Swinoujscie Vacation Part II — Peenemünde

Today we drove about 50km from Swinoujscie to the German town of Peenemünde. It sits on the very northwest tip of Usedom Island, and this remote, windswept Baltic Sea peninsula has a rather dramatic claim to fame: in October 1942 it was the launch site of first missile that exited the atmosphere and, by doing so, made it to space. Some of the same scientists who participated in the development of this advanced weapon, most notably Werhner von Braun, later designed the rockets that would propel Americans to the moon. Seeing the site left me with the feeling as if I had closed the loop: I had seen the ultimate achievement of von Braun’s career, the Saturn V, lying on its side in Rocket Park at NASA in Houston, and I now saw the test range at which he honed his craft while working on the V-2. A replica of this awful weapon stands today in the park, complete with the wartime “Queen of the Moon” cartoon on its side.

The site itself is extremely well-done, especially given the remnants of what they had to work with. The German scuttled the test facility before the Soviets captured it on May 4th, 1945. Destruction continued after the war, and today only the massive power station remains, while the launch sites, firing ranges, and the like are all off-limits because some of the wayward munitions are still there, and still live. The museum is mostly within the old power station, and it is a comprehensive, foreboding place, like many of the WWII sites in the Bundesrepublik. The guide pamphlet probably sums it up best: “The ambivalent nature of technological progress is uniquely reflected in the story of Peenemünde.” Prior to becoming a museum, the power station served the DDR (East Germany) until the very end in 1990. It was intended to be replaced in the late 1950s by a nuclear reactor at nearby Lubin, but the East Germans could never bring that plant fully on-line, so the old Nazi plant kept going for far longer than it ever should have.

And finally, sitting in the very small man-made coal receiving harbor adjacent to the power station there was a bizarre relic of the Cold War: a Soviet Juliett-class submarine dressed up as a German U-Boot (even with a “U461” number), decked out with mannequins and sound effects, and open for the tourist trade. Aside from the easily-uncovered trickery — it’s obvious from the Cyrillic signage throughout the vessel that this is a Russian sub rather than a German U-Boat — the sub itself is remarkably well-preserved and fun to tour. It’s also very big, close to 100m in length and 4000t in displaced weight, which makes it much bigger than the actual German U-boats I have toured in both the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago as well as the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The funny thing to me is that the Russian sub is far more impressive than the smaller German ones. It’s also far more advanced in payload: it was designed to shoot nuclear-tipped cruise missles at American cities on the East Coast. I left wondering why the owners of the attraction bothered to dress it up as anything else.