In the Shadow of the Moon

by Amy Cherrix

  On the evening of October 22, the Soviets hosted a banquet at a local restaurant. Alcohol flowed freely at the bar for the Germans. Serov and his men remained sober. An extravagant table and festive lighting added to the celebratory atmosphere. “Fruit was in absolute abundance,” one attendee recalled, although it was nearly nonexistent in postwar Germany. It was a huge feast, another diner said, but the only thing to drink was “vodka, vodka, vodka.” Around one a.m. the party ended. The well-fed and thoroughly intoxicated Germans were driven home.

  At around four o’clock in the morning, the phone rang at the Gröttrups’ house and Helmut’s wife, Irmgard, answered. “The Russians are at the front door. We’re going to be taken away,” a voice said.

  Irmgard believed it was a prank until the Russians began arriving by the hundreds. Their promise to the Gröttrup family, and other Germans who worked for them, was broken. They were told to gather their belongings and board trains for the Soviet Union. Most did not resist. “The dazed, half-asleep Germans didn’t immediately grasp why they needed to go to work in the Soviet Union at four o’clock in the morning,” Chertok wrote. “But the discipline, order, and the unquestioning subordination to authority that had been drilled into them and under which the entire German people had lived for many decades did the trick. An order [was] an order.” Approximately five thousand skilled German rocket specialists and their families were abducted and transported to the Soviet Union, where they would work with Korolev to build rockets for the Russians.

  Chapter 8

  Back to the USSR

  By February 1947, after more than a year of studying recovered V-2s in Germany, Sergei Korolev was back in the USSR. When he and his team first saw their future missile factory, a former air defense site in Podlipki, a suburb of Moscow, Chertok recalled, “we were horrified.” The Soviet rocket engineers had grown accustomed to the organized and well-maintained facilities they had left behind in Germany. The facility looked like something out of the Stone Age. “There was dirt and primitive equipment . . . [that] had been ransacked,” Chertok wrote. The recently deported Germans lived in overcrowded barracks and tents in and around Moscow. World War II had devastated the Soviet Union. As many as 1,700 cities had been destroyed and approximately twenty-seven million people were dead. Rebuilding the country would take years, but defense of the Soviet homeland could not wait.

  Korolev’s relationship with his wife was in equally bad shape. The years of separation during his imprisonment in the Gulag had driven a wedge between the once-happy couple. They would eventually divorce in 1948 after Korolev began an affair with another woman while he was still married to Ksenia. Korolev’s betrayal infuriated his eleven-year-old daughter, Natalia, who blamed her father for destroying their family. The rift in their relationship lasted nearly a decade.

  While his personal life crumbled, Korolev and his Russian/German staff began the difficult task of building a production system for Soviet rocket manufacturing. They worked long hours in poorly heated facilities with leaky roofs. The engineers didn’t have worktables for their drawings, so they repurposed overturned equipment boxes as desks. With slide rules and pencils balanced between frozen fingers, engineers meticulously re-created V-2 schematics and calculated by hand the brain-bending mathematics required to make a rocket fly.

  In April, Stalin summoned Korolev to Moscow for a progress report on the emerging V-2 project. Korolev was nervous. He hoped to convince the Soviet leader that it was time to move beyond the replication of the V-2 and build an original Russian-made rocket.

  Korolev later recalled the events in a letter to Ksenia. When he arrived at the meeting, the chamber was filled with at least a hundred high-ranking Soviet officials. Stalin paced the room with a pipe in his mouth. He “did not offer his hand.” The dictator questioned Korolev about rockets. He wanted to know if planes were better suited for the deployment of weapons. Korolev responded by emphasizing the superiority of rockets over airplanes. Stalin listened, “silently at first, hardly taking his pipe out of his mouth,” then interrupted the designer with “terse questions.”

  Korolev patiently answered them, then swallowed his anxiety and pressed ahead with his agenda for the meeting. He told Stalin that his design team was capable of building a better rocket than von Braun’s, one with a longer range than the already obsolete V-2. Wouldn’t it be a better use of time and resources to create an original Russian-made rocket? Stalin disagreed, because he was too preoccupied with the development of an atomic bomb. He insisted that the engineer focus on replicating von Braun’s proven V-2. Disappointed, Korolev accepted the decision. He would bide his time and wait for another opportunity to change Stalin’s mind.

  In late summer of that same year, the Soviets began building a bare-bones launch facility to test Korolev’s V-2 replica. The site was a remote and barren desert less than a hundred miles southeast of the town of Volgograd. Conditions at the Kapustin Yar test range were even more wretched than the cold and leaky workshop outside Moscow. The desolate area offered no human comforts, but its isolation made it ideal for testing unpredictable rockets. Every basic necessity had to be imported, including food, water, and shelter. Engineers, workers, and their families lived onsite in railcars. They would freeze through subzero winters and swelter during blazing-hot summers. The sand teemed with tarantulas and venomous snakes. But the remote facility was far enough away from populated areas to to maintain secrecy around the rocket project, while also safeguarding civilian lives if one of Korolev’s test rockets flew off course. Korolev couldn’t have known that thousands of miles away in an American desert, the V-2’s inventor, Wernher von Braun, was equally frustrated by a government that insisted on tying his hands. Like Korolev, von Braun’s dream of developing a brand-new rocket was on hold as he waited patiently for his shot.

