Hans Kammler

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General Dr Hans Friedrich Karl Franz Kammler (August 26, 1901 – May 1945?) was an 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.

Kammler was born in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland). In 1919, after volunteering for army service, he served in the Rossbach Freikorps [1]. From 1919 to 1923 he studied civil engineering in Munich and Danzig (now Gdańsk). He joined the NSDAP in 1932 and held a variety of administrative positions when the Nazi government came to power, initially in the Aviation Ministry. In 1940 he joined the SS, where from 1942 he worked at designing facilities for the extermination camps, including gas chambers and crematoria. 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. He was also assigned to the construction of facilities at Jonastal and Riesengebirge for nuclear weapons research and at Ebensee to develop a V-2 derived ICBM.

In 1944, Himmler convinced Adolf Hitler to put the V-2 project directly under SS control, and on August 6 replaced Walter Dornberger with Kammler as its director. From January 1945, Kammler was placed as head of all missile projects and just a month later was given charge of all German aerospace programs as these came under SS authority as well. Kammler is believed to have died in May 1945. The exact circumstances of his death are unknown, but he is thought either to have been killed in the fighting around Prague^[1] or else shot on his own orders by his adjutant^[2].

Kammler will be a character in the upcoming Finnish science fiction movie Iron Sky.^[3]