still not open to the public, only the wall, the concrete slab on which the start attempts took place, and the exhaust duct for static burning tests, in which there is a pond, are left.

The Peenemünde power plant

The Peenemünde power plant alone remained in operation until 1990. In its architecture and in its mode of operation, it vividly documents the totalitarian aspirations of the Nazi state, but illustrates the dimensions and the technical standard of the former research institutes. Between 20 and 25 of the 30 megawatts generated went to the oxygen plant. The coal-fired power station in Peenemünde was one of the largest in the German Empire. The former power plant houses part of the "Historical-Technical Museum", which recalls the beginnings of modern rocket technology, is the anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Culture (ERIH), but also contrasts the myth of rockets with the suffering of the victims.

A two-circuit 110 kV three-phase overhead line crosses the Peene between Peenemünde and Karlshagen , and its 75-meter-high masts are visible from a great distance. This line was built at the beginning of the 1950s to effectively transfer the electricity generated in the Peenemünde thermal power station, which was not used in this amount on Usedom, to the mainland. A branch line to the Karlshagen substation was later built from this line. After the power plant was shut down in 1990, the 110 kV overhead line from the branch of the branch line to Karlshagen to the Peenemünde power plant was dismantled, so that the 110 kV three-phase current line over the Peene only feeds the Karlshagen substation. The fragments of the large flak bunker southwest of the airfield have also been preserved.

Historical meaning

Peenemünde in the spring of 1941, Leeb, Todt, Lübke (middle / back), Walter Dornberger
V2 explosion in Camberwell Road, London, circa 1944

Numerous technical pioneering achievements were made in Peenemünde: Not only was the first large rocket launched that could advance into space, but the first industrial television system was also installed to transmit the rocket launches to the control bunker. However, this technical progress was paid for in blood in the truest sense of the word; The construction and subsequent production of the V2 in Mittelbau-Dora alone cost the lives of around 20,000 prisoners. As a result of the military use of the V2 itself, around 8,000 mostly civilians were killed.

The highest construction manager of the research institute was temporarily the later Federal President Heinrich Lübke . At least some of the 1400 prisoners living on Usedom were assigned directly to the " Schlempp assembly ", where Lübke was employed. Lübke independently led a prisoner detachment and also requested forced labor from the management of the institution himself. The scientists involved were aware of the use of concentration camp prisoners. An important original document can be found in Till Bastian (see lit., p. 222): A technical director of the HVA Peenemünde, Arthur Rudolph , later director of the Saturn V development program , comments on a memo from April 16, 1943 on the occasion of a tour of the prisoners' deployment at the Heinkel works in Oranienburg on April 12, 1943, detailing the extremely poor living and working conditions of the forced laborers , including many Eastern workers and French , naturally agreeing to these circumstances.

The Peenemünde Historical-Technical Museum describes:

“The ambivalence of using the most modern technology becomes clear on the system like in hardly any other place. Right from the start, research served only one goal: high technology should create military superiority. In hardly any other historical site are the benefits and risks of technical progress more obviously interwoven than in Peenemünde. "

Peenemünde (including its offshoots) was not the only place in Germany from which larger rockets were launched. Missiles were launched in the wadden area of Cuxhaven (including Operation Backfire ) and on the later temporary NVA training area on the Zingst peninsula . The dismantled material and personnel formed the basis of missile projects there , both in the USSR and in the West. In France, Peenemünder Personal was involved in the development of the Force de frappe .

As part of Operation Overcast , the USA was able to recruit a total of 127 specialists from Peenemünde for the US missile program in August 1945. The most prominent of the experts from Peenemünde who emigrated to the USA after the Second World War was Technical Director Wernher von Braun , who developed the Saturn V moon rocket for NASA in the mid-1960s and played a key role in the Apollo program for the first moon landing . A few other experts from Peenemünde, such as Helmut Gröttrup and Erich Apel , switched to the Soviet space program .

With its first successful flight on October 3, 1942, with a summit height of 84.5 km, the A4 was the first man-made object to penetrate the border area with space. An official ceremony of the German aerospace industry in Peenemünde under the patronage of the then federal government on the 50th anniversary of this first flight was canceled at short notice due to international protests. The A4 large rocket was brought into relation abroad with the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where concentration camp inmates built the rocket in series.

