Page 53 of V2

Two months later, the RAF bombed Peenemünde, and a week after that, while they were still trying to clear up the worst of the damage, von Braun called Graf into his office. He was haggard from lack of sleep, too exhausted even to rise from his desk. He waved Graf into a chair. ‘I just had a call from Dornberger in Berlin. Himmler has spoken to the Führer, and it seems we are to abandon plans to manufacture the rockets on the island, in view of our vulnerability to air attack.’

‘So that’s it? It’s over?’

‘Not at all. Production is to be moved underground. The SS have a mountain site in Thuringia that Himmler says is perfect for our needs. Their chief of construction will be in overall charge of building the factory.’ He studied his notepad. ‘Brigadeführer Dr Hans Kammler.’

Graf turned on the ignition. The Kübelwagen sprang forward and stalled. He put his foot down on the clutch and tried again. This time he moved off slowly, but when he tried to change up to second, he couldn’t find it. The grinding of the gearbox was loud enough to draw the attention of an SS soldier, who emerged from the shadows at the back of the hotel and waved him to a halt.

‘Nobody is permitted to leave.’

‘I am Dr Graf of the army’s Special Weapons Department.’ He took out his identity card and held it up. ‘I have to get over to Wassenaar immediately. There’s an emergency.’

‘All personnel must remain in place until the security action is completed.’

‘A rocket is on fire! Do you want to be held responsible for a disaster?’ Graf leaned out of the window and peered up and down the promenade. On the corner, a group of SS men were watching them. ‘Where is Obersturmbannführer Drexler?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We need to find him. What’s your name?’

The man looked uncertain. ‘Schumacher.’

‘Right.’ Graf leaned across and opened the passenger door. ‘Get in, Schumacher.’

‘Why?’

‘I want you to tell your comrades that this is an emergency. Hurry up.’

The man obediently climbed into the front seat.

Graf told himself not to drive too fast. The group of SS men stepped in front of the car and waved him down.

‘Tell them quickly, Schumacher.’

One of the men bent to talk to his comrade. ‘Who’s this?’

‘He says he’s one of the rocket engineers. He needs to get to Wassenaar. There’s a fire.’

‘All right.’ The man stepped back and waved them through. The same thing happened a hundred metres down the street: ‘He needs to get through: it’s an emergency.’ The SS man seemed to be enjoying his sense of importance. Graf drove past the railway station. After that, the road ahead looked clear. He pulled over. ‘You can get out here, Schumacher. Thank you. I’ll be sure to mention you to the Obersturmbannführer.’

He pulled away. When he looked in his mirror, the soldier was standing by the roadside staring after him. He turned left, towards Wassenaar.

Graf flew with von Braun and a couple of engineers to visit the proposed rocket factory at the end of August 1943. Von Braun piloted the plane himself, descending over the forests and mountains of the Harz and landing, with delicate precision, on a grass runway next to the pretty town of Nordhausen, with its roofscape of high church towers. Bluish in the distance rose the swell of the Kohnstein – not so much a mountain, it turned out, as a gently elongated wooded hill. Kammler had thoughtfully sent a car to pick them up.

It was late summer; harvest time. They drove in the back of an open-topped Mercedes, swatting away the thunderflies rising from the fields, through a haze of heat towards the square mouth of an enormous tunnel. A shadow fell across the car. The temperature dropped. After the dazzling golden light of the afternoon, it took a minute for their eyes to adjust to the gloom of the electric bulbs.

Brigadeführer Dr Hans Kammler – his doctorate, they discovered later, was in civil engineering – was waiting for them with his staff officers. He was in his early forties, good-looking to the point of prettiness, taut, trim, immaculate – a clockwork-toy SS figure with an extraordinary rapidity of movement and expression. He led them on foot along the tunnel, dashing off facts and statistics with the proud air of a country landowner showing off his estate.

The roof was high enough for a rocket to stand upright, or to lie horizontally across it and not touch either wall. This vast gallery extended as far as they could see – more than a kilometre, Kammler assured them, right the way through to the other side of the mountain. This was Tunnel B. Tunnel A, which ran parallel to it, was almost completed. Cross-tunnels linked the two galleries. The place had been a gypsum mine before the war, and after that a storage site for fuel and poison gas. The first task would be to clear it thoroughly, and that phase was already under way. In the semi-darkness, phantom figures in striped uniforms staggered under the weight of cement sacks, steel girders, wooden prop supports, metal drums. The showering white sparks of the oxyacetylene cutters, dismantling the gasoline storage tanks, spurted at intervals in the gloom. Next, continued Kammler, they would dig and blast out further cross-tunnels and lay a rail line, build a railway station. Eventually the components for the missiles would be brought in by locomotive at one end of the complex, and finished rockets would be taken away on flatbed trucks at the other. The production capacity would be nine hundred missiles per month, the entire process to be undertaken three hundred metres beneath the mountain, invisible to the enemy’s reconnaissance flights and impervious to his bombers. Production would be the responsibility of General Degenkolb, the railway tsar, who had made his reputation mass-manufacturing locomotives.

‘And when will production begin?’

‘January.’

One of the engineers whistled. Von Braun said, ‘The rocket is an extremely complicated mechanism, Brigadeführer. The machine tools require high precision and skilled machinists. Tomorrow is the first day of September. How can a factory be completed at such speed?’

‘By the utilisation of the one resource in which Germany possesses an undoubted surplus capacity.’

‘Which is what?’