Episode 39: After Peenemünde, the Horror Moves Underground

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One our first episodes discussed the small German town of Peenemunde, where Nazi scientists developed some of the earliest rocket technologies. We concluded the episode with the story of Robert Goddard, who developed many of the same technologies, albeit without the same intense support from the US government that the Nazi government provided Von Braun. In the story of rocket development, the chapter of Peenemunde closed when the British first bombed the research center in August 1942. But that was not the end of the V2. Instead, the horror moved underground to a secret facility near Nordhausen.

My visit to Peenemunde and Nordhausen, like most of my research trips, generated many insights as I experienced these locations that I’d only read about. But this trip was more sobering than most. To reach the site where the V2s were produced until the end of World War II, I essentially had to pass through the remains of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.  Like other concentration camp memorials, it honored lives taken in the overall slaughter of the Jews by the Nazi government.  At the memorial, amid all the exhibits, the strongest memory I have is of a single train boxcar sitting at the entrance. It was one of the thousands used to transport people from throughout Europe to die at this concentration camp. 

Fortunately, today, it stands empty. But it is a harsh reminder how easy it is to put people we don’t like, who are different, in a box and then categorize them as unworthy of life. That empty boxcar is a reminder of the consequences of where that thinking can lead. So, as we start this episode of My Dark Path, I hope we can remember to keep that box empty in our lives and hearts. Empty, so that some of the events we’ll describe here never need to be repeated.  And treat others as we would like to be treated.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas, and this is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science, and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. And since friends stay in touch, reach out to us on Instagram and visit mydarkpath.com.  But no matter how you choose to connect with us, I’m so grateful for your support.

If the story of the V2, Peenemunde, and Nordhausen are of interest to you, check out our newest YouTube video about Peenemunde!  We’re making great progress in developing our scripts into full videos…and we’d love your feedback!  Also, if you want more My Dark Path, join My Dark Path Plus on Patreon!  I’m releasing a new, subscriber-only episode every month.

If you stay until the end of the episode, you’ll hear a special promotion for the Holly Weird Paranormal podcast.  It’s a very entertaining show!

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the world’s Dark Paths with me. Let’s begin with Episode 39, After Peenemunde, the Horror Moves Underground.

PART ONE

The evening of August 17, 1943, was a pleasant one.  The weather in Peenemunde, sitting on the Baltic sea, was always mild, rarely reaching the mid 70s Fahrenheit in the summer.  Wernher von Braun, the technical director of Peenemunde’s Army Research Center, had spent the evening entertaining an old friend and fellow aerospace innovator, Hannah Reitsch. Reitch was a preeminent test pilot in the Luftwaffe and would later be assigned as one of Hitler’s personal pilots. But she was in Peenemunde to prepare for a test flight of the Me 163 Komet rocket-powered fighter plane the next day. As the party with Von Braun, Reitsch, and other members of the Peenemunde leadership team broke up, Von Braun went to his bachelor’s quarters on the base, only to be awakened around midnight by air raid sirens.

He quickly ran to the nearby communications center for an update. The technicians on the Nazi base were accustomed to observing British bombers that overflew the base. When attacking Berlin and other parts of southern German, allied bombers would take this route to minimize exposure to anti-aircraft guns. Consequently, von Braun and other observers initially believed that the bombers were headed to Berlin as they always did. Radio communications also confirmed that German aircraft were being sent to Berlin to intercept the bombers. Tension dissipated in the command center, and von Braun started walking back to his living quarters.

But as he walked, he “noticed that the artificial fog system enshrouding the Peenemunde facilities had been activated. Through the thin fog shone the pale reddish disc of a full moon. Suddenly, I saw a flare lighting up through the fog, and within a minute, the sky was covered with what we called ‘Christmas trees.”

The Christmas tree lights were flares dropped by a British Mosquito aircraft. Von Braun and the overnight watch staff were wrong, fooled by the allied plan to attack Peenemunde. The bombing raid on Berlin had, in fact, been real. It had its own code name, Operation Whitebait, and it had been a diversion that had worked perfectly. The bombers had been sent to Berlin to draw away the night fighters from the real target of the night’s attack, Peenemunde.  If you’ve heard the term night-fighter but never really understood it, it refers to a class of WWII fighter or bomber with special radar equipment and other equipment that made it effective in locating enemy planes in low visibility conditions.  

