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Transcription: [00:22:52]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
But as far as you - your experience was concerned, you stayed behind in Peenemünde long enough --

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Right.

[00:22:58]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
But you eventually went straight to Bavaria?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Right.

[00:23:03]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Without stopping off or being based -- in between?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Well, I certainly didn't spend any long time. I probably drove through that area, just right on the path from Peenemünde to southern Germany. I might even have had a few duties, to deliver a few more drawings or something like that.

[00:23:21]
I don't have any special recollection with it. And then I picked up my son in Jena, which is also in that general area, a little bit further south.

{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
I've been there, yeah.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
And then I traveled with both of them to Oberammergau.

[00:23:36]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
This would have been in April, I assume? [[pause for telephone]]

[00:23:40]
Okay, to finish then -- So your recollection was, that it was March that you left?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
It was definitely March. My son was born on the 25th of March, and I was shortly after that in Jena. Well, it could have been really early April.

[00:23:56]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
The first week of April, almost.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Ja, that could, that could be.

[00:24:02]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
So that - and you went then directly from there to --

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
To Oberammergau.

{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
To Oberammergau.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Ja.

[00:24:11]
And of course at that time we were still not under confinement, so to speak. Later on we were put in a German army barracks, they were not really barracks, they were pretty fancy building, Kasernen.

[00:24:24]
But the first month or so we were on our own. As I said, we were supposed to establish new design offices, eventually even new manufacturing facilities, and that was the purpose of this, the -- announced purpose of this move down to southern Germany.

[00:24:42]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
You were not up in that, then, in the hotel up on the - where von Braun --

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
That was a very small group. That was only von Braun and about another five, six people or so.

[00:24:54]
Von Braun's brother; Lindenberg was with him; Dieter Huzel, who wrote the book; and two or three others, so that was a relatively small group.

[00:25:05]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Yeah, so at the end of the war you were still in Oberammergau.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Right.

[00:25:09]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
With the design group that was sitting there.

[00:25:15]
Was it tense at that point? In terms of dealing - you had to worry about the SS and what they were going to do at the very last days of the war?

[00:25:25]
{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
And our big problem was, of course, we had lots of SS papers. As I said, my gas coupons were being issued by the SS. So all the people down in that area, they all thought we were SS troops,

[00:25:41]
-- and at some time, a number of us were already lined up on the wall and people wanted to shoot us - Americans even. The Americans had taken over already and they wanted to shoot these bad SS people.

[00:25:54]
And then in the very last minute somebody showed up and said, "Well, don't kill these people, they are from Peenemünde. They are the rocket people, and we want to talk to them first."

[00:26:08]
And so we were not shot at that time. Schilling was in that group with me, at that time. And Zoike - I don't know if you've mentioned the name Zoike already. He was running the valve laboratory at that time.

[00:26:24]
So in a way, to answer your question: yes, it was tense, it was very tense, particularly after the war finally really ended. You really didn't know what was going to happen. We didn't have rations in Peenemünde. You didn't need rations. We could eat in the cafeteria.

[00:26:43]
So we didn't have an awful lot to eat, and my wife with a little son just two weeks old, she didn't get enough milk, enough all the good stuff you need for little babies, so that was a relatively tough time.

[00:26:58]
And then after the Americans had taken over, some of them apparently were even pretty hateful - which you can understand, at the end of a war --

[00:27:07]
-- and they even collected all the food which was available in that area - and you probably·know they make a lot of butter and cheese and things like that - they piled it up all in one big heap, poured some gasoline on it and burned all the food.

[00:27:20]
And that made the people of course really mad, ja? We didn't have enough to eat in the first place, and now they even destroy these few parts, these few pieces we still had left. So that didn't exactly help for good relations.

[00:27:36]
But apparently that was one of these incidents and I think in the long run it disappeared again. I think from the very beginning the relationships with the Americans--and that I think were even French troops, French colored people. The French had a number of colored armies and they did this, so we probably were even more mad at the French than at the Americans.

