SS General Hans Kammler had a reputation for brutality and originated the idea of using concentration camp prisoners for forced slave labor. As an engineer he had several concentration camps constructed, including Auschwitz. There is much contradiction regarding von Braun’s awareness of the use of slave labor prisoners in the rocketry construction. He admitted visiting the plant at Mittelwerk on many occasions, calling the conditions “repulsive”. Some research indicates that there were more deaths building the V-2 rockets, known to the British as the “Buzz Bomb”, than were killed by it as a weapon. Von Braun denied ever having visited the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where 20,000 died from illness, beatings, hangings, and intolerable working conditions.
Von Braun team member Konrad Dannenberg stated that had von Braun protested about the brutal treatment of the slave laborers, “In my opinion, he would have been shot on the spot.” A friend quotes von Braun speaking of a visit to Mittelwerk, “It is hellish. My spontaneous reaction was to talk to one of the SS guards, only to be told with unmistakable harshness that I should mind my own business, or find myself in the same striped fatigues!… I realized that any attempt of reasoning on humane grounds would be utterly futile.” The V-2 rocket program certainly would not have progressed without the use of forced labor.
Apparently von Braun had been under surveillance beginning in October 1943. A report stated that he and two of his colleagues were said to have expressed regret at an engineer’s house one evening that they were not working on a spaceship and that they felt the war was not going well. This was reported by a young female dentist who was an SS spy. Such a defeatist attitude was not to be tolerated by the German hierarchy.
Of the several quotations attributed to Wernher von Braun, he had this to say about the Fuehrer, Adolph Hitler: “I began to see the shape of the man – his brilliance, the tremendous force of personality. It gripped you somehow. But also you could see his flaw — he was wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god, the only authority he needed.”
Wings Over Cumberland 