| http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=005214343220745&rtmo=3HYYAr8M&atmo=rrrrrrrq&
pg=/et/01/6/10/wnaz10.html ISSUE 2207 Sunday 10 June 2001 Germans at last learn truth about von Braun's 'space research' base By Tony Paterson in Peenemunde THE Nazi missile base from where the first V1 "doodlebugs" and V2 rockets were launched is being turned into a museum. For the first time, ordinary Germans will be confronted with the evils behind the "wonder weapons" that Adolf Hitler used to attack Britain in the closing stages of the Second World War. Until now, the Germans have sought to portray the base at Peenemunde - which employed 12,000 people during the war years - as merely the missile research centre run by Wernher von Braun, who later worked on the American space programme. The site has remained a largely deserted wasteland since German reunification in 1990 when the East German army withdrew from the area. Attempts to develop Peenemunde have been fraught with controversy. A German government-backed project to turn the site into an American-style "space park" failed in the early 1990s because of lack of investment. The scheme was also criticised for almost completely ignoring the fact that the site was used to create the most controversial weapons of the war. "Wernher von Braun's post-war involvement in the American space programme provided an excuse to glorify Peenemunde as the place where the technology for the Moon landings was developed," Dr Johannes Erichesen, the German historian behind the new £4.6 million museum project said. "The fact that the Nazis used the place to build missiles to win the war was regarded as an unfortunate aberration." After more than a decade of argument, German regional and central government has begun an investment programme that aims to turn Peenemunde into a museum dedicated to revealing the truth behind Hitler's most ambitious weapons development project. "We are trying to destroy the myths that have obscured the facts surrounding Peenemunde," said Peter Profe, one of the curators at the new museum. "Previous attempts to develop the site have been about as sensitive as proposing to open a supermarket on the site of a former concentration camp." Visitors to the completed sections of the exhibition - it will be two-thirds finished by next month - are already left in no doubt about the importance of Peenemunde for the Nazi regime. The first section of the exhibition is devoted to the inaugural flight of the V2 rocket on October 3, 1942, the first time in history that a missile entered outer space. Original film of the take-off is offset by the voice of the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, glorifying the new "wonder weapon" specifically designed to terrorise Britain. Wall-sized photographs of the destruction caused in London by the V2 and the earlier V1 flying bomb are coupled with private snapshots of German technicians, officers and their wives enjoying the almost holiday-like atmosphere of the Peenemunde base. Such images contrast sharply with the horrific conditions experienced by more than 20,000 foreign slave and concentration camp labourers who perished through starvation and maltreatment while constructing the V1 rocket at "Dora", the underground Nazi armaments factory in Thuringia, central Germany. A Polish slave-labour survivor of the Dora factory recalls how Wernher von Braun visited the works and seemed "completely unperturbed" by the piles of corpses. Further evidence exposes the role played by Heinrich Luebke, the former West German federal president, as one of the organisers of Nazi slave labour at Peenemunde and at Dora. For decades, allegations by Communist East Germany that Luebke was a "war criminal" were dismissed by West Germany as propaganda. The Peenemunde museum is still working on plans for a further exhibit to explain the background to the RAF's raid on the site in August 1943. Codenamed "Hydra", it was one of the largest single bombing sorties ever carried out by Britain and led to production of the V2 being evacuated to Thuringia. Organisers of the exhibition have gone to great lengths to underline the ultimate military failure of the V2. More than 3,000 of the rockets were aimed at London, Antwerp and Brussels during the closing stages of the war. Although they killed 2,774 people in Britain their use failed to alter the course of the war as Hitler had hoped. The V1 flying bomb claimed more than 8,000 lives, but its effect was also of minor military significance. Development of both weapons, however, ultimately accelerated Nazi Germany's defeat. They devoured millions of marks which most historians conclude would have been better spent on improving the German army's tank capability on the Russian Front. |
