Swastika Read online

  Finally, at 2:07 a.m., the bombers flew away, tailed by Messerschmitt 110s with new Schräge Musik guns. For von Braun, however, the battle had just begun. He spent the rest of that long night repeatedly risking his skin to try to salvage the secret documents of his lifelong obsession from the fire that was consuming House 4.

  With the light of dawn had come a stark realization.

  Von Braun had a mortal enemy in the British air marshal who was planning the Crossbow raids.

  Henceforth, he would be up against Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris.

  * * *

  The Peenemünde raid had set off a whirlwind of fury at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s remote headquarters in the forests of East Prussia. December 1941 had marked a jolting turnabout in the Kriegsglück—war luck—of the Third Reich. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s overwhelming assault on the “Bolshevik horde” of the Soviet Union, had resulted in months of Nazi triumphs over the Red Army … until the blitzkrieg got mired in the snows of the Russian winter. That same month had seen America enter the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Not only did Germany suddenly have to match the industrial output of three major powers, but the climactic Battle of Stalingrad had—in Churchill’s words—torn the guts out of Hitler’s army. More than one million Nazi soldiers had been lost on the eastern front, three hundred thousand of them at Stalingrad. Only ninety-three thousand had survived to surrender to the Bolsheviks on January 31, 1943. Faced with a manpower crisis, the führer had but one hope: the wonder weapons—the Wunderwaffe—of SS-Major Wernher von Braun and his fellow scientists.

  Now this!

  “The Bomber hit Peenemünde,” Himmler said. He had traveled to the Wolf’s Lair from his own nearby headquarters, High Forest, on the morning of that British attack twenty months ago.

  “Harris!” Hitler fumed, his color rising.

  “Yes. Overnight.”

  “How bad is the damage?”

  “Deployment of the V-2 has been set back months.”

  “Months we don’t have.”

  “Yes,” agreed the SS leader. “The Bomber wants our rockets. The RAF will come again and again. The Bomber won’t stop until every V-2 is useless scrap.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Pass control of the rockets to the SS.”

  For years, Heinrich Himmler had wanted to turn the SS—established as Hitler’s bodyguard service—into a private fiefdom. Assigned the task of maintaining security throughout the Reich, he had expanded that into building a huge network of concentration camps to supply slave labor for factories he wished to have dependent on his SS—and to exterminate “racial degenerates.” From twenty-five thousand inmates on the eve of the war, the population of the camps had climbed to well over half a million by 1943—and that didn’t include the millions of Untermenschen who’d already been gassed and cremated in Auschwitz, Dachau, and the other death camps. The power of the SS had grown to such perverse proportions that the Black Corps had its own combat force, the thirty-eight fighting divisions of the Waffen-SS, which didn’t take orders from the Wehrmacht, the regular German army. Cross Himmler and his Gestapo agents would come knocking on your door. The SS leader was the most sinister warrior of the Reich, and all that he required to make his power base absolute was complete control over all the secret wonder weapons in Nazi development.

  Here was his chance.

  The henchman who stood before the führer didn’t look like a man of violence. He looked more like an intelligent elementary schoolteacher than he did a monster. Today, Himmler wore the less-threatening field gray SS uniform that he’d had tailored to his slender, middle-sized physique. With an air of quizzical probing, his gray-blue eyes peered out through the round, thin-rimmed lenses of his glittering pince-nez. The trimmed mustache beneath his straight nose slashed a dark line across his pale features. The even white teeth that backed his constant, set smile were flanked by a hint of mockery at both corners of his colorless mouth. The most telling feature of his less-than-Aryan face was his conspicuously receding chin, for it revealed a defect in his genes. As Himmler addressed Hitler—another master racist who lacked the coveted features—he clutched his peaked SS cap in his slender, blue-veined, almost girlish hands, so the skull and crossbones of the Death’s Head badge winked at the führer.

  “Harris doesn’t fight like an Englishman. He fights like us.”

  “Fire with fire,” Hitler said begrudgingly.

  “The Bomber is no Montgomery.”

