Qualla: Kummersdorf

Kummersdorf: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oberlausitzerin64, CC BY-SA 4.0. You are not permitted to walk in this forest. Some 3,200 hectares of pine and sand about 25 km south of Berlin have carried protected-monument status since June 2007 and a general ban on entry for longer than that, and the reason is what is still in the ground: unexploded shells, and the chemical residue of seventy years spent testing things designed to destroy other things. Kummersdorf was the German army's proving ground from 1875 until Soviet troops reached it in the last week of April 1945. Nearly everything that army fired or drove was tried here first. And for a few years in the early 1930s, a very small team working on the western edge of the range fired the first liquid-fuelled rocket motors that would eventually lead to the V-2.

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Image: Oberlausitzerin64 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kummersdorf: Why the Range Moved

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oberlausitzerin64, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1871 the Prussian ministry of war decided that its artillery test range at Tegel, then a village on the northwestern edge of Berlin, was too close to the city - a judgement history has endorsed, given that the site became an airport. The replacement went into the Kummersdorf f...

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Image: Oberlausitzerin64 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kummersdorf: The Quiet Decade

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oberlausitzerin64, CC BY-SA 4.0. After 1918 the Treaty of Versailles set hard limits on what Germany was allowed to develop, and through the 1920s Kummersdorf ran programmes in artillery, armoured vehicles, motor transport, signals and aviation that were not advertised. Rearmament after 1933 removed the need for...

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Image: Oberlausitzerin64 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kummersdorf: Test Stand West

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oberlausitzerin64, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1929 the German defence ministry began investigating rocket propulsion for military use and assigned it to the Ballistics Branch of the Army Weapons Department. Walter Dornberger arrived in 1930. By December 1932 they had built a test stand for liquid-propellant motors on the ...

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Image: Oberlausitzerin64 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kummersdorf: Where the Test Stand Led

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clemensfranz, CC BY-SA 3.0. What happened at Peenemünde is not Kummersdorf's story, but it begins in that sand pit. The weapon that came out of the line of development started here, the V-2, was assembled from January 1944 in tunnels near Nordhausen by prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Aro...

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Image: Clemensfranz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kummersdorf: A Forest You Cannot Walk In

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oberlausitzerin64, CC BY-SA 4.0. By April 1945 the range was the front line. Whatever was still at Kummersdorf got thrown together into improvised units - a handful of tanks, some of them captured from other armies, and the site's own workers and civilians handed rifles and formed into a makeshift grenadier comp...

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Image: Oberlausitzerin64 | CC BY-SA 4.0