A Visit to Peenemuende Today
(c) 1996 by Roland S. Speth
In the summer of 1994, I had the opportunity to visit the historic
rocket test site of Peenemuende, from which, on October 3, 1942,
the first successful A4 rocket was launched for its 190-kilometer
ballistic flight. I visited both the museum which has been open to
the general public for several years already, and also the actual
test site, including the famous Pruefstand VII which lies within a
closed military security area. This is my account.
Contents
o The Village of Peenemuende
o The Museum of Peenemuende
o The Oxygen Plant
o The Test Site Area and Pruefstand VII
o Peenemuende - 50 years on
The village of Peenemuende
Peenemuende today is an almost ordinary village, situated in the
northwest of the former East German peninsula of Usedom. Usedom
itself forms the most Eastern part of the German Baltic coast,
bordering Poland and covering an area of 445 square kilometers.
According to my pre-reunification lexicon, the village of Peenemuende
had a total of 646 inhabitants in 1983. Of course, this village
has never really been quite so ordinary for most of its history.
However, perhaps the most unexpected sighting today's visitor is
going to make is a full-blown tram line linking the tiny villages of
the peninsula together. Normally you would find this kind of tram
line joining a big city such as Berlin to its outskirts, but here? In
order to find the reason for such luxury, the visitor has to go all
the way to one of its termini and find it written in big letters on
huge signs: Peenemuende.
These days, there isn't much which reminds the visitor of the famous
past this place has lived through. Not that visitors would care
very much - most of them come here for the pleasant seaside climate
anyway, and they would spend their days at the beaches taking a
sunbath or going for a walk. At best, from time to time their eyes
would wander out to that little island to the northeast, the
Greifswalder Oie, wondering what it was all about...
Life in Peenemuende has been dictated by the military for the better
part of this century. In August of 1936, work began to build the
army testing site in the northern part of the peninsula. In order
to keep the secrecy of the location, access to this area was
controlled very rigidly. With the end of World War II, the site was
taken over by the Soviet Red Army which - in accordance with allied
agreements - destroyed whatever they found, provided it wasn't
destroyed already. During the 1950s, when the East German People's
Army, the Volksarmee, was being built up, the Peenemuende site was
taken over by Germans again, using it for military exercises and for
teaching young soldiers how to drive their military trucks. With the
devolution of the German Democratic Republic, the DDR, this use
became also obsolete, and for a short period of a few months or so,
the whole north of the island, including the military security area,
became open to the public. In 1990, with the advent of German
unification, another command took over - new leaders, new army, and
the borderpoles went down again, now guarded by the German
Bundeswehr.
The former army test site, the Heeresversuchsanstalt, is now devided
into three parts, covering the most northern part of the peninsula
of Usedom. The west now houses a museum which commemorates both
Peenemuende's past as a rocket development center as well as its
military history during post-war times. Within the compounds of the
museum, next to the little harbour basin, lies the test site's own
power plant. Towards the middle, a small airport is situated. Here,
I am told, the paying visitor can find the right men to give him a
round trip over to the island of Greifswalder Oie and across the
peninsula itself. The eastern part - now closed to the public - again
is a military security area. Unfortunately, it is just this place
where history was really written. Here are the locations for all the
different test sites, the Pruefstaende, including the most famous of
them all, the Pruefstand VII.
The Museum of Peenemuende
The museum of Peenemuende covers a relatively large area and
comprises several buildings and an outdoors exhibition. There also
is a small gift shop to keep souvenir hunters occupied. My general
impression was that the museum is far from being finished - many
parts of the exhibition look quite improvised. But that's no
critisism at all, because the exhibition itself is very interesting
indeed, and the impression of being not just ready and completed to
me merely reflects the fact that many aspects within the history of
the place remain to be looked upon more thoroughly by historians than
it has been possible during the last six years. Wandering from one
exhibit to the next, the visitor is being dragged back and forth
between admiration for the technical solutions already developed in
the 1940s and the disgust of the objectives they were supposed to
achieve and of the means they were put into reality involving the
forced labour of captives.