  Himmler was alluding to Monty’s gentlemanly behavior after the Battle of El Alamein, when he had invited his dust-covered adversary from the trounced Afrika Korps into his tent for dinner so they could analyze the tank war they had just fought.

  “Harris plans to bomb us into submission. That man will stomach casualties that make his cohorts blanch. The only way to protect the V-2 is to produce it underground.”

  “Build a factory?”

  “Yes,” said Himmler.

  “We don’t have enough workers.”

  “I do. In the camps.”

  Hitler shook his head. “We must use German labor. Or we’ll have security leaks.”

  “We already do. The V-2 was betrayed by spies. How else would Harris have known the location of Peenemünde?”

  “The risk is too great.”

  “No,” said Himmler. “It’s the ideal solution. We can use slaves to burrow the tunnels and to build the V-2s. Having the prisoners underground guarantees secrecy. They can be cut off, with no escape, from the outside world. We can send in criminals as Kapo bosses. The plan is watertight.”

  “But can it be done?” asked Hitler.

  “I have just the man to do it.”

  * * *

  SS-General Ernst Streicher was a rocket himself. His climb through the ranks of the SS had been meteoric over the past two years. And unlike those Aryan rejects Hitler and Himmler, Streicher was as Nordic as an Über-Nazi could be. Not only was he the blondest man in the Third Reich, but his eyes were the iciest of blue. An architect and a civil engineer by training, the forty-two-year-old construction whiz had been a Nazi Party insider since 1931 and a member of the SS since 1933. Utter ruthlessness and endless energy had turned him into a driving force that got things done.

  Streicher had made his bones in the agriculture and air ministries by perfecting a way to mass-assemble hangars, barracks, and such. Recognizing that the Aryan poster boy was cut from the same cloth as SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler had tasked him with building the ultra-secret extermination camps and gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, and Maidenek.

  Streicher’s meticulously crafted design for Auschwitz had caught the attention of a delighted Hitler. The führer had instantly grasped that he had the ability to retain control of the minute details of a project without losing sight of its strategic goals. That, Streicher had proved in blood by drawing up plans to increase the capacity of the death camps to fourteen million, and by upping the daily output of their gas chambers and ovens from ten thousand to sixty thousand victims.

  That engineer was the ideal tool for this job.

  One week after the Peenemünde raid and Himmler’s meeting with Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, Streicher had dispatched the first contingent of slaves from Buchenwald to Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Their arrival on August 27, 1943, was witnessed by Fritz—then thirteen—and his brother, Hans. Their father planned to toughen up his motherless sons.

  “Kretiner!”

  Idiot!

  “Arschficker!”

  Ass-fucker!

  “Dreck!”

  Shit!

  “Krematoriumhund!”

  Crematory dog!

  The insults and the blows began as soon as the first trucks from Buchenwald disgorged their human cargo outside the yawning mouths of a pair of tunnels that wormed into Kohnstein Mountain. The site selected by the SS for its new “hardened” underground V-2 factory had begun life as a gypsum mine in 19
17. In 1936, following Hitler’s seizure of power, the mine had been transformed into a highly secret petroleum reserve for the Reich. Two parallel tunnels, “A” and “B”—each one a mile long and big enough to swallow two railroad trains, with enough space left over for service trucks and towering machinery—were bored into the mountain. A series of cross tunnels—each five hundred feet long—connected the main runs at regular intervals like the rungs of a ladder. With a total subterranean capacity of thirty-five million cubic feet, the S-shaped network had the potential to become the biggest underground factory in the world.

  Once it was completed.

  “Pay no attention to the human cost,” Fritz had heard the general tell the SS guards that day. “The work must get done, and in the shortest possible time.”

  With their body hair freshly shaved against lice, their emaciated bodies shrouded in the striped prison garb common to all SS camps, and their blistered, bleeding feet shuffling along in wooden clogs, those first 107 slaves were driven like cattle by blows from the guards’ Gummi cudgels—electric cables wrapped with rubber—into the mountain to get to work. Tunnel B had already exited through the mountain’s southern slope. The first job for the slaves was to finish Tunnel A and dismantle the petroleum dump so that machinery salvaged from the RAF bombing raid on Peenemünde could be installed in this new, hardened, top-secret factory.

