by Amy Cherrix
By studying applications of the V-2 technology for interplanetary travel, they were disobeying Hitler’s decree that every German, including women and children, devote everything—even their lives—to defeating the Allies. Von Braun was well aware of the precarious nature of his group’s position. If they were caught, they risked the wrath of Heinrich Himmler, the fanatical head of Hitler’s elite SS guard. Himmler was the key senior Nazi official responsible for the planning and implementation of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe, and he had already jailed von Braun once before.
The story goes that von Braun drank too much alcohol at a party and someone overheard him talking about using the V-2 as a spaceship. His drunken, treasonous remarks eventually reached Himmler, who had the rocket engineer arrested by the SS. Von Braun wasn’t just any prisoner, and Himmler knew it. He was protected by his privileged position within the Nazi establishment as the V-2 inventor—prestige that ensured that von Braun was not harmed while in custody. It didn’t hurt that von Braun also had friends in very high places, who were leveraging their influence on his behalf. After just two weeks of relatively comfortable confinement, his mentor, Walter Dornberger, and Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, succeeded. Von Braun was released, but he knew that privilege and powerful contacts wouldn’t save him a second time if Himmler found out he and his associates were planning to betray the Nazis. The group’s only hope for a future in rocketry was to escape Germany and surrender to the Americans. Von Braun believed the United States had enough money to support and sustain a space exploration program. He was risking his team’s lives and his own in trusting that America would make his dream come true.
Chapter 3
Rise of the Rocket Fanatic
Since childhood, von Braun had dreamed of building a rocket to reach outer space. His obsession ignited on March 23, 1925, when his mother, an intellectual with an interest in science, gave him a small telescope for his thirteenth birthday. His observations of the moon and stars captivated the youngster. But viewing the heavens through a telescope would never be enough. Von Braun wanted to build a rocket, climb aboard, and use it to travel to the moon.
Blessed with an agile mind and insatiable curiosity, von Braun enjoyed the study of foreign languages and the arts. He excelled as a musician, playing both the piano and cello. For a time, he considered becoming a composer. In school, von Braun preferred the role of class clown to teacher’s pet, and his grades, especially those in mathematics, suffered. He simply refused to focus on subjects that did not interest him. He preferred reading the imaginative science-fiction tales of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Homework was a bore. He wanted to work with his hands. Inspired by Henry Ford, the American automobile inventor, von Braun’s favorite pastime was rebuilding an old car in the family garage.
At age sixteen, he powered a wooden children’s wagon with a crude engine made entirely of fireworks. When it took off, the contraption streaked down the family’s Berlin street. “It swerved this way and that, zigzagging through groups,” von Braun recalled years later. “I yelled a warning and men and women fled in all directions. I was ecstatic. The wagon was wholly out of control and trailing a comet’s tail of fire.”
The police arrived and von Braun’s displeased father grounded him for a day, but his mother confessed that it was impossible to stay angry with him for long. “Whenever I tried, he would put on his most cherubic smile and talk about something else,” she said. “He had no problem learning good manners, and he usually practiced them. When he did not, it was just a brief spell of naughtiness, or simply his own way of expressing an exuberant joy of life.” Von Braun was less exuberant in his schoolwork, and his grades reflected the lack of effort. The school notified his parents that their son would have to repeat the eighth grade. The von Brauns refused to hold him back. Instead, he was transferred to a boarding school to complete grades eight through ten. It was here, during his first term, that his interest in space travel took off.
Putting him into Ettersburg School, 124 miles southwest of Berlin, the von Brauns hoped their son would finally transform into an accomplished student, but despite their worried pleas, von Braun would not apply himself to schoolwork. One afternoon in his room, he picked up a magazine. As he flipped through its pages, an advertisement for a book caught his eye: Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space) by Hermann Oberth. Rockets! Now there was a subject he could get excited about. He ordered a copy.
When it finally arrived in his school mailbox, von Braun raced to his room, eager to explore Oberth’s theories. But when he opened the book, it was undecipherable. “I was appalled by the fact that it was filled with mathematical equations,” he said years later. To his dismay, Oberth had written his book in two of the languages von Braun had failed to learn: mathematics and physics. Terrified of never being able to comprehend the book and desperate for help, von Braun rushed to his teachers. “What can I do to understand this book?” he demanded. They told him that in order to understand Oberth’s work, he would have to master his two worst subjects. It was a defining moment in his life. Almost overnight, von Braun became a model student. His grades in math and science improved dramatically. Soon after, he began writing a physics textbook and sketched illustrations of a future spaceship.
Von Braun’s illustration of his future spaceship.
After finishing tenth grade at Ettersburg, von Braun enrolled in the Lietz School in northwestern Germany to complete his secondary schooling and prepare for college. It stood on the remote island of Spiekeroog, in the North Sea. While his friends attended parties and dated, von Braun’s studies intensified. His newly directed intellect and drive to succeed were a relief to his parents and an asset to his teachers and fellow students. He worked as a tutor, helping classmates with their schoolwork. When an instructor fell ill, he stepped in as a faculty substitute—despite the fact that the course was above his grade level. “By day I taught. By night I tutored,” he said. “Between times I studied my own lessons.”