And the diversion had worked perfectly. And at 12:35 AM, just after midnight on August 18, the RAF’s first bombs struck Peenemunde.  It marked the beginning of the end of the research center’s role in the V2 program.

Peenemunde, if you recall, was a small target relative to other strategic bombing targets. Consequently, the 600 bombers assigned to operation Hydra utilized the British’s innovative radar system named H2S. Not only would the H2S system guide the bombers to Peenemunde, but it also enabled them to release their bombs at an altitude of 8,000 feet instead of the traditional 19,000 feet.

Operation Hydra was meticulously planned and the plan called for three waves of bombers, led by flares dropped by the Mosquito pathfinder planes. The first bomber wave was to target sleeping and living quarters, then factories in the second wave and finally experimental labs in the third wave.

But the raid did not go to plan. First, problems with the H2S radar disrupted the timing of the three waves. Then, the Luftwaffe discovered that the Berlin raid was just a diversion and rerouted the night fighters to Peenemunde. Consequently, 42 British bombers were destroyed, and only the second wave of bombers succeeded in releasing their full payloads over their targets.

And thus, did Operation Hydra fail in its first objective – the killing of as many of the scientific and technical leadership as possible. Only two important scientific leaders were killed. Also, as is common in war, many innocents were killed too.  Between 500-600 prisoners were killed when bombs heavily damaged the Trassenheide forced labor camp.

But operation Hydra forced the Nazi government to transfer the development and manufacturing of the V2 and other rocket systems to other sites throughout Germany. Principle among the sites would be the underground hell-world of Mittelwerk, just outside of Nordhausen.

PART TWO

The idea of mass producing the V2 was initiated in early December 1942 when Albert Speer, the German Armaments Minister, set up the A-4 Special Committee. He appointed the fanatical Nazi Gerhard Degenkolb to run the committee. Remember, the term V2 was a practical name for the technical designation of the rocket, the A-4. Each number in the A series reflected a meaningful advancement in the range and capability of the rocket. And, in a future episode, we’ll cover the Amerika Rocket, or A-12, which was designed to strike New York City.

Degenkolb was a very pragmatic choice. He had successfully organized the efficient, mass production of German railroad locomotives. Taking a similar approach, in 1943, he started pushing to have the V2 manufactured in a similar industrial model. He also attempted to take manufacturing control away from the German Army Ordinance organization which was beset with bureaucracy. But Degenkolb faced an issue that hindered the entire Nazi war effort – a lack of manpower.  Most able-bodied men were now fighting the allies on two fronts.  The idea to use concentration camp labor for the V2 came when its chief production engineer Arthur Rudolph toured the Heinkel aircraft manufacturing plant near Berlin. By June 1943, Peenemunde requested 1,400 detainees from other SS camps. This group of slave laborers would bolster the existing, poorly paid guest workers already at Peenemunde. And so, the first V2 assembly line was started in Building F1 on the grounds at Peenemunde.

The line, opened on July 16, scarcely a month before operation Hydra's bombs would fall, was a prototype of the rail-based manufacturing which would later be used at Mittelwerk. 

Operation Hydra triggered a series of immediate changes in the V2 program. After a personal meeting with Hitler on August 18, 1943, SS chief Heinrich Himmler informed Albert Speer that he was personally taking over the manufacturing of the V2. At that time, he also placed SS Brigadier General Hans Klammer in charge of relocating the Peenemunde site to an underground location in the region of Nordhausen in central Germany. Klammer had been responsible for building the extermination camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maidennek and Belzec.

Then, a week later, on August 26, Klammer and others decided to use a series of pre-existing tunnels as the location for the new V2 plant, which would come to be known as Mittelwerk, or Middle Works in English. The tunnels were a former gypsum mine at Kohnstein mountain near the town of Nordhausen.

The gypsum mine had been abandoned in 1917 and was unused until 1936 when the Wehrmacht government seized it for the storage of fuel and poison gas.  By mid-1943, the complex had become Germany’s most important fuel and oil depot. On September 24, 1943, about 5 weeks after Operation Hydra, Mittelwerk was created as a private corporation and given a contract to manufacture 12,000 V2s.