My second major impression I gained during my stay at the museum
concerns the spirit of the place. Looking at the language, the
choice of words in all the documents in the exhibition, it becomes
very obvious that the entire machinery involved in the A4 was very
much a military one. Sometimes you can read about Peenemuende being
the birthplace of rocketry for the exploration of outer space - and
in the end, this is perhaps true. But the spirit in which this
development was performed, was very much a military, i.e. a
destructive one. (Non-German readers may find this association of
the military with a destructive motive hard to understand, but I
think for many young Germans like myself, are inclined to make this
association, bearing our particular history in mind.)
I cannot go into details regarding particular items in the
exhibition, but they're very widespread. Here, you will find parts
of an A4 engine, or a metal blade to be exposed to the hot stream of
exhausts of a climbing rocket in order to control its trajectory.
And next to it, there is the housing of a Soviet SS-20 war head,
rather unimpressively standing on the floor of a scarcely lighted
room...
The exhibition doesn't comment much on single exhibits, it rather
leaves the visitor to make up his own mind. This is what I
particularly liked about the museum. On the other hand, there are
lots of information on technical details and explaining figures
readily available. These are rounded off by a couple of very
informative films stretching from Peenemuende's own past up to the
achievements of today's exploration of space. The films are shown
in a cinema-like room prepared inside the historic power plant of the
site, which also houses many of the exhibition rooms. So the trip
around the exhibition takes the visitor right through the actual
locations, adding to the feeling that this is not just another
museum on rocketry. By the way, the power plant itself was up and
running right until reunification in 1990!
Leaving the indoors exhibition, the visitor strolls among scale
models of an A4 rocket - unfortunately there is no original shown -
standing next to a genuine part of one of its main nozzles, a
full-size mockup of a V1 (please excuse me for using this term, but
I know nothing about it but its propaganda name), several Volksarmee
MIGs and more...
A striking experience for me were those items which just casually
lay around on the ground like a strange in-between of a genuine
exhibit and any old junk thrown away after use. Believe it or not
- they were the housing of - in my layman's words - bombs!
The last major outdoors sight acutally located within the compounds
of the museum is the harbor basin of the Heeresversuchsanstalt which
is also . At the time of my visit, it provided a secure anchor
place for some Volksmarine vessels, put out of duty with the advent
of German reunification.
The Oxygen Plant
South of the museum, towards the actual village of Peenemuende,
guarded by wire fences and hidden behind high grass, lies the
historic Oxygen Plant, the Sauerstoffwerk.
Unfortunately, the building is threatened by structural collapse -
so no visitors are allowed here.
Inside, large parts of the roof have already come down, and only the
unpleasant Hakenkreuz graffities on the walls give a testimony of
recent guests.
The Test Site Area and Pruefstand VII
The actual test site, including the Pruefstaende, is situated in the
northeast of the Usedom peninsula. Being a closed army compound -
albeit not an actively used one - it is completely surrounded by a
high wire fence and guard patrols to keep unwanted intruders off
the site. Even the beach which provides the eastern border of the
former test facilities is blocked by the fence stretching out into
the sea. If this wasn't enough, big signs keep warning walkers that
this is a military security area where shotguns may expected to be
used, while another group of signs points out the area may still be
infested by dumped ammunition...
I won't go into the details of how my friend and me finally managed
to get access to the site beside its relative security, in order to
preserve the privacy of the place and to leave the remaining
artifacts undisturbed. Let me just say that among the museum staff
there were one or two very helpful chaps who made our visit possible.
I must however stress that in fact, I would strongly recommend to
take the dangers expressed on the warning signs very seriously - so
please don't risk your health and take your fate in your own hands.
Having walked through the high wheeds for quite a while after having
entered the test site from the south, the first signs of its troubled
past came in the shape of a couple of concrete steps leading down
to a small bunker dug into the ground near the beach. We had just
finished our lunch break on top of a hunter's outlook which provided
a splendid view of the small island named Greifswalder Oie which
lies about 8 km from the coast. It was this little island were, in
1937, the first few "shots" were fired before the actual test stands
of Peenemuende were ready to be used: more or less unsuccessful
launches of the A3 rocket, precursor to the better known A4 rocket.
Starting immediately after the little bunker, we found an old road
leading further inland in a northwestern direction. I had brought a
copy of an old map dating from 1943 which clearly showed the net
of railroads and streets cut into the woods covering this part of
the peninsula. Although the actual rail tracks were not there any
more, the angles with which the roads and footways met each other
gave us some idea on how to orient ourselves according to our map -
despite it's being more than 50 years out of date!
