V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,88

– four Wehrmacht and one SS – that made up his command. Division zV, he had insisted on calling it. He felt it had a certain ring – zV. Zur Vergeltung. For Vengeance.

Kammler the builder – the man in charge of revenge!

Graf watched his big car swerve at speed around the corner and pull up with a gangsterish screech of rubber outside the Hotel Schmitt, saw him throw open the door and spring out bare-headed onto the pavement, followed from the rear seats by his two staff officers. Slam, slam, slam – the volley of closing doors ricocheted in the still morning. Kammler paused to pull on his cap and adjust it minutely – there was vanity in even his tiniest action, Graf noticed – then trotted smartly up the steps and into the headquarters. There was no sign of von Braun.

Graf turned up his collar and resumed his walk.

A weak dawn was breaking over the dilapidated guest houses, with their peeling wooden balconies and salt-streaked glassed-in verandas. And as the tide of darkness receded, it revealed the scars of the previous night. Some had had their front doors broken down. Damaged windows banged in the strong easterly wind. Broken glass lay in pools across the pavement. The men of the rocket battalions were going about their duties with their heads down, not talking much. Graf waited for a lorry to pass, then crossed the road towards the engine shed.

Inside, the three faulty V2s were being readied for their return on the next train to Nordhausen. It had not proved possible to repair them on site; each now required its own docket to explain its particular malfunction to the engineers in Germany. He moved from bay to bay like an automaton, studying the diagnostic reports, exchanging a few words with the technicians, signing off the reports. It was a relief to be able to focus his thoughts on the familiar dry details of fuel pump pressure and electrical resistance. His mind was numb. He had not quite finished when the door to the shed was rolled back by one of Huber’s staff officers.

‘Dr Graf, you are needed at headquarters straight away.’

‘I’m busy here.’

‘Gruppenführer Kammler wishes to speak with you.’

‘What on earth does he want with me?’

The officer bridled at his tone. ‘No doubt he will tell you that himself. It is an order. Come with me, please.’

Graf followed the lieutenant outside, back across the street towards the Hotel Schmitt. He had a premonition of something unpleasant, as was generally the case with Kammler. For more than a year he had watched him slowly take control of the rocket programme – studied him with a kind of resigned and detached horror, as a man who had been bitten by a venomous spider might observe his body succumbing to paralysis limb by limb. Kammler had not only built the factory at Nordhausen; he had also been given the task of constructing a new testing facility for the V2 on an SS proving ground in Poland – another thoughtful gift from Himmler following the bombing of Peenemünde that it had proved impossible to refuse.

‘Whereabouts in Poland?’ Graf had asked von Braun when the plan was first mooted.

‘About two hundred and fifty kilometres south of Warsaw.’

‘What? Inland?’ Ever since Max and Moritz in 1934, they had always fired their rockets out to sea, so that they would fall harmlessly into the Baltic at the end of the test.

‘Yes, I pointed out the risk of civilian casualties, but apparently it can’t be helped.’ He had held up his hand to forestall Graf’s protests. ‘It has to be situated somewhere out of the range of the RAF.’

Graf had started attending the tests in Poland a couple of months later, flying down from Peenemünde to stay for two or three days at a stretch. The engineers were accommodated in railway cars in a siding near the village of Blizna. The whole facility, which was called Heidelager, was guarded by the SS. It was hard not to feel a prisoner. General Dornberger was still nominally in charge, but soon Kammler was turning up to watch the launches. At first he was content merely to observe, ‘on behalf of the Reichsführer-SS’. But as the winter went on, he began to take a more active part in the technical conferences, arriving sometimes unannounced when Dornberger wasn’t present. It was yet another period when the missile repeatedly misfired. As rocket after rocket flew horizontally over their heads or exploded in mid-air,