[00:27:59]
But the Americans finally came to the places where we worked. We were initially not in the Kaserne in Oberammergau, we were distributed all over the country, but we were finally picked up by American jeeps and then taken over to Oberammergau - to Garmisch-Partenkirchen - where we had the army barracks where we finally were housed, and where we finally got also the information that we will be offered a contract.

[00:28:26]
Now, I myself went first up to Cuxhaven - you probably heard about Operation Backfire - so I was picked up by the British in Garmish-Partenkirchen. They took us by trucks to Cuxhaven, and we launched three V-2s there, in Cuxhaven, for the British.

[00:28:47]
And then at that time, the contract was written with the Americans, and my wife signed for me because I was in Cuxhaven, and the contract was offered - and maybe that's where you got the idea that a lot of people were living in Nordhausen. The initial army contacts were made in Nordhausen. And I think also the contracts were signed in Nordhausen.

[00:29:11]
My wife was living at that time close by in Eschwege, which is not too far from Nordhausen, and she finally got contacted by von Braun and she signed for me that I was willing to come over here, because she knew that I would be interested, so she didn't even have to check with me.

[00:29:28]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Why would you be interested?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
I was always interested in rockets, and there was not much going on in Europe, in Germany at that time. Germany was kaput. And I didn't have a job. My job was really in Peenemünde.

[00:29:44]
Even the VDO where I was working before, they probably had to start from scratch again. And I was basically interested in rockets, as a number of people were who came over to this country.

[00:29:56]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
And you didn't really feel at that time - it's hard, you have to think back - negatively about the United States as such?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Well, in a way, when, in the last days in Peenemünde, we already philosophized quite often - well, what is going to happen after the war?

[00:30:15]
And one of our favorite subjects of discussion was to eventually come to the United States and to keep on building bigger and bigger rockets here in the United States.

[00:30:24]
So we really, we were certainly not antagonistic, and I think in a way our early dreams even really finally got being fulfilled.

[00:30:39]
And also von Braun, I think von Braun had fairly well planned the whole thing through. Although the transport was arranged by the SS, but von Braun went along with it.

[00:30:51]
And many people have told us that really the main purpose of the SS was to use the Peenemünde group - the von Braun group - as a negotiating token, so that the SS people could save their own lives by making this group available.

[00:31:11]
Now, again, von Braun was always a pretty good negotiator. He finally got completely out of under the reach of the SS, so we made the contact with the Americans directly, directly from von Braun.

[00:31:23]
His brother who spoke really the best English of the whole bunch at that time - he really had most of the discussions. And the SS was not a part of it at all. Dornberger was also with von Braun, in Oberjoch, ja, which you mentioned earlier.

[00:31:40]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
As far as your discussions then about possibly going to the United States, when you were just in the last phases of Peenemünde, was that a discussion that had to be kept in a fairly tight group?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Oh, ja. You talk only to your very closest friends about that.

[00:31:59]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
That's the kind of talk that'll land you in a concentration camp.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Right. Definitely. So you didn't talk to strangers about that at all, and even among our closest friends we were very carefully talking about these things.

[00:32:10]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
How small was the group who were discussing that, or was it just a bunch of, small groups of friends talking to each other?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Just individuals, I would say. Individuals talking to one another.

[00:32:21]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Not any kind of core group around that was involved in that.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
No. No.

[00:32:28]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
So it was just a -- so that's interesting in terms of seeing just where the idea came from and to what extent von Braun was planning to try to use that.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Well, I think von Braun certainly did quite a bit of that planning, and it fortunately worked out all right.

[00:32:44]
And, again, I think it shows you a little bit the wisdom of von Braun, even in these non-technical areas. He normally knows which way to go and how to make the right decisions.

[00:32:57]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Okay. Well, is there anything else that we should cover? I guess it's late enough, though, we should just stop, at this point.

[00:33:06]
{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
And right off-hand I can't think of anything else. If I can, maybe I can still contact you?

{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Yes.