Following our way, again for quite a while, we found ourselves
approaching a very strange-looking group of trees - dead trees -
directly in front of us. They were all grey and naked, and not a
single leaf was hanging from their branches. And so looked the
bushes around them. A few more steps and we saw the reason: a large
pile of tons, probably leaking their poisonous contents of chemical
waste into the ground, made us turn even further to the west in
order to avoid any closer contact with this deadly waste dump.
Soon after, the woods opened up into a wide plane of wheeds
stretching out to the north. In the distance, the heavily corroded
remains of a couple of military trucks looked sadly as if to confirm
the rusting signs stating that this was a kind of driving school
used by the East Germans' Volksarmee. Passing the plane, we soon left
all signs of human activity behind us again, except for the road-like
clearing we were following.
After a while, a big mound of earth, perhaps about ten meters in
height and covered with grass and trees, began to stretch along the
right side of our road. Going on, it became obvious that the regular
shape and appearance of this wall couldn't be of natural origin, but
before we finally grasped what its true nature was, the mound opened
up and revealed it all: the famous Pruefstand VII - the authentic
location where, on October 3, 1942, the first successful
190-kilometer ballistic flight of an A4 rocket had lifted off into
space!
And now, more than half a century on, there's nothing to remind
today's visitor of this historic date. No plaque, no commemorative
stone - nothing. Only silence. Leaving us to our own thoughts. One
moment thinking about the technical triumph of shooting a man-made
object out of the Earth's atmosphere, the next one reminding
ourselves of what this project was all about: warfare. And then
again, trying to imagine how all this looked 52 years ago.
The entire complex of Pruefstand VII was surrounded by a high earth
mound in order to shield the rocket and launch facilities from heavy
winds blowing along the Baltic coast. This entire mound is still
there today, marking the characteristic oval shape of the stand. The
central feature inside the wall is the large rectangular servicing
trench, located in the northern curve of the oval. It is now
completely filled with water. Looking down to its ground, it reveals
nothing but boulders of concrete and twisted rods of steel. At the
museum I have been told that fearless divers had already searched the
floor of this trench - despite the apparent dangers involved with
all the protruding metal and concrete edges - in order to secure any
original parts of the A4 and launch equipment for archeological
preservation.
The large plane inside the oval is now covered by high wheeds and
trees. It was particularly astonishing to me to see the height of
these trees and find how much terrain Nature has won back from
human intruders during these fifty years. Here and there, especially
in the vicinity of the water-filled trench, large plates of broken
concrete stretch out from the ground into the air - giving evidence
of the Red Army having done all they could to make sure Germany was
never to use this place for developing rockets again. Back in the
1950s, they conducted a series of explosions in accordance with
allied agreements to achieve this objective.
There are many rumors circling about the facilities of Peenemuende.
One of them says that the entire mound of Pruefstand VII is
undertunneled by a secret pathway. Obviously, we had a close look
ourselves, and, well, in one of the explosion craters in the wall
itself, we found a small whole - perhaps just big enough for a man
to slip through - leading into the mould. It remains to be seen
whether this is just the entrance to a tunnel reveiling more
information about Pruefstand VII.
With the afternoon coming to a close and a long footmarch and
bycycle ride before us, we had to leave Pruefstand VII. For a while,
we tried to pay the V1 facilities in the far north of the peninsula
a short visit. However, when we lost our way several times and found
ourselves in deep grass, we gave up and left the area of the
Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemuende.
Peenemuende - 50 years on
With the rediscovery of the Peenemuende test site and the
construction of the museum reflecting its past after German
reunification in 1990, understanding this aspect of German history
has only just begun. I will therefore not even try to give any
valuation of this period. In 1992, the discussions about how to
handle the 50th anniversary of the first successful A4 launch clearly
show that Peenemuende still is an open wound in the German
conscience.
For historians as well as those of us Germans interested in the
history in rocket development, a lot of work remains to be done in
the case of the Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemuende. In the German
language, we have a strange expression for that: "Die Geschichte
aufarbeiten" - working off history...
_____________________
Further reading
Walter Dornberger: Peenemuende - Die Geschichte der V-Waffen,
Ullstein Frankfurt (1989)
(c) 1996 by Roland S. Speth (speth@hermes.amp.uni-hannover.de)
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