By the time von Braun graduated in April 1930—a full year ahead of schedule—he had outgrown his reputation as a class clown and emerged as a disciplined academic who knew his life’s purpose. Wernher von Braun had evolved into a full-blown rocket fanatic.
Von Braun, (second row far right) as an eighteen-year-old rocket enthusiast attending a launch in July 1930.
He was not alone in his enthusiasm for technology. Europe in the 1930s was gripped by a rocket craze. Science-fiction films like Metropolis and Woman in the Moon by the famous director Fritz Lang inspired amateur rocketeers to invent their own fantastic vehicles. Von Braun watched as real-life daredevils in leather jackets, helmets, and goggles climbed aboard fast and dangerous rocket-powered cars, racing around tracks and roaring down city streets.
These amateur rocket designers dreamed of their inventions reaching outer space, but defying the laws of nature was expensive, and their only capital was creativity. To succeed, they needed money to pay for parts and fuel. For most people in 1932, rocket building probably looked like an exciting but weird hobby that could blow up in your face. For von Braun, who was now studying mechanical engineering at the Charlottenburg Institute of Technology, the rocket enthusiasts were a like-minded community of people who shared his obsession. He joined forces with a group of headstrong rocket builders headquartered in an abandoned munitions dump in Berlin, known as the Raketenflugplatz (Rocketport). Von Braun became a prominent member of the group and was instrumental in the successful launch of their first homemade liquid-fueled rocket. Powerful people began to take notice.
Since the end of World War I in 1918, the Germans had been desperate to rebuild their military. The conflict began when Germany invaded Belgium on August 4, 1914. Belgium’s ally, Great Britain, responded by declaring war on Germany, sparking a bloody four-year war involving ten countries, which ravaged Europe, killing an estimated forty million people.
RO
CKET CRAZE
Today it’s difficult to imagine a time without rockets, but in the 1930s, they were still highly experimental. World governments had not yet discovered how to effectively apply rocket technology to warfare, let alone use rockets to travel into space.
The Treaty of Versailles ended the war and outlined the penalties Germany had to pay for starting the conflict. Among other restrictions, the treaty forbade the German military from rebuilding its weapons arsenal by manufacturing tanks, submarines, airplanes, and other armaments. The treaty, however, held no provision against rocket development. The technology was still in its infancy, but if this new invention could be produced affordably and deployed as a weapon, Germany would gain a secret military advantage. Among the amateur rocketeers, few were as eager to prove themselves as the ambitious Wernher von Braun.
An Irresistible Offer
It was a spring day in 1932 when German Army captain Walter Dornberger arrived in a black car in front of the Raketenflugplatz headquarters. The German army had been keeping tabs on the young band of rocket fanatics, and von Braun stood out from the others. Dornberger recalled being impressed with his energetic work ethic and “astonishing theoretical knowledge.” The army offered to fund the group’s experimental rocket work. The only condition was that their experiments be carried out under the utmost secrecy on the secure grounds of an army post.
Twenty-year-old von Braun was elated. It was a generous offer, and experimenting with rockets for the army in exchange for funding seemed reasonable. The potential military applications of the technology were not entirely unknown to him at the time. His hero, Hermann Oberth, had suggested as much in his writings, but it remained only a theoretical possibility. The German army wanted von Braun to develop rockets for defense, but von Braun would later say that he hadn’t cared what the army’s motives were. He and his fellow Raketenflugplatz members needed money, and the army was willing to give it to them. In 1932, the Nazis had not yet come to power. It was peacetime. Von Braun wasn’t worried about the possible future applications of his rockets as weapons. He was obsessed with space exploration. “To me, the Army’s money was the only hope for big progress toward space travel,” he later said. The possibility that one of his inventions could be deployed as a weapon, or what it could one day destroy, did not figure into the calculus of his moral code. The rocket itself was all that mattered to him.
Within four years, von Braun’s relationship with the German army had expanded beyond his wildest dreams. The Germans had such confidence in his abilities and the future applications of his technology that they planned to build a top secret, state-of-the-art rocket manufacturing facility. The Peenemünde Army Research Center would be the first of its kind in the world. If von Braun—then only twenty-four years old—had any doubts about his growing importance to the German military, they were soon dispelled by his new role as the research center’s technical director.
The construction site was the tiny fishing village of Peenemünde (pronounced pay-neh-moon-duh), located in a remote section of northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. Von Braun’s mother, Emmy, suggested the site, reminding her son of the area’s natural isolation and how much their family had loved visiting there to vacation and hunt. Peenemünde, with its tall pine trees, marshes, and abundant wildlife, was largely undeveloped, with fewer than five hundred residents. Its only structures were ninety-six houses and a single school.
To clear the path for construction of the highly classified facility, local residents were forced from their land but were at least paid fairly for it. Before long, the tiny seaside village had vanished and Peenemünde’s technological transformation was underway.