My visit to the Mittelwerk plant came just a day after my visit to Peenemunde. As you can see from the photos we’ve put up on our website and that I’ve included in the Peenemunde Youtube episode, it would be easy to forget the evil the Nazi’s planned to unleash on the world from tiny, remote town. The remnants of the research facility are nestled in the forest, which has reclaimed much of the land. A strong, cool wind comes off the Baltic Sea. It might be an idyllic location for a resort.

But not so for Mittelwerk. The horror of this facility remains, almost frozen in time, without the need to memorialize it with museum-like recreations. After passing through the Mittlebau-Dora concentration camp, which we will return to later in this episode, I entered the underground labyrinth. 

The Mittelwerk plant had two main parallel tunnels, A and B, each around 6,200 feet long and between 29 and 36 feet high. The tunnels were joined by 46 cross tunnels, each about 500 feet long and set at regular intervals.

The V1 assembly line was made in the southern section. The V2 assembly occurred in the complex’s central area, while Junkers aircraft engine production took place in the northern section. 

Two standard gauge railway lines ran through each of the main tunnels. Tunnel A was primarily used to transport and store parts and supplies for the V2. Tunnel B was the factory’s central assembly line and the principal route for completed V2 missiles out of the factory. The assembly process included the two railway lines in Tunnel B. Even today, partially assembled V2s rest in silence, abandoned and rusting.

But as the facility approached completion, the prisoners moved all of the production equipment from Peenemünde and reassembled it by hand at Mittelwerk. Prisoners, German laborers, and supervisors worked on the Mittelwerk assembly lines in a ratio of about two prisoners to one worker. Wehrmacht soldiers who were injured or sick were transported to Mittelwerk for duty as parts or process inspectors, while German engineers oversaw the numerous workshops and production crews.

Initially, around 7000 prisoners were assigned to work in the tunnels in October 1943; by January 1944, the number had climbed to 12,000, and by February 1945, it had risen to 19,000. It is estimated that between 40,000 and 64,000 people built the Mittelwerk facility and then on the manufacturing lines, with 26,500 of them dying, many of them during the evacuation when the SS slaughtered prisoners in mass when the American army advanced closer and closer to the facility.

By June 1944, eight months after the Mittelwerk was launched, the V2 production lines were operating at capacity.  About 2,500 German personnel guarded and worked along side the slave labor.  They built 4,575 V2 rockets between August 1944 and March 1945.

The source of these prisoners was the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. It was the last main camp created by the SS.  While the camp was established on October 28, 1944, its beginnings date back to August 28, 1943, when a subcamp of Buchenwald, nicknamed Dora, was founded. On that date, the SS transported 107 Buchenwald inmates, the very first to work on the tunnels that would become Mittelwerk.

Nazi government built the Mittelbau-Dora camp to supply prisoners for forced labor. The terms “death camp” and “concentration camp” were commonly used interchangeably; however, they are not the same. The Death camp has an objective that many of us commonly think of when we hear the word concentration camp – the mass extermination of human beings. But as German industrial capacity was worn down under relentless Allied attacks, work concentration camps grew to supply forced labor. In reality, prisoners in these camps were simply on a slower path to certain death. Prisoners were given little to eat or drink. Medical care and warm clothing were virtually non-existent. 

At Mittelwerk, the inmates worked inhumanely to expand the mining galleries, and the experience inside the underground complex was brutal. When the overloaded trucks came off the small gauge rail tracks, prisoners were crushed.  Others were killed by rock falls.  And of course, they were constantly subjected to cruel treatment by the soldiers who supervised their work.

In the cross tunnels, the prisoners were forced to eat and sleep in filthy, lice-infested bunks heaped four high. No running water or sanitary amenities existed, sickness was expected, and death the only respite. Another prisoner replaced those who died from accidents, starvation, or disease. Trucks carrying piles of bodies left frequently for the cremation furnaces. 

