pynchon-l-digest V2 #1447

[Doug Millison]

"The problem of finding workers for the missile assembly plants had 
long plauged Dornberger, Schubert, and the production planners. ... 
Until early 1942 few soldiers captured by the Germans on the Eastern 
Front had been exploited for work, because the armed forces (not the 
SS) had intentionally left these "subhumans" to die in huge numbers. 
In one of the forgotten Holocausts of the Third Reich, more than 2 
million of some 3.5 million Soviet prisoners were dead by February 
1942 as a result of mass starvation and disease. (The death toll by 
1945 was more than 3 million out of 5 million captured.) Only after 
Germany failed to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in 1941 did 
their labor become desirable, particularly because the Easter Front's 
insatiable need for German manpower made the labor shortage in the 
Reich ever more severe. ...Thus, for a short time in early 1943, the 
use of "Russians" became the basic plan for the Peenemunde Production 
Plant. On April 8 and 9, however, Jaeger visited Peenemunde and 
recommended another solution to the factory's labor problem:  the 
employment of SS concentration camp prisoners. ...The SS began, in 
effect, a rent-a-slave service to firms and government enterprises at 
a typical rate of four marks a day for unskilled workers and six 
marks for skilled ones. In return, the SS supplied guards, food, 
clothing, and shelter, usually in a manner that led to a heavy death 
toll from starvation, disease, and overwork. The lives of camp 
inmates were, by definition, expendable. ... Rudolph's memo initiated 
the systematic exploitation of slave labor in the rocket program 
months before the creation of the infamous Mittelwerk underground 
facility .... Clearly, A-4 production was about to begin in a big way 
at long last through the exploitation of slave labor. .... The real 
cost of the Mittelwerk must be measured, however, in human lives and 
suffering. ... Kammler....(a)rmed with special powers from 
Himmler...brushed those complaints aside, allegedly stating to his 
construction staff, "Pay no attention to the human cost. The work 
must go ahead, and in the shortest possible time." .... At first the 
bodies were hauled back to Buchenwald for cremation, but a portable 
crematorium arrivred in January, and a permanent one was opened in 
the new camp [Dora -- the one that Pynchon features in GR] in the 
first quarter of 1944. .... all three [Rudolph, Dornberger,  Von 
Braun] were present at a Mittelwerk meeting on May 6, 1944, in which 
the enslavement of more prisoners was discussed....During the 
meeting, Sawatzki said that he would ask the SS to enslave 1,800 more 
skilled French workers in order to meet shortfalls in the Mittelwerk 
labor supply....Dora's population grew from nearly 13,500 on November 
1 to more than 19,000 in March...These numbers would have grown even 
faster but for disease and starvation; the bodies began to pile up at 
the crematoria faster than they could be burned. ...of the roughly 
60,000 unfortunates who passed through the Mittelbau-Dora system, at 
least one-third did not survive. Perhaps half (10,000) of the deaths 
can be linked to A-4 production....it is clear that the A-4 was a 
unique weapon:  More people died producing it than died from being 
hit by it. ... The most "Nazi" aspect of the Army rocket program was, 
in fact, the employment of slave labor in A-4 production....The 
exploitation of concentration camp prisoners int he war economy was 
enterirely typical of the Third Reich after 1942, and it was rooted 
in a Nazi racial hierarchy that many Germans took for granted. ... 
The leap at such an early date from the small-scale rocket research 
to a massive program would not have occurred without National 
Socialism; Pennemunde grew and flourished under Hitler because of the 
very nature of his regime. ... The ease with which its military and 
civilian leadership became involved in mass slavery in order to 
achieve technical and civilian ends is certainly one of Peenemunde's 
most troublesome legacies to the world. But a much more ambiguous 
legacy was the big rocket itself. The A-4/V-2 was and is the 
grandfather of all modern guided missiles and space boosters. .... 
the A-4's successors have threatened us for fifty years with nearly 
instantaneous nuclear destruction, and will continue to do so, 
despite the end of the Cold War. Starting from unlikely, even utopian 
origins in the Weimar spaceflight movement, and ending even more 
strangely with ineffective weapons and emaciated slaves, the German 
Army rocket program and its Peenemunde center without a doubt changed 
the face of the twentieth century."

The Rocket and the Reich:  Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic 
Missile Era
by Michael J. Neufeld
Harvard University Press, 1995

I quote at length to display what a leading historian of the German 
rocket program has to say about the historical reality of the slave 
laborers that rj chooses to characterize as "*labour* camp inmates at 
Dora: the "foreign prisoners", political dissidents, 175s" in his 
response to my previous characterization of these workers as slaves. 
As a matter of historical fact, they were slaves, victims of the Nazi 
Holocaust, treated with unspeakable cruelty as "subhuman" production 
factors in the rocket program -- just as Pynchon describes them in GR.

I don't understand what rj is trying to accomplish by denying or 
otherwise obscuring the fact that they were slaves; in so doing, his 
rhetoric comes dangerously close to that of the Holocaust deniers.  I 
want to believe that rj is not a Holocaust denier, and I am not 
calling him a Holocaust denier, but in this case -- as in rj's 
previous obfuscations in this Pynchon-L discussion thread -- what he 
says could be said to carry echoes of the rhetoric used by Holocaust 
deniers.

In addition to his depiction of some of these facts in the fictional 
work, GR, Pynchon seems clear on the concept, when he wrote the 
following in an article published on October 28, 1984, in the NY 
Times, where he draws a conclusion not altogether different from 
Neufeld's conclusion that I've quoted above:

"By 1945, the factory system - which, more than any piece of 
machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution 
- had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German 
long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It 
has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of 
development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since 
Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, 
and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range 
and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to 
seven- and eight-figure body counts has become - among those who, 
particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies - 
conventional wisdom."

I'm grateful that Pynchon took the time and made the effort to write 
GR and thus spin the tragic history of the A-4 and the extension of 
that Holocaust-enabled missile program into the decades that 
followed,  into the powerful work of art that we've been discussing.

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>


P.S. Anticipating that I might be accused of quoting rj out of 
context, here's what he wrote in reply to my post yesterday:

rj:
"I'd say that the "central metaphor" of the novel (if there can be such a
thing -- seems like a pointless rhetorical maneuvre to try to prioritise
metaphors, symbols, themes etc) is probably the parabolic arc of the V-2
rocket. The ones built at Nordhausen. By the *labour* camp inmates at Dora:
the "foreign prisoners", political dissidents, 175s."

That would be rj's emphasis on "labour camp inmates," "foreign 
prisioners," "political dissidents," and "175s" in response to my 
characterization of them as slaves. As we see in Neufeld's work, they 
were in fact slaves.

By the way, I agree that the parabolic arc of the V-2 rocket is a 
central metaphor for GR -- in fact, if I had to choose only one 
metaphor to call "central", that would have to be it. As I've said 
before -- relying on historians like Neufeld -- without the Holocaust 
and the slave labor that the Holocaust provided, there would have 
been no V-2 rockets to launch. As such, without the Holocaust, there 
would be no "parabolic arc of the V-2" for rj, or anybody else, to 
designate as the novel's central metaphor.  So the Holocaust remains 
at the center of GR, too. Whether you like it or not. That's where 
Pynchon put it.