Hitler’s Terror Weapons: The Price of Vengeance. Richard Overy
eventually sank back into the dark-age history from which that mysterious and perhaps dubious group had been so imperfectly raised. They left an important legacy of Anglo-American rapprochement and common feeling.
Not so the ancestral Germans; the bitterness of defeat seemed to bathe the ancient German tribes in a new light; they appeared as heroes whose purity had been lately corrupted by the admixture of inferior breeds, foremost amongst whom were the Slavs and the Jews. The solution to this ‘problem’ appeared to be simple; a leader, a Fuehrer, was needed to act upon it. The next thousand years of history would justify his ruthless actions. But this could not be achieved, it was thought, until Weimar, tainted with defeat, cosmopolitanism, modernism, democracy and humanity, was swept away.
A war of vengeance had long been contemplated and planned in the highest circles of the German army. Its leaders saw that the Great War had been a war of whole peoples. The collapse of the home front had been caused or aided by a catastrophic failure of agriculture, which had led to famine and bitterness. Industry had been unprepared for a long war, and had been imperfectly mobilised for mass production.
The solution to this was found in a Wehrwirtshaft, the defence based economy, a strategy of total economic mobilisation for war, prepared in peace. Links began to be established with industry, which became more open after 1926, when the allied control commission left Germany.29 The philosophy of an historical climacteric, when the future of whole races and peoples would be decided in a total war in which vengeance would be wreaked, was thus well established in official circles in Germany before Adolf Hitler came to power. The seeds of vengeance had been sown in a rich soil.
To the many disadvantages with which the Weimar republic was burdened must be added divisive trends that had begun even before the Great War. Americanisation and modernisation resulted in the continued rationalisation of industry, together with the new ‘time and motion’ analysis and the use of new labour saving machines and methods. Paradoxically, alongside the ghosts from the German past, the ‘mystique of youth’ was more pervasive in Weimar than in other contemporary societies; the model for the young of both sexes was America.1 Youth became more free of parental values; ‘Earning money and enjoying themselves are the twin poles of their existence … primitive sexuality and jazz on the one hand … modern … concern for … sensible personal hygiene on the other … it is not socialism, but Americanism that will be the end of everything as we have known it’, proclaimed a cleric2 – a curiously modern ring! Weimar was burdened with a generation gap.
The new internationalism, the new youth, had been enthralled by the culture of science and modernity; and what was more modern than the idea of space travel? In 1923 Hermann Oberth, a 28 year old Transylvanian German, published a 92 page book entitled ‘Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen’ (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space). Oberth, in his childhood an avid reader of Jules Verne, advocated manned space flight, and suggested a method – a multi stage vehicle powered by a motor burning a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen. In 1924 Max Valier joined Oberth, proving himself of value in publicising and popularising Oberth’s ideas. Valier later joined the VfR – the Society for Space Travel – in Breslau. He secured the interest of the liquid oxygen equipment manufacturer Paul Heylandt in a rocket-powered car, for which Valier had himself designed the engine.
In 1929 Fritz Lang directed the hit film Frau in Mond (Woman in the Moon), with Oberth as scientific adviser. As a consequence of the film, the Raketenflugplatz Berlin (Rocketport Berlin), a spaceflight society run by rocket enthusiasts, was founded in 1930. The futuristic romance of spaceflight became popular in Germany, more so than in any other western country. Oberth received queries from the public concerning the use of poison gas in liquid fuelled rockets, and discussed the question in his book Wege zur Raumschiffart (Ways to Spaceflight) in 1929, concluding that the accuracy required was ‘decades away’.
In 1930 Max Valier was killed in a liquid fuel rocket experiment, and a bill (which subsequently failed) was introduced into the Reichstag to ban rocket experiments altogether. But they continued, although Paul Heylandt, a manufacturer of liquid oxygen, decided to end his research into liquid fuelled rockets. The same year the Raketenflugplatz built a 7Kg thrust petrol-liquid oxygen engine, (partly through a grant from the army). Its membership included Klaus Riedel (1903-1944) and Baron Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), son of an ex Weimar civil servant sacked for a too right wing stance during the Kapp Putsch of 1920.
The army now took an interest in rocketry in the shape of Lt.Colonel (Dr.) Karl Emil Becker (1879-1940), who headed Section 1 (ballistics and munitions) of the army ordnance testing division. Becker, disturbed by the bias of the old officer corps against the technocrats and the appalling mess into which heavy artillery (indeed all) procurement had sunk during the late war, had begun a programme of technical training for army officers. This programme attracted, amongst others, Walther Dornberger (1895-1980), an artilleryman whose ardent enthusiasm for long range bombardment had been lit by the ‘Paris Gun’, which consisted of a 15 inch barrel into which a much longer 8.26 inch tube had been inserted, and which was supported half way along its length.3 On 23rd March, 1918 commencing at 7.20 am, a battery of these gigantic guns, secure behind the German lines, had startled the citizens of Paris, some 78 miles away, with a bombardment of 25 huge shells which lasted until 2.45 pm, and which killed 16 people and wounded 29. Altogether, 303 shells were fired at the French capital, of which 183 landed in the city, killing 256 and wounding 620. The 228 lb projectile4 left the gun at a speed of 5260 feet per second, and in 90 seconds had attained a height of 24 miles. The total flight time was 176 seconds. The energy generated was some 8 million ft pounds. So great was the range, that a correction had to be made for the rotation of the Earth. The distance which the shell had travelled was calculated by reading a pressure gauge. The immense force of the explosion of the 195kg charge so scoured and enlarged the chamber of the gun that each successive shell, of a slightly different size and numbered for the purpose, had to be inserted further into the barrel.
The Paris gun had therefore been an impressive piece of ordnance indeed. Superlatives abounded. But it had some drawbacks. The huge barrels had to be renewed after firing 60 rounds (the French 6 inch gun could fire 3500). One, indeed, had exploded. It was not accurate, its pattern of shot being some 9.4 mils5 in range and 2.5 in bearing, and the explosive carried in the shell was only some 25lbs in mass. The sheer size of the guns hampered their mobility, and rendered them vulnerable to counter fire, or to aeroplane bombs. Dornberger was therefore drawn to the use of rockets as a means of overcoming these drawbacks, and perhaps of increasing the weight of attack. Much genius would be expended in this investigation, but none seems to have been directed towards the utility and expense of bombarding a city. Gigantism seems to have been self-justifying in Germany, even before the advent of National Socialism.
Rockets had a long history of use in warfare. “The rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air …” over Baltimore in September 1814, with which the British had failed to subdue Fort McHenry despite the use of some 1800 projectiles, were to be immortalised in ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, which became America’s national anthem in March 1931.6 But the rocket had never become a serious rival to the big gun. It even ceased to impress savages upon a closer acquaintance.7
At a meeting on 17th December 1930 Becker reported that ‘There has been a quantity of irresponsible talk and literature about space travel, and we must approach the rocket question with some misgiving. Our task is to investigate how far the rocket is capable of supplementing our weakness in artillery equipment.’ Becker reported that