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Transcription: [00:36:39]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
OK, So at what point did you, in '43 did you really start working on the mass production of the 18 injector engine?

[00:36:48]
Was that before the air raid sometime? That you [[crosstalk]] were transferred to that duty?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
That was pretty much parallel to the air raid. That was about the time when it had been decided to mass produce the V-2s.

[00:36:59]
And von Braun objected to it, initially, as you may have heard from other people. He thought the V-2 was really not quite developed; he should have another year or so of extra development time.

[00:37:10]
But he was overruled and the Army and the SS at that time, also who already was in the process of taking over Peenemünde, they decided, regardless of all the problems, we are going ahead and we are going to mass produce them.

[00:37:25]
And that's when I was put in charge, to really get all the drawings out.

[00:37:29]
To get them delivered to the Mittelwerke, so that the people there could write their orders. They still, the parts had to be ordered. They had not been manufactured.

[00:37:40]
To deliver the parts, to finally assemble all these things. And finally get the complete V-2s out.

[00:37:47]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Um, so as far as this was, as far as this mass production task was concerned, you, I know that Speer started to press very hard for mass production, right at the beginning of '43.

[00:38:05]
Uh, this is after Hitler had signed an order for that. And so then the Sonderausschuss A-4 came into the picture in the Spring of '43, Degenkolb, and Saur, and Sawatski, and those people came in.

[00:38:24]
{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
And all these people, of course, cried for drawings, ja. That's why I was put in, almost as a commissioner, to get the drawings together.

[00:38:32]
Because of course, these people could not go to our individual designers and force them, so that was a task of the Design Office to really say:

[00:38:40]
"This is it, this is what we think we should produce." And that really took most of my time during '43 and '44, I would say.

[00:38:50]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Now, I know that in some time about the middle of '42, it was the very beginning of this process, Stahlknecht came from Speer's ministry.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Right.

[00:39:02]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
And he was the f--

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Was he already with Speer? I didn't realize that. I thought that was a--

{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
I think he was delegated from Speer's ministry, that he came in the middle of '42, as I, as I recall. And they set up a, on one organization chart it's called Nachbaudirektion, which I gather was an office for trying to get the production drawings together.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
To get the production going, and they initially also wanted to do all our drawings over. They wanted to simplify everything and make it easier to be produced.

[00:39:36]
But that failed, that failed very badly. And at that time Walter Riedel 1 got a bad name, because he was also in the Nachbaudirektion and he was in charge of all these production drawings,

[00:39:49]
but when they then finally built the parts and tested them they found out most of the parts don't work. So we finally went really back again to the R & D drawings, to the research and development drawings. Not to the production drawings, which had been prepared by a separate group of people, and this separate group of people worked under Walter Riedel.

[00:40:10]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
OK so, this is, this is important. I hadn't gotten the information on exactly what happened, with this whole--

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Probably Rees would probably be a really good man to talk to about that kind of thing. He was involved directly. He was von Braun's deputy, and he was really most in charge of production. Production activities. In Peenemünde and also in connection with the Mittelwerke.

[00:40:31]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Now as far as this --

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
And Rees has an awfully sharp memory. He remembers dates and names and everything.

[00:40:39]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Yeah, I'm supposed to talk to him tomorrow, I just, I don't know if they realize how many hours this could, could be if I were to talk--

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Yeah, don't make it too hard on him. Try to make it relatively short.

[00:40:52]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
The, so--
[00:40:54]