General Dr Hans Friedrich Karl Franz Kammler (August 26 1901 - April 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 and from 1919 to 1923 studied civil engineering in Munich and Gdansk. He joined the NSDAP in 1932 and held a variety of administrative positions when the Nazi government came to power, initially in the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM - 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. 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 on August 17 1943, Kammler was assigned to moving these production facilities underground, which resulted in the Mittelwerk facility and its attendant concentration camp, 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 Hitler to put the V-2 project directly under SS control, and on August 8 replaced Walter Dornberger with Kammler as its director. From March 1945, he was also put in charge of the jet fighter projects as these came under SS authority as well.
In April 1945, Kammler disappeared. It is generally believed that he was assassinated by a member of his staff, acting on orders from Himmler not to allow personnel with detailed knowledge of the rocket programme to fall into Allied hands. The fact that his exact fate is unknown and that his body was never recovered has provided material for conspiracy theorists to suggest that he continued his work in the United States after the war, where it is alleged he worked on anti-gravity devices.
