Hi Philip,

The successful June 4, 1942 test firing of the Nebelwerfer 42 rockets designated D0-38 under Project Ursel was the end of the program. It proved the theory of being able to launch rockets from under water but the small rockets had a range of just 2.8 miles and were of no strategic or tactical value. That was the end of Kapitanleutnant Friedrich Steinhoff's involvement. His brother's actual name was Dr. Ernst Steinhoff. It was in the fall of 1943 when German Labor Front Director Otto Lafferenz witnessed a test firing of the A4/V2 that the idea of a submarine-towed submersible launch container to carry and fire the A4 came about. Assigned to Prufstand XII at Peenemunde for development, the rocket-silo-barge designated Apparatus-F was developed. Several were under construction at the end of the war but none ever went into service before Germany's surrender. Following the surrender of the U-873 at Portsmouth, NH, Captain Steinhoff was beaten during his initial interrogation at the Portsmouth Naval Prison before being transferred with his crew to Boston. They were originally to have been housed at the Hotels Buckminster and/or Thorndike, but they had been filled with PoWs from a recently arrived troop ship. A foreign national civilian hired by the Office of Naval Intelligence under Group Op-16-Z named Jak Henry Elberti, disguised as a U.S. Navy Lt. Cdr. with the assistance of a burley Marine guard from the Portsmouth Naval Prison named Sol Leventhal, continued his brutal interrogation at the Charles Street Jail where he was found unconscious the next morning, bloody, beaten and suffering from what they claimed was a self inflicted laceration to his right, dominant wrist. They gave at least four differing accounts as to how he accomplished the wrist laceration, and deprived him of medical attention for three hours while he lost a great deal of blood, before bringing him to the Massachusetts General Hospital just 100 yards away from the prison. In my opinion, he did not kill himself. He knew he would soon be repatriated back to Germany, where his wife would give birth to his third son just 10 days following his death.I believe his interrogators went too far seeking information about what they believed might have been an attack of New York City by U-boats towing Apparatus-F A4/V2 launch equipment, and tried to cover up their crimes which were in clear violation of the Geneva Convention rules governing the handling of PoWs. Originally, the U-873, a long-range Type IXD2 was loaded with 200 tons of strategic war materials intended to sail for Japan, but at the last minute her orders had been changed to simply attack shipping off the American Northeast coast, as German/Japanese diplomatic relations had broken down just prior to the fall of Berlin.

Regards,

Paul