Perhaps the most heartbreaking element of the entire visit occurred as I walked down one of these cross tunnels. Here were the barracks where prisoners were kept. Everything remained untouched, seemingly from the moment Mittlewerk was evacuated. Thin sheets pushed aside on bunkbeds, twisted forks lying untended on the table. No museum could ever adequately re-create the harsh reality a camp prisoner’s life. Most of those who lived here never saw daylight or felt freedom again. 

PART THREE 

On April 11, 1945, the 3rd Armored Division, the spearhead of the advancing American troops, entered Nordhausen, where they were to join with the 104th Infantry Division before jointly continuing their assault to the east. The Americans were thrilled when most of the V-2 development team decided to surrender to them. One unnamed German, quoted in the book The Rocket Team, said, “We despise the French, we are mortally afraid of the Soviets, we do not believe the British can afford us. So that leaves the Americans.” Whether a real quote or not, it nicely summarized the dilemma of these scientists across the fallen Nazi empire.

Entering the Nordhausen area, the liberating American troops were instructed to “expect something a little different.” Even so, they were unprepared for what they saw when they entered Mittelbau-Dora camp, where they discovered 1,300 to 2,500 corpses and a few survivors. They soon reached the Mittelwerk tunnels’ entrances, where they found rows of V2s and subassemblies stretching out through the tunnels. Electric power and ventilation systems remained operational.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany drawing closer, the Allies began looking for solutions to appropriate German knowledge. The allies recognized that German scientists and technology would be a valued asset and had set up diplomatic protocols called the Allied Control Commission. Among the most sought-after specialists were those with expertise in nuclear physics, potentially useful in finishing Manhattan Project.  Others of great value included experts in V2 missile technology as well as weapons, navigation, aircraft construction, and electronics. Immediately after the capitulation of Germany in May 1945, the transfer of skilled workers, documents, laboratories, and material abroad from the Western occupation zones began.

The next month, on June 20, 1945, von Braun and 1,000 other scientists and family members fled east Germany into the US zone, just barely escaping capture by the Soviet army.

American troops would only have a short stay at Mittelwerk before Soviet troops were expected to arrive on June 21, 1945. This area of Germany was part of the Soviet post-war sphere of influence and would later become East Germany. As a part of Operation Paperclip, the well-known operation designed to relocate German scientists and technology to the US after the war, 100 V2s were eventually shipped back to New Mexico. Thousands of German V2 personnel and their dependents would also relocate to America to work on the US rocket program. This included Werner von Braun, the head of operations, who later went on to lead the US ICBM and Saturn V programs before becoming Director of NASA. On June 28, 1946, the first reassembled V2 was successfully launched.

The Soviets were equally obsessed with accessing the scientists and technologies of the Third Reich. As the war ended in Germany, the Soviets stepped up their own campaign to search for and evaluate Nazi technology. 

Initially, the Soviets sent teams into the countryside to try to lure German scientists into joining the Soviet side.  They offered rich salaries, food rations, and the opportunity to stay in their home country. Some Soviet agents even crossed into the American zone to entice Germans to come back.

They were generally unsuccessful, perhaps confirming that earlier quote that everyone was afraid of the Soviets. One engineer did come back to Germany, Helmut Grottrup, a physicist and an expert on the V2 flight control system. What motivated him to return? We’ll see later how his decision cost him his freedom.  His motivation remains the subject of much speculation.  But a common hypothesis is that he many conflicts with von Braun and, perhaps, looked forward to being the leader of the Soviet program. 

Nevertheless, the Soviets managed to find enough ex-Nazi rocket scientists and Grottrup became a central figure at a new Soviet rocket research center in the German town of Bleicherode, about 16 miles from the Mittelwerk facility. Initially, the Soviets took great care of their prize scientist.  Grottrup was set up in a spacious mansion with a $1,250 per month salary, or about $20,000 today. The Soviets evicted the house owner to make way for their new V-2 expert. Soon, Grottrup was leading an organization comprised of hundreds of German scientists. Their first assignment was to reproduce plans for the V2 and restart manufacturing at Mittelwerk’s site. By 1946, production had restarted, and V2s started to roll off the line again.

