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General Dr Ing. Hans (Heinz) Friedrich Karl Franz Kammler (August 26, 1901 – First Week Of May 1945?[1]) was a civil engineer and high-ranking officer of the SS. He oversaw SS construction projects, and towards the end of World War II was put in charge of the V-2 missile programme. He is most commonly referred to as Heinz Kammler or Hans Kammler.
[edit] Early lifeKammler was born in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland). In 1919, after volunteering for army service, he served in the Rossbach Freikorps. From 1919 to 1923, he studied civil engineering in Munich and Danzig. Kammler joined the NSDAP on 1 March, 1932, and held a variety of administrative positions when the Nazi government came to power in 1933, initially as head of the Aviation Ministry's building department. He joined the SS (no. 113,619) on 20 May, 1933. [edit] World War II From 1942 Kammler designed facilities for the extermination camps, including gas chambers and crematoria.[citation needed] Kammler eventually became Oswald Pohl's deputy at the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA), which oversaw Amtsgruppe D (Amt D), the Administration of the concentration camp system, and was also Chief of Amt C, which designed and constructed all of the concentration and extermination camps. Following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, Heinrich Himmler assigned him to overseeing the demolition of the ghetto in retaliation. Kammler was also charged with constructing facilities for various secret weapons projects, including manufacturing plants and test stands for the Messerschmitt Me 262 and V-2. Following the Allied bombing raids on Peenemünde in Operation Hydra in August 1943, Kammler was assigned to moving these production facilities underground, which resulted in the Mittelwerk facility and its attendant concentration camp complex, Mittelbau-Dora, which housed slave labour for constructing the factory and working on the production lines. Albert Speer made Kammler his representative for "special construction tasks", expecting that Kammler would commit himself to working in harmony with the ministry's main construction committee. But in March 1944 Kammler had Goering appoint him as his delegate for "special buildings" under the fighter aircraft programme, which made him one of the war economy's most important managers, and robbed Speer of much of his influence.[2] In 1944, Himmler convinced Adolf Hitler to put the V-2 project directly under SS control, and on August 8 Kammler replaced Walter Dornberger as its director. From January 1945, Kammler was placed as head of all missile projects and in April 1945 was created "Fuehrer's general plenipotentiary for jet aircraft" by Hitler.[2] In March 1945, as US forces were advancing through Germany, the slave workers housed in the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp were to be executed as security risks. It is believed that the order for their murder was received by Kammler, but he did not comply with it. [edit] DeathOn 9 July, 1945 Kammler's widow petitioned to have him declared dead as of 9 May, 1945, adducing a sworn statement by Kammler's driver, Kurt Preuk, according to which Preuk had personally seen "the corpse of Kammler and been present at his burial" on 9 May, 1945. The District Court of Berlin-Charlottenburg ruled on 7 September, 1948 that his death was officially established as 9 May, 1945. In a later sworn statement on 16 October, 1959, Preuk stated that Kammler's date of death was "about 10 May, 1945", but that he did not know the cause of death. On 7 September, 1965, Heinz Zeuner (a wartime aide of Kammler's), stated that Kammler had died on 7 May, 1945 and that his corpse had been observed by Zeuner, Preuk and others. All the eyewitnesses consulted were certain that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning.[3] In addition to testifying to Kammler's suicide by cyanide, Zeuner also claimed earlier that Kammler had asked Zeuner to shoot him. However, doubt has been cast on Zeuner's evidence since he is reported to have told an earlier denazification hearing in February 1948 that he was already in US custody on 2 May, 1945.[citation needed] In their accounts of Kamler's movements Preuk and Zeuner claimed that he left Linderhof near Oberammergau on 28 April, 1945 for a tank conference at Salzburg and then went to Ebensee (where tank tracks were manufactured). According to Preuk and Zeuner he then travelled back from Ebensee to visit his wife in the Tyrol region, when he gave her two cyanide tablets. The next day, 5 May, he is said to have departed Tyrol for Prague.[citation needed] However, Preuk and Zeuner's testimony clashes with the known movements of US Divisions throughout Austria in May 1945. By 4 May, 1945 the US 103rd Infantry was already at Innsbruck, preventing Kammler from travelling from Ebensee to the Tyrol. The US 88th Infantry division had arrived from Italy cutting off any route to the Tyrol from the south while the US 44th Infantry Division established a command post at Imst in Tyrol on 4 May, 1945 and together with the 103rd entirely controlled the Tyrol region preventing Kammler from visiting his wife. Preuk is quite clear that they drove everywhere so that it would have been impossible to bypass US checkpoints. A further complication is that the 80th Infantry Division reached Ebensee on 4 May, 1945 [4], and the concentration camp itself was liberated by two M-18 half tracks of the US 80th Division at 2.50pm on 5 May, 1945. There are four different versions of Kammler's death:
[edit] ControversyIn recent years Kammler has become associated with apocryphal Nazi super weapons such as "Die Glocke". The first suggestion along these lines came from author Nick Cook, who in his "The Hunt for Zero Point" (2001) raised the possibility that Kammler was brought to the United States along with other German scientists as part of Operation Paperclip as a result of his supposed involvement in secret German projects. Joseph P. Farrell's "Reich of the Black Sun" (2005) casts further doubt upon the facts surrounding his death[5], however his only references are to the book "Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia" (1985) by self-identified "British Intelligence agent" Tom Agoston.[6] In reality, unlike many other war criminals who escaped from Europe at the end of World War II, such as Josef Mengele, there have been no sightings of Kammler since the end of the war, and in the opinion of many people there is little disagreement that he did indeed die in 1945. In addition, since Kammler was primarily an administrator rather than a physicist or rocket engineer, it is unlikely that he would have been considered suitable for recruitment by the US. [edit] In popular culture
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