"...I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realize that if they had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warface." - Sir Roy Feddon, chief of the technical mission to Germany for the Ministry for Aircraft Production in 1945 from "The Daily Telegraph",  October 1, 1945.

"The Germans were preparing rocket surprises for the whole world in general and England in particular which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year." - Lt. Col. Donald Leander Putt, Dep. Cmmd. Gen., AAF Intelligence, Air Technical Services Command.

"To the German scientists, the V-2 was just a toy. The V-1, V-2 and Me 262 certainly high technology for the British and Americans, but compared with the Saenger bomber, the A9/A10 rocket (both ready or almost ready in 1945) or the flying disks, they were only toys." - Lt. Col. John A. Keck, June 28, 1945.

Mittelwerk was the name given to the underground factories and facilities located underneath the Kohnstein Mountain near Nordhausen in central Germany. Most of the factory's workers were imprisoned in the Dora concentration camp, that was located southwest of Kohnstein. The underground factory is best known for being the production facility of the infamous V-2 rocket.

Germany's rocket program was formerly located at Peenemünde, north-Germany, but following the massive allied air assault on the facility in August 1943, the decission was taken to move the V-2 program to the underground facilities of Kohnstein mountain. General Hans Kammler was put in charge of Mittelwerk, as the underground factory was named.

Arthur Rudolph has been in charge of the Peenemünde assembly, but the V-rocket program was the creation of mainly Werner von Braun. The first of this range was the Fieseler Fi 103 unpiloted flying bomb, or the V-1. The weapon was grossly inaccurate and indiscriminate. London was always its intended target but in May 1943 preliminary discussions were held on the feasibility of firing the V-1 from a submarine such as the large Type XIV replenishment U-boat.

The V-2 was the A-4 giant rocket 14 metres in length, 1.6 metres at the widest point of the fuselage and 3.5 metres across the tail assembly. Maximum altitude of 80 kilometres and the range was up to 305 kilometres. During powered flight the projectile was remote-controlled from the ground or regulated by an onboard gyro-compass. Late in the war, the rocket had a destructive effect on the city of London, its impact being equivalent to fifty 100-ton steam locomotives hitting the ground simultaneously at 70 mph. Tests with firing a V-2 from an underwater submarine were also carried out.

Few commentators seem to be in any doubt but that the V-3 was the "High Pressure Pump" or "England Gun". Paul Brickhill recorded in The Dam Busters:

"the greatest nightmare of all was the great underworld being burrowed under a 200-foot-thick slab of ferro-concrete near Mimoyecques (between Calais and Boulogne). Here Hitler was preparing his V-3. Little has been told about the V-3, probably because we never found out much about it. The V-3 was the most secret and sinister of all - long-range guns with barrels 500 feet long!"

Than there was the Uraniumbombe. This laboratory-produced nuclear explosive was to be the warhead in the large V-2 or A9/A10 rockets. The V-2 had a range of 200 miles while the A9/A10 could hit New York. There was no rocket of the same species for the inter-mediate ranges and this omission was fatal. By December 1944 when the Uraniumbombe was ready for use in numbers for the definitive V-2 campaign, the Low Countries and France had been lost and now the range was too long. After the failure of the Ardennes campaign, in March 1945 Hitler decided on a last desperate gamble. On his last appearance at the front, he exhorted his troops to hold out until the miracle weapon should be ready, which would bring about the change in Germany's fortunes. Posterity has been left few traces of the former flak weapon based on firedamp. In principle it generated a ferocious pressure wave at ground level, killing principally by blast and suffocation, but it had a knock-on effect which threatened a structural change to the atmosphere. The mysterious loss of Luftwaffe and OKW War Diaries for the month or so in question may have been connected with the execution of Luftwaffe General Barber and several hundred pilots and airfield commanders for refusing to implement orders to use it at the end of March 1945. When captured in May that year, Hermann Goering exclaimed that he had "declined to deploy a weapon which might have destroyed all civilisation," the interference being perhaps that the use of the explosive threatened to so destabilize the climate as to bring about the cataclysm, but that hItler had nevertheless ordered its use against the Allies on the western front regardless. It certainly does not look as though it happened that way round.

The only rocket in Germany's armoury able to reach beyond the 200 miles of the V-2 carrying a one-tonne payload was the winged A9/A10. It was eighty feet long and coult hit New York. The series was not yet in mass production, the project having only been resurrected in December 1944. A test launch seems to have been carried through near Ohrdruf on March 16, 1945. At least four witnesses gave evidence that an "Amerika" rocket was launched succesfully from Polte II MUNA Rudisleben (an underground munitions factory site).

All photographs of the Mittelwerk factory on this page are the courtesy of Peter Woodcock.