  It was grueling work.

  Work Camp Dora quickly became the satellite hell of Buchenwald. A steady stream of slaves—all male and predominantly of Russian, Polish, or French background—were trucked in from the main concentration camp to construct tomorrowland. No Jews among them: Jews were for gassing and burning in other camps. So grinding were these hellholes, which minced up human flesh like sausage meat, that one worker was heard to scream, “Compared with Dora, Auschwitz was easy!” The following day, his body was among the truckload of corpses being shipped back to Buchenwald for incineration in the main camp’s ovens. So horrified were those who saw the homecomings of so many crushed and mangled slaves that some committed suicide on learning that they were slated to go to Dora.

  “Vernichtung durch Arbeit.”

  That’s what the general had called it.

  “Annihilation through work,” Streicher had explained to his sons as he led them toward the carnivorous caves to inspect the progress of the first month’s labor. On the same day, September 24, 1943, Mittelwerk GmbH (Central Works Ltd.) was incorporated and received an order for the fast delivery of twelve thousand V-2s to knock Britain out of the war.

  The entrance to one of the caves was covered with a camouflage net. The huge work yard out front was cluttered with dusty machines, railroad stock, metal ducting, piles of cement bags, rolls of electric cable, stacks of reinforcing bars, and heaps of mining timber. The wind down the valley howled through the man-made canyons, but it was overpowered by the eerie wailing from the hole, a shrill amalgam of slaves’ screams, metal grinding on metal and rock, and explosions deep within.

  The agony thrilled Fritz.

  The inferno inside brought to mind a beehive gone berserk. Fumes of burned oil and choking dust hung heavy in the air, which was already thick with humidity and the stench of death. Gray beings staggered through the fog with their backs bowed by the weight of crushing loads, or else they struggled to haul long lengths of railroad track at a run, lurching through pools of dim light like ghosts in a graveyard. The Kapos who lashed them viciously had much to lose, for they were real criminals who’d been selected from the Reich’s prisons for their perverse sadism, and they would do anything to keep their pain-free—and pain-dispensing—positions in the hierarchy.

  “Los! Vorwärtz!” “Quick! Forward!” barked the Kapos from behind a hail of Gummi blows while SS thugs watched for any reason to shoot.

  The guards called it Premiënschein, meaning “Good for a prime.” An SS man “forced” to kill a slave had earned himself a prime, or a few days’ leave.

  Some notched their guns to record vacation time.

  Passing the glint of mica deposits winking from the rock walls, then hills of gravel and hoppers loaded with rubble and broken bodies, the SS engineer and his sons sank deeper into the mountain. Frantic activity swarmed around them as slaves used shovels, pickaxes, and their bare hands to hollow out and tear away at the would-be factory. The distant blasting added to the chaos, causing slaves atop thirty-foot scaffolds to plummet down onto teams of other workers who were hauling huge skids or pushing heavy handcarts on rickety rail lines. As the skids stopped and the skips toppled, the Kapos whipped and clubbed the slaves until each had either fixed his setback or was dead.

  The general nodded his approval.

  And so did Fritz and Hans.

  The first twenty cross-tunnels were functional, but conditions grew more primitive after that. There was no time to construct a barracks outside, so the SS had walled off cross-tunnels 43 to 46 to make some living quarters at the unfinished end of Tunnel A. The shift was changing as Streicher, Fritz, and Hans reached these quarters. Four thousand wretches were caged here underground. At first, the slaves had slept on straw or naked rocks, but then they’d hammered together tiers of bunk beds four levels high. From these, sleepy slaves would be rousted with whips and herded out to the shit barrels.

  Toilets were non-existent in this netherworld. Fritz and Hans tried to plug their noses against the retching stench, but their father knocked down their hands.

  “A barn should smell like a barn,” he said.

