Erich Apel (3 October 1917 – 3 December 1965) worked during World War Two as a rocket engineer at the Peenemünde Army Research Center in Nazi Germany. After his return from the Soviet Union, where he had forcibly worked for rocketry development under the Operation Osoaviakhim until 1952, he became an East German party official. During the later 1950s, he was increasingly involved in economic policy, serving from 1958 as head of the German Democratic Republic's Economics Commission in the Politburo. He was seen as a reformer. However, economic reform rapidly fell off the agenda after October 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev fell from power in Moscow.
Apel served as president of the state planning commission between 1963 and 1965. His final project was to negotiate a trade deal with the Soviet Union. However, hours before he was due to sign the resulting agreement on behalf of the East German government, he killed himself.
Life Early years Erich Hans Apel was born in Judenbach, a small town in the Franconian Forest which had once benefited from its position as a staging post on a major trade route, but which had lost out commercially following the construction of a railway line providing a direct link from Leipzig to Nuremberg. Apel's father was a mechanical engineer: his mother worked in the garments industry. He attended school in nearby Sonneberg and Steinach, but left school in 1932 in order to embark on an apprenticeship at the Neuhaus porcelain factory in toolmaking and mechanical engineering. The ruling Nazi Party was popular in the region and in 1935 he joined the Deutsches Jungvolk youth organisation. However, it was found that the sixteen year old disrupted the "mind-numbingly dull drill exercises" (""), and he was thrown out after nine months because of his "negative attitude" to the quasi-military exercises in which the boys were expected to participate. After completing his apprenticeship in 1935 he stayed on at the Neuhaus factory as a toolmaker and designer until 1937. Then, between 1937 and 1939, he attended the Engineering Academy at nearby Ilmenau, emerging with a degree in mechanical engineering.
War years Directly after receiving his degree, in September 1939 Apel was conscripted into the army, becoming a member of Infantry Reserve Battalion 451, based in Gotha. Around this time World War II broke out. However, on 20 December 1939 Apel was ordered to the Weapons Agency's research facility at Peenemünde on Germany's northern coast. The head of the facility was the charismatic rocketry expert, Wernher von Braun. Apel seems to have been in his element. A contemporary later recalled that he worked from 07.30 until 17.30, like everyone else, but then in the evenings he retreated to his bedroom in a nearby hostel, in order to work on proposals for improvements. His speciality was the hydraulic systems for the rockets. He was tireless in his work of calculation, measuring and modelling. He seems to have made a good impression, since in August 1940 he was relieved of all further obligations regarding military service. In November 1940 he was appointed to the position of plant engineer and assistant to the facility director. He was totally uninterested in politics, never joining the party, and regarded by colleagues as a dedicated engineer, body and soul.
3 October 1942 was Apel's twenty-fifth birthday. Coincidentally, he was able to spend the day as a witness to the first launch anywhere in the world of a long-distance rocket, the so-called (at this stage) A4. The launch took place at 16.00 and everything worked perfectly, the rocket attaining a speed of Mach 4.5, a height of , and a horizontal distance of . At the start of 1943 Apel was promoted again, despite his young age becoming head of one of the many development departments at the Peenemünde army research facility. Shortly after this he mentioned to a group of colleagues what a wretched business it was that the thing should explode in the middle of a city. His boss, Walter Thiel, came to hear of the comment and called him aside, "Apel, you should have joined the medical service: you're too soft for the work here". However, there is no indication that Apel's comment adversely affected his career prospects: the researchers at Peenemünde saw themselves as an elite team engaged in vital work, and the only realistic alternative career path would have led him back to the military frontline.
During 1943 it became clear that the British knew about the research facility at Peenemünde. With their US allies they launched a succession of bombing raids to destroy it, starting in August 1943. Most of the 733 people killed at Peenemünde in the first bombing raid, on 17 August, were forced labourers, but the dead also included Apel's boss, Walter Thiel and his family. By that time, however, Apel himself was far away, transferred in April 1943 with his own team of assembly specialists and administrators to the Linke-Hofmann-Werke (LHW) plant in Breslau (as Wrocław was known) before 1945). Breslau was traditionally a centre for railway production and LHW was traditionally a manufacturer of railway locomotives and rolling stock, but during the war its sophisticated engineering capabilities were also being adapted to produce components and sub-assemblies for the rocket, which government propaganda was by now identifying as the "Vergeltungswaffe 2" ("Retribution weapon 2" / V-2). As the continuing bombing raids at the Peenemünde Army Research Center had their effect through 1943 and 1944, the LHW plant became the assembly location for the V-2 rockets. On 1 April 1944, at the request of the LHW management, Apel was released from his employment contract with the Army High Command Weapons Agency. He was now employed directly as chief engineer and assistant to the technical director at LHW.
