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 Erich 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 Erich 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.