GRGR: important "facts" ?

[jill]

Hello,

I'd been looking for this line from back when there was that discussion of
the color black, in the first quote, and the term "liberate," which is
mentioned in the second quote below, and also, later, have I discovered
some coincidences of personality of characters in the book?

Again, all it seems I know how to do is quote this book, but here it is
again, >Peenemunde to Canaveral< / Dieter K Hutze. Hutze was an Engineer at
Peenemunde. BTW, there is a forward by Werner von Braun. The context of
this quote is that successful firings of the first V-2's had let the cat
out of the bag, and Peenemunde was experiencing unwanted attention from
allied air raids. Hutzel reports in this chapter called Peenemunde at War: 

"A little farther away, noticeably isolated, a group of thirty or forty
concentration camp prisoners were sitting on the ground, watched by a
couple of bored guards. I couldn't help noticing the difference beetween
these poor souls and the only other group I had run across, during my days
at Siemens in 1938. Concentration camp prisoners carried colored markers on
their arms to indicate the type of offense. Six years earlier most of these
I had seen were murderers, thieves, sex offenders, and the like, with only
a small proportion of political prisoners. Now I noticed a shocking
predominance of black political arm marks. What had started out as a means
of getting able-bodied prisoners to do useful work had apparently turned
into a device for political persecution. A feeling of uneasieness came over
me..."   

By the way, I do not know if we did discover what the Schwartzgerat was.
Did we?
Now, next chapter, called Personality of Peenemunde, who is this? I am not
suggesting it is Weissman, but it is irresistable to compare:

"Part of the personality that was Peenemunde, Nimwegen was a puzzle to
almost eveybody. He had appeared as if from nowhere one day: a big, heavy,
corpulent man who had operated a hotel in the area atone time and had
somehow gotten a position in the car pool. His talent for organizing (in
the sense of the GI slang term, "liberate") had become legndary around the
plant--but always for the benefit of the plant, never for personal gain. He
was a "big time operator," par excellence, blessed with irrepressible
savoir-faire. It was no trick, for example, for him to call the Admiral of
the Navy installation at Swinemunde and identify himself as speaking for
the Reichsfuhrer SS (Himmler), and then follow through with requests for
materials, food, fuel--almost invariably with success. 
   He was, nevertheless, a loudmouth and course in his manner, and often
his methods skirted close to the edge of the law. All of these things
tended to isolate him from the rest of us. In way, this was a shame, for on
numerous occasions he was a big help to the plant, and later on he
deemonstrated great, unselfish courage by making sorties via truck into the
eastern combat areas, collecting pigs and other domestic animals abandoned
by the fleeing population--all right under the noses of the advancing
Russians. And though we could not know it then, he was later to play an
important role in the  relocation of the entire Peenemunde effort to
Bleicherode, in the Harz mountains."

A-and later using strange acronyms: "We utilized as much as possible the
advantges accruing from the attachemnt of our weapon system to SS Chief
Heinrich Himmler. Pompous passes and letterheads sprang into being
conveying to all and sundry that we were a part of the SS organization.
These naturally included reference to our association with Dormberger's
agency, BZBV Heer. By a strange quirk of misunderstanding, some of this
BZBV stationery emerged as VZBV, an utterly meaningless expression. Here
again Nimwegen's preposterous talent turned the error to advantage. He made
VZBV a top secret agency, not to be interfered with by anyone save Himmler
himself. Soon VZBV signs began to appear in letters several feet high on
boxes, trucks, and cars."

there is so much more. do people want more?