By the end of 1944 the war was coming home to Germany. LHW now outsourced V-2 rocket production to a firm called "Peterbau GmbH" in Kleinbodungen near Nordhausen. With the assembly contract they sent Apel, who with effect from January 1945 became technical director of Peterbau GmbH. Apel's resolute determination to avoid politics now seemed to catch up with him, since the new location for rocket assembly was part of the vast underground factory at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Conditions were so dreadful that at least one commentator has suggested that the V-2 rockets found more victims among the slave labourers engaged in constructing the underground factory and in working on the rockets than among the citizens of London, the intended target of the finished rockets. Even if Apel had nothing to do with setting up and running the vast deadly forced labour infrastructure, as the engineer responsible for the rockets he was naturally associated with it. As Nazi Germany collapsed militarily and politically during the first part of 1945, Apel succeeded in getting back to his home village of Judenbach. Like millions of his compatriots he was determined to make a clean break with the past.
Soviet occupation zone War ended, formally, in May 1945. The entire southern region of Germany had been liberated by the United States Army, but the victorious powers had already agreed a partition of the western two thirds of the country into four military occupation zones. After the Americans had withdrawn to their agreed positions Judenbach was included in the middle portion of Germany that would now be administered as the Soviet occupation zone. Initially Apel worked on the local farms. On 15 January 1946 he enrolled on the "New Teachers" programme. With millions of working age Germans dead or in prison of war camps, there was a desperate shortage of teachers, and the scheme, implemented with varying levels of effectiveness in the various occupation zones, was designed to select those appropriately educated individuals who were thought to be not excessively tainted by Nazi involvement, to undergo a rapid "re-education" and set to work educating school-age children. At the same time he both studied and taught, until 31 May 1946, at the Professional Business Academy in nearby Steinach.
In January 1946 Apel joined a political party, choosing the centre-left Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD). Four months later, the SPD merged with the Communist Party to form the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED). The merger was presented as a way to prevent divisions on the political left from opening up opportunities for right wing populists to take control as had happened after 1932. In reality it never took effect except in the Soviet zone, where it received sustained practical backing from the military administration. The political development was not one for which Apel could muster much enthusiasm, and in common with many SPD members he was not one of those "volunteering" to sign his party membership over to the new party (though he was accepted as a member of the SED, eleven years later, in 1957).
Work in the Soviet Union
On 1 June 1946 Apel was "picked up" by the Soviet authorities. They showed no interest in his association with forced labour at the underground rocket factory at Mittelbau-Dora. But they were nevertheless interested in the factory; and they did make him an offer which, for a range of practical reasons, he was almost certainly in no position to refuse. The Soviets invited him to work with them as chief engineer and representative of the (former) factory management at the Soviet Technical Commission in the Bleicherode quarter of Nordhausen (which had also ended up in the Soviet zone), adjacent to the vast underground rocket plant.
Soviet interest in the German rocket programme was fully shared by the United States. During the chaotic closing weeks of the war Wernher von Braun had traveled to Nordhausen and met with Apel, offering to take him to America after the military defeat which by now everyone saw as inevitable. Von Braun was keen, as far as possible, to keep his full team with him. But his specialist in rocket hydraulics turned him down. Apel did not want to volunteer for further work in the weapons industry.
On 22 October 1946, across the Soviet occupation zone, in the early hours of the morning technicians and engineers from the rocket project were visited by Soviet officers, each accompanied by a translator. A brief instruction was read out: "By order of the Soviet Military Administration you must work for five years in the Soviet Union. You can take your wife and family with you, and as many of your personal effects as you wish ...". Till now Apel's working life had involved living in guest houses or barracks so he did not have many personal effects. Just hours after the order was given Apel and his colleagues were on the train heading east as part of Operation Osoaviakhim. The mood on the train was dark and apprehensive. The journey took around 14 days. Their ultimate destination was an island in the middle of Lake Seliger in a sparsely inhabited marshy region some northwest of Moscow.