But the success of technical sites like Bleicherode caught the attention of the Soviet leadership. This site was one of many across the conquered Germany under Soviet control that was staffed almost exclusively by Germans. Others focused on long-range missiles, others on aviation and nuclear physics. Initially, it made sense to Soviet planners to have these development centers in Germany as there were few equivalent scientists and engineers back in the USSR.

But soon, this approach started to worry Soviet military officials.  Keeping these advanced technical sites in captive Germany required that they send Soviet scientists and technicians from the USSR to train and collaborate with these German scientists. They were concerned that German scientists were being exposed to the Soviet plans in rocketry, nuclear research, and aviation. Soviet leaders were also uneasy with the relative freedom enjoyed by East Germans, even though they were now in the Soviet zone of control. As more Germans realized the implications of being under Soviet control, more tried to flee to the west.  This heightened concerns that their German scientists and technicians would also defect to the west and take their knowledge with them.

Given Stalin’s paranoia and obsession with secrecy, it may be surprising that these German research institutes survived as long as they did. By the way, to learn more about how paranoia contributed to the bunker he designed to protect him and the politburo from an atomic attack, be sure to join My Dark Path Plus for a subscriber-only episode about Bunker 42. Visit mydarkpath.com to learn more! 

Finally, the Soviet government moved to change the situation, less than a year after the war with Germany had ended. Stalin himself signed a decree on May 13, 1946. It was a secret decision to deport, or essentially kidnap, 1,400 German scientists and engineers to the USSR. The order also included the relocation of families, so the total was expected to reach 3,500 people. The program was led by Ivan Serov, the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.

Given the number of people to be relocated to the USSR from across Germany, Serov planned to deport everyone at roughly the same time, in mid-October. The Soviet government formalized the plan with decree number 2163-880s, approved on September 13, 1946.

The code name for the secret program was assigned. It would be called the Osoaviachim action. Unlike most code names given to espionage or military projects, this code name wasn’t just picked at random. Osoaviachim had been the name used by a volunteer group in the 1930s that had organized Soviet citizens who had been interested in rocketry and aviation. 

In early October, Serov received the final list of deportation targets and their assignments to projects in the USSR. In all, the list identified 2,200 specialists who would be assigned to to many different projects including the Ministry of Aviation, Armaments, Communications, Agricultural Machine building, and shipbuilding. Historical records initially noted that the NKVD planned to deport about 6,000 people, a number that included the families of the scientists, to the USSR.  Recent releases of previously undisclosed Soviet documents now puts the number around 7,000.

Early in the morning of October 22, 1945, the Osoaviachim Action organized Soviet soldiers and 2,500 police officers into teams and sent them to the homes of each German specialist.  Every house they called on had the same shocking experience.  A knock on the door in the middle of the night, followed by soldiers and police entering the home.  They instructed each family to pack immediately and prepare for a train ride to the Soviet Union. While the families packed under armed guard, soldiers started loading furniture on trucks.  The few items they could bring would join them on the train taking them to their new homes.  Not surprisingly, there remains much rumor and guesswork about the way the Soviets handled the deportation.  It’s reported that some scientists were told they could leave their families behind if they wanted, and that some wives took advantage of this offer.

Now betrayed by his trust in the USSR, Helmut Grottrup demanded an answer from Dmitry Ustinov, who headed the Soviet ministry for rocket development. He wanted to know how long the thousands of scientists and their families would be detained in the Soviet Union.  Dismissively, Dmitry is said to have responded that they could leave: “As soon as you can fly around the world in a rocket.”  

Before the Osoaviachim action, Irmgard Grottrup, Helmut’s wife, played an important role in running the research institute outside of Nordhausen. She had scoured the country for food for the staff and their families.  Her feeling of betrayal is also evident as she recounted the events of that early morning of October 22.

Could these be the same officers who not so long ago had tried, with a courteous smile, to make the reconstruction of our experimental station palatable to us? In response to our tentative inquiries, the same officers who assured us that we should never be sent to Russia? Their grin was as friendly as ever. Indeed, they even made a few promises: a flat much larger and much nicer than ours, a life without restrictions, a life in a magnificent country, a magnificent city amongst grand people. The only thing they couldn’t promise was when we should see our own country again. At one point, simply to be free for a moment, I tried to get out through the back door. Impossible! The barrel of a gun, a broad face: “Nyet.”