See also

literature

  • Philipp Aumann: Armaments put to the test: Kummersdorf, Peenemünde and total mobilization . Historisch-Technisches Museum Peenemünde , Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86153-864-6 .
  • Till Bastian : high tech under the swastika. From the atomic bomb to space travel. Militzke, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-86189-740-7 , pp. 97-125.
  • Volkhard Bode, Gerhard Kaiser: Missile tracks. Peenemünde 1936–1996. A historical report with current photos by Christian Thiel. Christoph Links, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-86153-112-7 .
  • Walter Dornberger: Peenemünde - The history of the V weapons. RhinoVerlag, Ilmenau 2018, ISBN 978-3-932081-88-0 . Extended new edition of the third edition published in 1958, Book V2 - The Shot into Space. Bechtle Verlag, Esslingen 1981.
  • Joachim Engelmann: Secret armory Peenemünde. V2 - "Waterfall" - "Butterfly". Podzun-Pallas, Friedberg, ISBN 3-7909-0118-0 .
  • Wolfgang Gückelhorn, Detlev Paul: V1 - "Eifelschreck" kills, crashes and impacts of the flying bomb from the Eifel and the right bank of the Rhine 1944/45. Helios, Aachen 2004, ISBN 3-933608-94-5 .
  • Günther Jikeli (ed.): Rockets and forced labor in Peenemünde. The responsibility of memory . Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung , Schwerin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86498-750-2 ( PDF ).
  • Martin Kaule: Peenemünde. From the missile center to the monument landscape. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86153-764-9 .
  • Manfred Kanetzki: Operation Crossbow: Bombs on Peenemünde . Historisch-Technisches Museum Peenemünde , Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 3-86153-805-9 , 978-3-86153-805-9.
  • Ruth Kraft : Island without a beacon. The great novel about Peenemünde, Hitler's V weapons and a young woman . Torgauer Verl.-Ges., Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-930199-13-6 (406 pages).
  • Bernd Kuhlmann: Peenemünde - The missile center and its industrial railway. 2nd Edition. GVE, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89218-081-4 .
  • Jürgen Michels: Peenemünde and its heirs in East and West. Development and way of German secret weapons. With the collaboration of Olaf Przybilski. Bernard & Graefe, Bonn 1997.
  • Christian Mühldorfer-Vogt (Ed.): The operation can be carried out with prisoners - forced labor for the war rocket . Peenemünder issues 3; Historical-Technical Museum Peenemünde , Peenemünde 2009.
  • Volker Neipp: With screws and bolts to the moon - the incredible life's work of Dr. Eberhard FM Rees. Trossingen 2008. History of the deputy Wernher von Brauns, Eberhard Rees, from Peenemünde to the USA. Springerverlag Trossingen, ISBN 978-3-9802675-7-1 .
  • Botho Stüwe: Peenemünde West. Bechtermünz Verlag 1998, ISBN 3-8289-0294-4 .

Web links

Commons : Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Historisch-Technisches Museum Peenemünde  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peenemünde: Astronauts visit the cradle of space travel , Ostsee-Zeitung , November 8, 2013, accessed on November 10, 2014.
  2. ↑ Steffen Buhr: Signal systems of the Peenemünde factory railway. November 18, 2012, accessed October 10, 2019 .
  3. ^ A b Manfred Bornemann : Secret Project Mittelbau. From the central oil depot of the German Reich to the largest rocket factory in World War II . Bernard & Graefe, 1994, ISBN 978-3-7637-5927-9 (240 pages).
  4. ^ Peter Hall: Organigram Electromechanical Works Karlshagen. Retrieved October 3, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h Rainer Eisfeld : Moonstruck. Wernher von Braun and the birth of space travel from the spirit of barbarism . To Klampen Verlag , Springe 2012, ISBN 978-3-86674-167-6 .
  6. ↑ Technology monument: The black power of Peenemünde , Mitteldeutsche Zeitung , April 24, 2012.
  7. ^ Station 9 - The loading ramp ( Memento from June 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), website of the Historical-Technical Museum Peenemünde
  8. ↑ a b c Mass grave at the rocket ramp . Historian Jens-Christian Wagner on Heinrich Lübke's role in the deployment of concentration camp prisoners in Peenemünde. In: Der Spiegel . May 28, 2001, ISSN  0038-7452 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 4: Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-52964-X , pp. 560, 561.
  10. ^ Lüdenscheider News ; March 25, 2006.
  11. ↑ Accumulatoren Fabrik AG
  12. ^ Jens-Christian Wagner: Production of death: The Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Göttingen 2001, p. 87.
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder: The Place of Terror: History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 4, CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2006, pp. 560, 561.
  14. ↑ See Hansjakob Stehle “The spies from the rectory” in Die Zeit from January 5, 1996.
  15. ↑ Peter Broucek: The Austrian Identity in the Resistance 1938-1945. In: Military resistance: studies on the Austrian state sentiment and Nazi defense. Böhlau Verlag , 2008, p. 163 , accessed on August 3, 2017 .
  16. ↑ Andrea Hurton, Hans Schafranek: In the network of traitors. In: derStandard.at . June 4, 2010. Retrieved August 3, 2017 .
  17. ^ Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/wk2/kriegsgeschichte/wunderwaffen/index.html
  18. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder: The Place of Terror: History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 4, CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2006, pp. 560, 561.

Coordinates: 54 ° 8 ′ 53.5 ″  N , 13 ° 47 ′ 38.5 ″  E