By May 1937, the first manufacturing plants had been completed and rocket tests began. Von Braun proved himself a hands-on leader with a remarkable talent for keeping track of the growing manufacturing enterprise and its workers. The people who worked for von Braun held their leader in the highest regard because he rarely lost his cool when things went wrong. Once, an engineer confessed to a mistake that caused a rocket to fly off course, and von Braun rewarded his honesty with a bottle of champagne. He wanted his team to trust him, especially when they fell short of his expectations, because it was the only way to ensure the error wasn’t repeated on future tests.
While von Braun was honing his people skills and building a career with the German army, Adolf Hitler came to power. In November 1937, von Braun was invited to join the Nazi Party, and he accepted. His pivotal role in the German national defense and his dependence on powerful political connections within the Nazi Party made it difficult for him to refuse. The degree to which he may have been coerced is unclear, but a statement he made years later sheds light on his decision. “My refusal to join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life. Therefore I decided to join. My membership did not involve any political activity.” Von Braun may have claimed little interest in the details of day-to-day politics, but his rocket work was inseparable from the evil actions of the Nazi regime that paid his salary and funded his research.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and World War II erupted. As the war raged for six years, the Nazis murdered six million Jews for failing to meet Hitler’s cruel criteria for creating a perfect master race. Others, too, were targeted by the regime, including anti-Hitler German politicians and resistance activists, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, non-Jewish Polish civilians, Serbs, Roma, and homosexuals. The physically disabled and mentally ill were also executed. All told, as many as sixty million soldiers and civilians perished in the conflict. These crimes and casualties are among the worst and most well-known facts defining World War II in history books. However, these often-repeated statistics are so overwhelming in scale that they helped conceal a lesser-known story buried deep inside a mountain cave in central Germany, near the small town of Nordhausen. It was here that von Braun’s connection to Hitler’s crimes was hidden.
Chapter 4
Camp Dora
APRIL 11, 1945
CENTRAL GERMANY
By the spring of 1945, Army private John Galione felt grateful to have survived the war thus far, but it was the mission, not good fortune, that was now driving Galione and the soldiers of the US Army’s 104th Army Infantry Division, known as the Timberwolves. The soldiers were to assist in the liberation of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp (also known as Camp Dora) outside the city of Nordhausen in central Germany. But nothing the battle-weary Galione had witnessed in the war prepared him and his fellow soldiers for what they found that early spring day.
The corpses of approximately five thousand starved prisoners were strewn across the sprawling grounds and inside the camp’s buildings. Some of the victims had died in a recent bombing raid by the Allies. But evidence of the Nazis’ murderous cruelty was everywhere. The army medics choked back tears as they found more bodies “stacked like cordwood” beneath a staircase in one of the barracks.
This memorial sculpture by artist Jürgen von Woyski stands in front of the cremantorium at Camp Mittelbau-Dora.
“The people were so happy to see us,” Galione remembered. “They were tugging our clothes, thanking us, hugging us . . . feeling our uniforms between their fingers like they were gold. They just wanted to touch us; thanking God over and over again . . . they looked like the walking dead. They were skin and bones . . . some of them were so weak they didn’t even live long enough to be rescued.”
It is estimated that sixty thousand people had passed through the Camp Dora system during the war. Members of the Timberwolves were haunted by what they had seen, and some were so traumatized, they refused to speak of it for the rest of their lives.
Adjacent to Camp Dora was the entrance to an old gypsum mine hidden inside Kohnstein Mountain. After the Allies bombed the Peenemünde Army Research Center in August 1943 and severely damaged the facility, the Nazis relocated the factory to the abandoned mine. Mittelwerk—German for “central works”—became the new manufac
turing center of the V-2. Buried inside the mountain’s network of tunnels, the V-2 operation would be hidden from Allied planes. Before manufacturing could begin, however, the mine required additional improvements to expand it into a rocket production facility.
That job fell to another barbaric SS officer, Brigadier General Hans Kammler. The civil engineer and ardent Nazi supervised the upgrades at Mittelwerk. The general’s sadistic claim to fame was the prominent role he played in building the ultrasecret extermination camps and gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and Belzec. At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, between two of its chambers, approximately four thousand people could be murdered at one time.
At Mittelwerk, Kammler used concentration camp forced labor to blast deeper into Kohnstein Mountain and expand the railroad tunnels that would transport equipment and parts into the facility and carry finished rockets out of it. The inmates came from all over Europe, but mostly from the Soviet Union, Poland, and France, and had been arrested for political reasons. Beginning in May 1944, Jews were also deported to the camp. They cleared debris after dynamite blasts and loaded the heavy rocks into railcars by hand.
The conditions under which prisoners were forced to live and work inside the tunnels were abominable. Before crude barracks were constructed at Camp Dora, thousands slept in rancid, lice-infested bunks, not seeing daylight for months. There was no heat or running water. Even in the summer their bodies were cold. The temperature inside the dank mountain tunnel was a near-constant forty-two degrees. Compounding the misery was the absence of adequate bathroom facilities. Large barrels served as toilets—and there weren’t enough of those. Dysentery and typhus were rampant. Weakened by disease and hunger, some prisoners fell to their deaths from thirty-foot scaffolds as they churned out the V-2 rockets in backbreaking twelve-hour shifts. Some dropped dead where they stood. Others were crushed beneath heavy machinery or falling rubble after explosions.