Reportedly, Grottrup also wrote other letters of protest. No response is noted in the historical record.  And, perhaps he was fortunate that he received no answer.  The Soviet response to dissent never came in the form of a letter, but instead a knock at the door in the middle of the night followed by a burial in an unmarked grave, or, at best, a lifetime in the gulag. 

Grottrup and Irmgard were not the only ones angry over the lightning-fast strike.  But German community dissent in the areas where the kidnappings took place was short-lived.  Protests were shut down. The Soviet system would tolerate no dissent. 

PART FOUR

Sergei Korolev will be remembered as one of the world’s great aerospace designers and engineers, recognized for leading the Soviet Union’s achievements in space in the 1950s and 1960s.

But he also vehemently fought against the use of German technology and the inclusion of German scientists in the Soviet work. This was not borne of ethical considerations. Instead, he viewed the Germans and their work as competitors.

Korolev was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, in 1907. His parents divorced when he was a child, perhaps initiating a self-reliant outlook. When Korolev was five years old, he attended an airshow, watching the planes from his grandfather’s shoulders. His dream of flying drove him to design a glider as a teenager. He joined a flying club in college and participated in constructing a glider, only to later break two ribs on a test flight. After graduation, he formed a society to develop rockets. He led the flight testing of the USSR’s first liquid-fueled rocket, the GIRD09, in 1933, leading to the development of a series of rocket-propelled missiles and gliders, including 1936 Korolev’s RP-318, the first Soviet rocket-propelled aircraft. But before the flight, he and other aerospace engineers were falsely accused by the Soviet secret police and thrown in prison. He was later transferred to a series of gulags, building railroads and mining gold as slave labor. Stalin finally freed him in 1944, primarily through the intervention of Andrei Tupolev, another Soviet aerospace pioneer.

So when the imprisoned German rocket scientists ended up assigned to Korolev’s projects, they were working for someone who had also been unfairly imprisoned, uprooted from his home, and forced into slave labor.  

Many of the Germans were sent to the city of Podlipki, a small town about a 3-hour drive south-east of Moscow. While the true nature of the Podlipki would not be acknowledged until the 1990s, the area became the epicenter of the Soviet rocket industry. Eventually, it would be renamed in honor of Korolev, finally giving the area the recognition it had earned. The German group had been assigned to the new NII-88 scientific research institute. It was the first Soviet facility dedicated to rocket development. 

Grottrup and others were given homes in the northeastern suburbs. Grottrup’s home, still standing, garnered an interesting name: the Fascist Palace. Like Korolev, other leaders were very negative about the presence of the Germans. Valentin Glushko, another Soviet leader in rocketry at the time, distanced himself from the Germans.

Grottrup, without leadership support, struggled to operate with poorly equipped labs and a general lack of equipment. Even more astonishing, Germans assigned to work for Glushko were taken off aerospace projects completely and given demeaning projects like designing foundations for industrial buildings. Tension grew, but ultimately Stalin intervened, demanding that the Soviets launch the V2s they had taken to learn from them before proceeding with their designs. The Soviets launched their first captured V2s in August of 1947, about 15 months after the US launched their first captured V2 in April of 1946 in New Mexico.

The Soviets planned to launch the V2s in Kazakhstan. Irmgard Grottrup joined her husband on the trip.  Ever the resourceful journal writer, she wrote that the camels outnumbered cars in the launch area. Still, she noted that her husband and the other Germans were excited to be back doing the work they loved, reminiscent of the excitement they felt “like at Peenemunde when we do our first experiments.”

But after the test launches were complete, the Soviet scientific leadership again blocked the Germans from participating in the rocketry work.  Nevertheless, Grottrup and his team presented to their Soviet bosses plans for two rockets. One was a guided missile, the G1, based on work they had done during the war. Another was the R10, an upgraded version of the V2 with a significantly longer range. But the projects went nowhere, and the Germans were soon reassigned to a research facility on Gorodomlya island, far away from Moscow and the NII88 institute.  But for the small group of scientists uprooted from their homeland, there was one benefit to the new location.  There were many other Germans who had been assigned to the island from the first moment of their abduction.

