The Luftwaffe's testing site for secret long-range guided missiles and its development history. In the seclusion of the island of Usedom, near the fishing village of Peenemünde, the Luftwaffe and the Army set up two independent testing facilities for liquid-fuel rockets and other revolutionary military innovations under the strictest secrecy. In 1937, construction began on the world's largest rocket research facility until the end of the war, at a cost of over 10 million Reichsmarks. At times during the war, this "cradle of space flight" housed over 20,000 technicians and workers. The most famous development at the facility is the V 2, which has gone down in history as the first large long-range rocket.
Less well known is the fact that many other significant technical inventions originated at Peenemünde: the He 176, the world's first rocket plane with a liquid engine, the Me 163, various glide missiles, long-range guided weapons, guidance and homing systems, long-range bombs, fighter rockets, anti-aircraft missiles, automatic fuses ... Written by an engineer involved in the developments, this documentation of the tests at Peenemünde-West is convincing in its detail, accuracy and brilliance of writing. Wherever the name Peenemünde appears in connection with the events of the Second World War, the development and construction of the A 4 rocket, the forerunner of all single- and multi-stage large rockets launched into space up to now, is primarily thought of. In 1936, the first sod was turned on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom for both the Army Experimental Station Peenemünde-East of the Army Ordnance Office and the Air Force Experimental Station Peenemünde-West of the Reich Aviation Ministry. From 1936 to 1945, the test site was a restricted area for all persons not employed there and was also camouflaged with a veil of utmost secrecy. It was only after the war that a large part of the "island secrets" became public, through newspaper notes, reports of experiences and pictures, etc. After the successful rocket launches in the USA and the Soviet Union, they finally became main topics in the world press. For understandable reasons, Peenemünde-West was neglected, because the long-range guided missiles and special equipment that had once been tested there were no longer of interest, even if one could read about the Me 163 rocket plane or the V 1 flying bomb from time to time. Botho Stüwe has taken on the challenging task of writing a technical documentation on the many equipment and weapon systems that were tested at Peenemünde-West and describing the development history of the individual devices in great detail. But the reader is not only captivated by the technical history of this documentation, but also by the history of the origins of the island of Usedom and the description of the development from a "fishing village to the cradle of space travel".
Botho Stüwe, born in 1919 in Berlin-Neukölln, after attending school and studying engineering, did military service in the air intelligence unit in 1940. In 1941, he was transferred to the Luftwaffe's Peenemünde-West testing station, where he worked in the field of remote control technology until April 1945 - with interim assignments at the FOGGIA and JESAU testing stations. From 1947 until his retirement in 1985, he was employed as a development engineer by a well-known major company in the electrical industry.
