The historiography of National Socialist Germany in the past few years has increasingly concentrated on the self-perception of the Germans (and Austrians) as victims rather than perpetrators. The Austrians after the war most notoriously portrayed themselves as “Hitler's first victims” for two generations—a myth deconstructed after the election of Kurt Waldheim in 1986. More recently, German civilians were portrayed as victims of the brutal bombing campaign of the Western allies (W. G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich); German civilians were seen as victims of Red Army expulsions from eastern Europe (Günter Grass), German prisoners of war (POWs) as victims of the western allies in the infamous Rhine meadow camps (James Bacque), as well as millions of German POWs as victims of the Red Army (Frank Biess). Robert G. Moeller has brilliantly analyzed these postwar German discourses of “the politics of the past” in “Germans as Victims?” in History and Memory 17 (2005): 147-94.

Michael B. Peterson's book fits into this larger historiographical turn of “victims mythology deconstruction.” He deals with the community of German missile builders in Peenemünde on the island of Usedom and the myth they created about themselves and their motivations after the war. Much of the postwar literature written about the Peenemünders was full of admiration for their amazing technological feats of building the first “space rocket”—the A-4 (better known under Himmler's SS-rechristening as the “V-2”). While their achievements were celebrated, “the dark side of their records” (p. 255) was ignored. Moreover, the Allied bombing attacks on Peenemünde in 1943/44 killed some of the missile engineers. Peterson's book deconstructs the entire mythology of the rocketeers just “doing their duty” (as Waldheim had claimed) rather than serving the Nazi regime and its expansionist and destructive goals.

Petersen drives his thesis home relentlessly. The rocket scientists at Peenemünde (and later at the relocated production facility Dora-Mittelbau) “thoroughly enmeshed themselves in the structures and practices of the National Socialist regime.” None of the “Peenemünders” questioned “the central mission of producing missiles for the purpose of defending the Nazi state” (p. 255). The heart of Petersen's study is his sociological analysis of the Peenemünde rocketeers as a privileged and “segregated elite community” (p. 80) of scientists/engineers who pursued their professional goals unencumbered by the war (at least until the first British bombing raid in August 1943). Working in state-of-the-art facilities generously financed by the Nazi government, the rocketeers also managed to escape the draft. In the isolation of Usedom they pursued the design, testing, and production of the A-4 as one of the Nazis' “top secret” programs. They accepted the surveillance regime of the Gestapo on the island to enforce the secrecy of the program. A code of “institutional secrecy” (p. 86) defined their identity.

Living in the traditional German beach communities on the island of Usedom was like living in paradise during the first half of the war. Next to the enormous daily pressures of building a rocket that could win the war quickly, their leisure time was pleasant. The scientists had their families on the island; they swam, played music, went to the theater, and built “deep and durable social bonds with each other” (p. 95). (These bonds still were strong in the rocketeer community in Huntsville, Alabama, where many of them relocated after war.) They bought into the Nazis' post-Stalingrad “struggle for survival” mission, however, and wanted to make their contribution of building an operational missile to help the regime (pp. 100f). Walter Dornberger and his engineers espoused and preached the heady “mixture of militaristic nationalism, technological triumphalism, and Nazi ideology” (p. 101). The Peenemünders saw themselves as the saviors of Germany by building the weapons that would save Europe from the Soviets and exert revenge on the British for their terror attacks on German cities. Their postwar professions of just dreaming of space travel and “inner migration” from the regime were bogus. Peenemünde was “the archetype of the National Socialist factory,” Dornberger proudly claimed in one of his 1943 speeches to the staff (p. 102), a claim he conveniently did not mention in his memoirs.

The first successful test of an A-4 missile came in October 1942. The surprising British raid on the Peenemünde facilities came in mid-August 1943 and spelled an end to the island paradise (in 1944 three more American air raids followed). The production facilities were transferred to the underground facilities of the new factory complex known as Mittelbau-Dora in the Harz Mountains; Himmler's SS tried hard to snatch the elite program from the army. Prisoners had been used as laborers in Peenemünde. But now the SS shipped thousands of concentration camp laborers to Dora as the principal source of labor. Thousands of these slave laborers were worked to death under the most brutal circumstances digging the tunnels. Many thousands more died in the underground mass production of the A-4. There was no dissent over the use of slave labor from Wernher von Braun and his rocketeers and no protests over the barbaric working conditions (pp. 152, 169). The missile engineers complemented the SS's “empire of horror” in their joint mission to build the weapon to win the war for Germany. Petersen's conclusion: “They tolerated Nazi brutality either by turning a blind eye to it or, worse, by turning it into their own advantage” (p. 190). Everyone involved was fully aware of the enormous human suffering caused by the mass production of some 5,789 V-2 rockets and the destruction the missiles wreaked in London and elsewhere. Toward the end of the war, von Braun and his engineers also began developing surface-to-air missiles to shoot down Allied planes and submarine-launched ballistic missiles to attack New York (code named project “Schwimmweste”) (pp. 232f). These projects were not completed but would resurface during the Cold War.

The Peenemünders did more than their duty for the fatherland—they wanted to save Germany and the Nazi regime and tolerated the use of slave labor. The Germans Moeller and other historians have recently portrayed in shades of gray may have been victims, some became perpetrators, and some were both—the same holds true for the rocketeers (see Moeller, p. 182). Petersen's sophisticated analysis is well written and belongs in every World War II library.