  The Arschtonnes were oil drums that had been cut in half and topped with planks for squatting. They stood in the cross-tunnel exits from the rows of bunks. The general and his sons arrived in time to catch the guards’ favorite game. To hurry those squatting on the makeshift toilets at the end of their twelve-hour shift, and to clear the planks for those about to work the other half of the day, the SS guards were pushing some of the slaves into the full barrels. The besmeared workers had nowhere to go but into the already filthy and lice-infested bunks, and nothing to clean themselves with except their own urine.

  The guards were laughing.

  Here in the center of the mountain, there was little air. The manmade cave was damp, dark, and perpetually cold. The walking skeletons on the work crews were entitled to only one cup of water a day, a cup of coffee, a piece of bread, and a bowl of swill in which swam a few rotten vegetables. Dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, thirst, and starvation plagued the camp. Whimpers, screams, shouts, and threats of execution echoed throughout the tunnel.

  Exhausted slaves stumbled into the now vacant bunks or collapsed onto the ground. Those behind, pressed on by the Kapos, trampled across any comrades who fell, and soon thousands of men were desperately crying out for sleep. But the blasting had started up again, and the noise was ratcheting up to a level that shredded nerves and bored into the brain, until there was no escape from dementia even in sleep.

  Untermenschen, Fritz thought.

  This is what they deserve.

  To suffer, slave, and die in the bowels of the earth.

  * * *

  By November, there were eight thousand slaves underground.

  By December, those subterraneans numbered ten thousand.

  That didn’t include the thousands who’d died and were cremated at Buchenwald.

  By the end of the year, Streicher was the toast of the Nazi elite. It had taken him only four months to evacuate the bombed remnants of the V-2 factory at Peenemünde and restart rocket production in this hellhole at Nordhausen. Even Albert Speer, the armaments minister who’d lost control of the wonder weapons program to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, had sent the general a note of begrudging respect for an accomplishment “that far exceeds anything ever done in Europe and is unsurpassed even by American standards.”

  On New Year’s Eve, 1943, Streicher—sporting the dress uniform of the Black Corps and flanked by his sons in their Hitler Youth garb—had cracked a bottle of schnapps at the mouth of the tunnels to celebrate th
e rollout of the first four V-2s.

  The rockets were destined for the hands of the aerospace scientist for whom the slaves had toiled.

  SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun.

  * * *

  Rockets, rockets, rockets … they were the driving obsession of Wernher von Braun. To perfect them, he was willing to sell his soul to any devil. The end justified the means.

  The brilliant young aristocrat had joined a horseback riding unit of the Berlin SS in 1933 as a sign of political loyalty at a time when Hitler’s Nazis were consolidating their power. In 1937, he had joined the Nazi Party, and on May 1, 1940, at Himmler’s personal request, he had formally joined the Black Corps with the rank of lieutenant. Promotions in late 1941 and 1942 had elevated him to the rank of captain, or Hauptsturmführer. Von Braun—like Streicher—was shooting up faster than his rockets. It paid to have friends in high places.

  On June 28, 1943, Himmler had visited Peenemünde for a tour of the blast-off site, and was tickled pink to be greeted by von Braun in the black uniform of the SS. So pleased was the Gestapo chief to see the scientist flaunting the Totenkopf that he promoted von Braun to the rank of major, or Sturmbannführer.

  The sky was the limit for most men, but not for the Third Reich’s V-2 wunderkind.

  On July 7, 1943, von Braun had reached the top. The boomerang blows of the war had shot the V-2, Germany’s potential knockout punch, to the head of the Nazi elite’s priority list. On that day, the rocketeer was summoned to meet Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair.

  The audience had opened with a propaganda film. With von Braun narrating as the V-2 blasted off onscreen, the führer—degeneration already showing in his unhealthy, hunched-over appearance—could hardly contain his fidgeting excitement. The sleek, single-stage rocket—filmed at the first successful launch, on October 3, 1942—stood 14 meters high, von Braun explained, weighed 12.9 tons, sped at a maximum velocity of 5,760 kilometers an hour, and could strike an enemy target at a distance of 330 kilometers. The logo on its side was from Fritz Lang’s 1929 film, Woman in the Moon.