V-2: Goebbels wanted London to be the target of the “miracle weapon”

Joseph Goebbels was delighted: “The evening report contains some good news, namely that A4 is finally to be used for the first time,” he dictated to his secretary early in the morning of September 6, 1944. It was still unclear whether the target should be London or Paris, which had been liberated by the Allies two weeks earlier. “London, of course, if our launching areas are still large enough,” said the propaganda minister. “Otherwise it will be Paris’ turn. The Parisians will then certainly soon lose the joy of the new Anglo-American occupation. It would of course be nice if we could bombard London. That would fit in well with the current mood of victory in the British capital.”

“A4” stands for “Aggregate 4”. The name for the world’s first operational ballistic missile was chosen deliberately. The first shot was fired on September 8, 1944 at around 6:37 p.m. local time. The 2nd Battery of the Wehrmacht’s 485th Artillery Regiment fired two rockets; the launch pads are in Wassenar, a suburb of The Hague in the Netherlands.

A few seconds before 6:41 p.m., one of the rockets hit Staveley Road in the London suburb of Chiswick near the Thames, on the street between houses numbered 1 and 5. The 738 kilograms of explosives in the warhead detonated and caused enormous damage: a crater almost three meters deep gaped in the middle of the street, and all gas and water pipes were destroyed. Three people were killed: a 67-year-old woman, a three-year-old girl and a soldier on home leave; 17 others were injured. Eleven houses were totally destroyed, and twelve others were so badly damaged that they were unusable. More than 500 buildings suffered repairable damage.

Among those injured was six-year-old John Clarke and his sister Rosemary Star. She had been in the front bedroom on the top floor of the family home at 1 Staveley Road at the time of the impact, while he was in the bathroom at the back of the house.

At about the same time, the second rocket exploded in a forest near Epping, about 31 kilometers northeast of London. Only pigeons and rabbits died here, but no people.

The head of the German missile program, Walter Dornberger, was quite dissatisfied with these effects. His missiles were actually intended to hit the center of London, but it landed a good ten kilometers west of 10 Downing Street as the crow flies, and the others even landed three times as far northeast. The next two shots on September 10 and 11 were similar, hitting North Fambridge in Essex on the Thames estuary and Orpington south of the British capital.

But now an extremely powerful phenomenon began to take effect: hearsay. Since June 1944, more than a thousand V-1 flying bombs have hit London and the surrounding area. A significant part of their destructive power was psychological, as they roared loudly through the air for a long time before falling silent and hitting the ground five to 15 seconds later. The new weapon deployed in September 1944, the debris of which was secured and analyzed by British engineers, came completely unexpectedly.

In Berlin, Goebbels spoke of the first effects: “The news that London is again being bombed by our retaliatory missiles is gratifying,” he dictated on the night of September 20, 1944: “This will certainly be anything but pleasant for the population of the capital of Great Britain.”

The weapon, which still had no official name other than the technical designation A4, was 14.02 meters long and had a diameter of up to 1.65 meters. At the rear there were four tail fins with a span of 3.56 meters – their size was based on the clear width of tunnels because the rockets were transported by rail. Unfueled, each A4 weighed just over four tons. 975 kilograms made up the 2.01 meter long head, filled with 738 kilograms of explosives.

The rocket was fueled with around four tons of a mixture of methyl alcohol and water (“B-substance”) and 5.5 tons of liquid oxygen (“A-substance”). After ignition, up to 58 kilos of “B-substance” and 72 kilos of oxygen per second were pressed into the combustion chamber through small nozzles, where they reacted at 2500 degrees Celsius. The resulting thrust corresponded to a maximum of 650,000 horsepower and accelerated the rocket to 1500 meters per second within 63 seconds. The total burn time was just over 70 seconds; the A4 completed the rest of the flight without propulsion. A total of 320 seconds after ignition, the rocket hit the ground about 300 kilometers from the launch point.

In September 1944, SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler was given responsibility for the A4. Born in 1905, the architect studied and had been a member of the NSDAP since 1932. He had made part of his career and had been responsible for all of Himmler’s SS construction projects since 1941. This meant that he was responsible for the expansion of Auschwitz-Birkenau into an extermination camp and, from 1943, for the underground relocation of German armaments factories using slave labor from concentration camps. He then became the Third Reich’s secret weapons chief.

Joseph Goebbels was pleased again: “Kammler has now taken over this operation,” he says in the dictation of September 24, 1944. “And he is firing from a variety of positions so as not to alert the English to his firing point.” “He fired, according to the propaganda minister, a whole series of shots into the Anglo-American troop concentrations in France, a few at Paris, a whole series at London and a great many at the south-eastern region of England.” That is not true, but that was probably due to the lack of technical understanding that Goebbels, who had studied German, had.

From September 27, 1944, he spoke in his dictations of the V-2, the “Vengeance Weapon 2” analogous to the V-1, and this term soon became established. In total, Hans Kammler had around 1,360 rockets fired towards London by March 27, 1945. British authorities recorded 1,119 hits, killing around 2,750 civilians and injuring 6,500 more. Another 1,600 V-2s flew against Antwerp and a good 200 at other targets, with a total of around 5,300 more fatalities.

This makes the V-2 the only weapon in military history whose mass production caused more deaths than its use. In the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in particular, but also at other sites of Kammler’s armaments empire, between 15,000 and 20,000 prisoners died in direct connection with the preparation of the production facilities or the construction of the rockets; this was determined by Jens-Christian Wagner, the director of the Thuringian Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.