The Peenemünde Army Research Center was founded in 1937 as one of five military proving grounds under the German Army Weapons Office (Heereswaffenamt). Several German guided missiles and rockets of World War II were developed by the HVP, including the V-2 rocket. The works were attacked by the British in Operation Crossbow from August 1943, before falling to the Soviets in May 1945.
The V-2, with the technical name Aggregat 4 (A-4), was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities. The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944.
Hanna Reitsch was a German aviator and test pilot. Along with Melitta von Stauffenberg, she flight tested many of Germany's new aircraft during World War II and received many honors. Reitsch was among the very last people to meet Adolf Hitler alive in the Führerbunker in late April 1945.
Major-General Dr. Walter Robert Dornberger was a German Army artillery officer whose career spanned World War I and World War II. He was a leader of Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket programme and other projects at the Peenemünde Army Research Centre. After the war, the US Nazi scientist recruitment programme Operation Paperclip saw him move to the US, largely avoiding punishment for involvement in war crimes, to work for some decades in high positions in aerospace, including for Bell Aircraft and Boeing.
Paul Henreid was an Austrian actor, director, producer, and writer. He is best remembered for two film roles: Victor Laszlo in Casablanca and Jerry Durrance in Now, Voyager, both released between 1942 and 1943.
Frederick Alexander Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell, was a British physicist who was prime scientific adviser to Winston Churchill in World War II.
Carlo Fortunato Pietro Ponti Sr.OMRI was an Italian film producer with more than 140 productions to his credit. Along with Dino De Laurentiis, he is credited with reinvigorating and popularizing Italian cinema post-World War II, producing some of the country's most acclaimed and financially-successful films of the 1950s and 1960s.
Crossbow was the code name in World War II for Anglo-American operations against the German long range reprisal weapons (V-weapons) programme. The primary V-weapons were the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, which were launched against Britain from 1944 to 1945 and used against continental European targets as well.
V-weapons, known in original German as Vergeltungswaffen, were a particular set of long-range artillery weapons designed for strategic bombing during World War II, particularly strategic bombing and/or aerial bombing of cities. They were the V-1, a pulsejet-powered cruise missile; the V-2, a liquid-fueled ballistic missile ; and the V-3 cannon. Germany intended to use all of these weapons in a military campaign against Britain, though only the V-1 and V-2 were so used in a campaign conducted 1944–45. After the invasion of western Europe by the Allies, these weapons were also employed against targets on the mainland of Europe, mainly in France and Belgium. Strategic bombing with V-weapons killed approximately 18,000 people, mostly civilians. The cities of London, Antwerp and Liège were the main targets.
The Rocket U-boat was a series of military projects undertaken by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The projects, which were undertaken at Peenemünde Army Research Center, aimed to develop submarine-launched rockets, flying bombs and missiles. The German Navy did not use submarine-launched rockets or missiles from U-boats against targets at sea or ashore. These projects never reached combat readiness before the war ended.
Wilhelm Josef Ritter von Thoma was a German army officer who served in World War I, in the Spanish Civil War, and as a general in World War II. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.
Mittelwerk was a German World War II factory built underground in the Kohnstein to avoid Allied bombing. It used slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp to produce V-2 ballistic missiles, V-1 flying bombs, and other weapons.
Peenemünde Airfield is an airfield on the Baltic Sea coast, north of Peenemünde, Germany. Today, round trips in light aircraft are available from Peenemünde Airfield. There are also bus tours which visit the former shelters of the East German National People's Army (NVA) and the remnants of the V-1 flying bomb facilities. Because of its long runway, the airfield is also a location for flight schools.
The Blockhaus d'Éperlecques is a Second World War bunker, now part of a museum, near Saint-Omer in the northern Pas-de-Calais département of France, and only some 14.4 kilometers north-northwest from the more developed La Coupole V-2 launch facility, in the same general area.
Operation Hydra was an attack by RAF Bomber Command on a German scientific research centre at Peenemünde on the night of 17/18 August 1943. Group Captain John Searby, commanding officer of No. 83 Squadron RAF, commanded the operation, the first time that Bomber Command used a master bomber to direct the attack of the main force. Hydra began the Crossbow campaign against the German V-weapon programme. The British lost 215 aircrew and 40 bombers, and killed several hundred enslaved workers in the nearby Trassenheide forced labour camp. The Luftwaffe lost twelve night-fighters and about 170 German civilians were killed, including two V-2 rocket scientists. Prototype V-2 rocket launches were delayed for about two months, testing and production was dispersed and the morale of the German survivors was severely affected. However, the impact of this British operation on German V-weapon production was apparently lumped together with subsequent Allied attacks on Peenemünde as "not effective" in the 1945 "Summary Report" of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The Germans had already started to disperse the manufacturing of the V-2 in 1942, for example to Raderach near Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance.
Military intelligence on the V-1 and V-2 weapons developed by the Germans for attacks on the United Kingdom during the Second World War was important to countering them. Intelligence came from a number of sources and the Anglo-American intelligence agencies used it to assess the threat of the German V-weapons.
V-2 rocket facilities were military installations associated with Nazi Germany's V-2 SRBM ballistic missile, including bunkers and small launch pads which were never operationally used.
The bombing of Peenemünde in World War II was carried out on several occasions as part of the overall Operation Crossbow to disrupt German secret weapon development. The first raid on Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast of Germany, was Operation Hydra of the night of 17/18 August 1943, involving 596 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force. Intelligence about the existence and location of the programme was said by some to have been obtained from the secretly recorded conversations of a German officer, Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, who was a prisoner of war of the British. However, von Thoma is not mentioned in declassified files and the story may have been fabricated in order to protect members of the Belgian and Luxemburg resistance. The official history of MI6 by Prof Keith Jeffery cites several sources including a tip-off from forced labourers drafted to work at Peenemünde. Subsequent attacks were carried out in daylight raids by the US Army Air Force's Eighth Air Force. Among those on the ground at Peenemünde were Walter Dornberger, noted rocket expert Wernher von Braun, and Nazi female test pilot Hanna Reitsch, who later claimed to have slept through the raid. Some markers were dropped too far south, and ultimately a number of buildings remained undamaged, while many bombs hit the forced labour camps, killing between 500 and 600 prisoners. However, sufficient damage was caused to delay the V-weapons programme for some months, and the senior engineer Dr Walter Thiel was among the dead.
The Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum, former "Peenemünde Information Centre for History and Technology", is a museum, founded in 1991, in the observation bunker and site of the former power station in Peenemünde on the island of Usedom in eastern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Germany. The museum is dedicated to the history of the Peenemünde Army Research Centre and the Luftwaffe test site of "Peenemünde-West", especially the rockets and missiles developed there between 1936 and 1945. Since January 2007 the information centre has become an anchor point on the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH), a Europe-wide network of industrial monuments, and a part of the ERIH themed routes for Energy and Transport & Communication.
The Blizna V-2 missile launch site was the site of a World War II German V-2 missile firing range. Today there is a small museum located in the Park Historyczny Blizna in Blizna, Poland. After the RAF strategic bombing of the V-2 rocket launch site in Peenemünde, Germany, in August 1943, some of the test and launch facilities were relocated to Blizna in November 1943. The first of 139 V-2 launches was carried out from the Blizna launch site on 5 November 1943.
