The museum opened in 1991 inside the surviving turbine hall, the only major industrial building left after Allied bombs and Soviet salvage crews finished with the site. Exhibits trace what the curators call "the fateful pact" — the bargain Wernher von Braun and his team of engineers struck with the Nazi regime for the resources to pursue rocketry. The film of a V-1 flying bomb arcing overhead is shown beside the photographs of London streets after the warhead arrived. The museum does not lionize the engineering. It places the technology in its moral frame and asks visitors to sit with what they see. Saturn V and the moon are not the museum's story. Antwerp and Liège are.

Roughly 12,000 forced labourers and concentration-camp prisoners died producing V-weapons — most of them in the Mittelbau-Dora tunnels in central Germany, but many at Peenemünde itself. They came from across occupied Europe: Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians rounded up in street sweeps, Jewish prisoners worked beyond exhaustion. The museum has reconstructed parts of the camp infrastructure and named names where records survive. Exhibits show the soup ration, the bunk dimensions, the sentence lengths handed down for an unauthorised glance at a guard. The chapel near the site commemorates all the victims — the prisoners who built the rockets, and the civilians the rockets later killed in London, in Antwerp, in Liège. The museum insists on holding both.

On the night of 17 August 1943, nearly 600 RAF heavy bombers crossed the Baltic and dropped nearly 2,000 tons of bombs on Peenemünde in an operation called Hydra. The raid killed about 170 German engineers and staff — and several hundred forced labourers locked in their barracks who could not flee to shelter. Bomber Command lost 40 aircraft. The damage was severe enough to delay the V-2 programme by months and push assembly underground to the Mittelwerk tunnels, where conditions for forced labour grew far worse. Standing today on the cracked concrete of the old test site, with gulls calling overhead and the Baltic wind moving through the pines, you can still trace the bomb craters in the ground.

The outdoor exhibition spreads across the Peenemünder Haken — the "Peenemünde Hook" of land that juts into the Baltic. A replica V-1 sits on its launch ramp where the original ramps stood. A V-2 (the Germans called it the A4) towers nearby, painted in its black-and-white test pattern. A Soviet missile corvette of the Tarantul class, the Hans Beimler, rests at the dock — a reminder that after 1945 Peenemünde became an East German naval base, the cycle of weapons development continuing in different uniform. Information boards mark the locations of two former forced-labour camps and the old industrial railway halt, often in surprisingly quiet corners of the heath.

In 2002 the museum received the Coventry Cross of Nails, made from the timbers of the English cathedral the Luftwaffe destroyed in 1940 — a gesture of reconciliation between a city Germany bombed and a site that bombed others. In 2013 the European Union and Europa Nostra honoured the museum for the integrity of its presentation. The recognition matters because the temptation at Peenemünde was always to celebrate the technology and brush past its uses. The HTM does not. It treats the V-2 as what it was: a weapon of terror built by slaves to kill civilians, whose engineers later helped put humans on the moon. All of that is true. The museum makes you hold all of it at once.