While the German engineers were not sad about leaving the dysfunctional NII88 culture, their families were more reticent about the move. Irmgard noted, “Farewell Moscow! In spite of everything, you meant a great deal to me – a host of good friends – a city where I quarreled, laughed, wept, and pondered much.”

Life was very different at Gorodomlya for the German scientists and their families. The first Germans to arrive were given apartments that had no bathrooms. Their movement was severely restricted and could not even leave the island without a permit.  Even then, permits would only allow them off the island for a brief time and required they be accompanied by an escort. But the Germans made the best of their situation. Some noted that the town looked like a toy village transplanted from Germany. Children were educated in a local school that grew to 150 German students. Today, people play on a tennis court they built in the summer of 1948.

But the underlying issue remained. No matter what the German team did, it was dismissed by the Soviet planners. Grottrup was pleased with the quality of his team there; not only did they have better equipment, but they operated more collaboratively than the Germans did in NII88. However, while the Soviet infrastructure for development and testing grew, the German team could not test any concepts or collaborate with anyone who wasn’t on the island. The Soviet leadership feared having them engaged in their rocketry work, but perhaps feared even more not having them.  Every project review with leaders from the NII88 ended with no action being taken. Finally, in 1950, Grottrup asked to be relieved of his position. Privately, he hoped that no one from his team would accept the role of replacing him. But Johannes Hoch, an expert in flight controls, agreed to take over leadership. He and five others were transferred to Moscow to join a team developing an anti-aircraft system. Hoch ended up applying for Soviet citizenship. 

Despite this, any hope that German scientists would contribute to the Soviet space program had dissipated.  Russian engineers were displacing all of the Germans. And most Germans were assigned to projects that were a waste of time at best and humiliating at worst. 

Finally, in 1951, the first German group was allowed to return to East Germany. And the Grottrups?  They remained in the USSR until 1953.  They were some of the last Germans to remain on the island. But once back in East Germany, they managed to relocate to freedom in West Germany and ultimately succeeded in the electronics industry. Irmgard’s observations are available in a book, Rocket Wife. If you recall why he decided to stay in Germany in the first place when most of his peers fled the US and other countries in the west?  Well, by 1953, his nemesis Wernher von Braun was the head of the entire US army ballistic weapon program in Huntsville, Alabama.

So what are we to make of this tragic story? Its history reaches all the way back to scientists like Hermann Oberth, who had been dreaming of rockets since he was a child.  And others like Slovene engineer named Herman Potočnik, who published the visionary book called The Problem of Space Travel.  And then, recall the night when Robert Goddard looked at the moon from a cherry tree – and envisioned building a rocket that would take mankind to mars.

But the visions of great scientists like these were harnessed for the purpose of war. Remember Hitler’s claim about the V2s?  When he watched a film narrated by Von Braun, showing the successful liftoff of a V2 rocket, he proclaimed, "If we had had these rockets in 1939 we should never have had this war…" He promptly declared Peenemünde to be the number one priority in the entire German armaments program. 

While the V1s and V2s designed and produced there ultimately had little strategic value, their potential to change the course of the war drove the allies, and Churchill in particular, to act.  The desperate execution of Operation Hydra helped force the Germans to relocate V2 production from Peenemunde to Mittelwerk where the Nazis killed tens of thousands to pursue their wonder weapons.  

Mittelwerk is the location where those scientists responsible for these technological achievements, and perhaps many of the atrocities required to create them, diverged into two paths.

Some, like Von Braun, had a choice and chose the west and freedom.  Others, like Gottrup, made a choice that cost him and thousands of others their freedom for more than a decade. 

Think back to that empty boxcar that sits outside the memorial of the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp.  That empty boxcar that brought thousands to their death.  Think about the paths that others have followed and their consequences.  And, in our own hearts, ponder the path that we choose to walk today and how our choices are either a blessing or curse to others.  

I don’t think poetry will typically be a part of the My Dark Path storytelling toolkit.  Yet Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, seems particularly appropriate to wrap up today’s episode.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, the creator and host. I produce the show with Courtney and Eli Butler; and our creative director is Dom Purdie.  I wrote this story. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a rating and review wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you. 

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.