  Chapter 9

  Space Cowboys

  It was another hot, dry day in Fort Bliss, Texas. Thirty-five-year-old Wernher von Braun squinted into the sun and watched as an object spiraled toward him. Should he stand his ground or get out of the way? Von Braun sprinted forward, raised his arm, and smashed the volleyball. It whizzed over the net and was unreturned. He smiled. It must have felt good to win, because life in the US proved disappointing at first. His team had not been assigned to any new rocket development projects.

  Since their arrival in 1945, they had worked almost daily with the Americans, teaching them to fly the confiscated V-2s that had been shipped to the US from the Mittelwerk tunnels in Nordhausen.

  The Germans began referring to themselves as “POPs” (prisoners of peace) and found creative ways to pass the time when they were not working. During the day, they played volleyball, gardened, or completed simple construction projects, such as building furniture for their austere barracks. At night, their quarters looked and sounded more like a college fraternity house than a military post. The engineers staged elaborate competitive battles against each other with fire hoses, sandbags, water bombs, and pillows.

  Von Braun (black pants) enjoys a game of volleyball at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1947.

  As more time passed, the group became increasingly restless with the baby-step pace of the American military. “Frankly, we were disappointed with what we found in this country during our first year or so,” von Braun said years later. “We were distrusted aliens living in what for us was a desolate region of a foreign land. . . . Nobody seemed to be much interested in work that smelled of weapons, now [that] the war was over and spaceflight was a concept bordering on the ridiculous.”

  At Peenemünde, the Germans had fired as many as two missiles per day; now they were lucky if they fired two in a month. Von Braun’s dream of kicking off an American space program seemed as unlikely as a rainy day in the Texas desert. He realized that he and the other German rocketeers had been spoiled with the best tools and equipment money could buy. “We had been coddled,” von Braun later said. “Here they were counting pennies.” Some members of his team wondered if surrendering to
the United States had been a bad idea. They wanted to build new rockets, not tinker with technology they had already perfected. When tensions escalated within the group, von Braun implored them to be patient and remember the reason they had come to America: it was the first stop on their way to the moon.

  The German Operation Paperclip rocketeers assembled at Fort Bliss, Texas.

  It was also a way to help their families. Under their temporary contracts with the army, the engineers earned a small salary, most of which they sent home to their loved ones who were still living in devastated postwar Germany.

  Despite their frustrations, the engineers were proving themselves as valuable long-term national security assets. However, their contracts were only for six months. Operation Paperclip had been a temporary project, not a permanent immigration program. So the government began taking steps to transform the wartime operation into a permanent path to citizenship. Some of Paperclip’s most valuable participants, like von Braun and members of his Fort Bliss group, received new contracts, extending their stay for as long as two years. Since they would be in the country on a more permanent basis, the time had come to reveal Operation Paperclip to the American people.

  In early 1946, the War Department issued a series of carefully worded statements about the nature of Operation Paperclip, without disclosing its most scandalous detail: that some of the program’s alumni had been ardent Nazis, or in the case of von Braun, members of Hitler’s SS. The War Department hoped a controlled release of information over time would minimize any backlash. The broad outlines of the secret program gradually became public knowledge. Americans learned the project’s name and its stated purpose of leveraging German science to benefit national defense. The identities of some of the participants, including von Braun’s, were released as well. When the El Paso Times ran the story, it called von Braun’s team “the brains behind Hitler’s boasted ‘secret weapon,’ the V-2 rocket,” declaring, “Now they have turned their skill over to their former enemies.” No attempt was made to hide von Braun’s membership in the Nazi Party. It would have been too difficult to conceal, given his position as the V-2’s designer.

  The War Department press releases stressed that the Germans had been thoroughly vetted (which we now know wasn’t entirely true). Some Americans, at the time, were understandably skeptical. Detroit congressman John D. Dingell was outraged that the United States government would consider partnering with the Germans. “I have never thought that we were so poor mentally in this country that we have to go and import those Nazi killers to help us prepare for the defense of our country. A German is a Nazi and a Nazi is a German. The terms are synonymous,” he said. Dingell’s comments echoed the lingering anger many Americans felt against Germany after the war and their fear that war criminals would be allowed into the US. And while not every German citizen or participant in Operation Paperclip was a “killer,” as Dingell described, some of the Paperclip scientists, engineers, and technicians had been Nazi officers and/or zealous believers in Hitler’s cause. In the case of von Braun, he was a Nazi officer who knew that concentration camp prisoners at Mittelwerk assembled his rockets, but chose not to allow that fact to interfere with his ambitious plans.

  Meanwhile, V-2 launch days at the nearby White Sands Missile Range in White Sands, New Mexico, became a spectator sport. Visitors drove from miles around, their cars and trucks streaming along Route 70 to watch in awe as the powerful V-2 ripped off the sand and into the sky. Curious onlookers parked on the roadside, and passengers craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the future.

  These V-2 test flights, known as Project Fire-Ball, were milestones in American rocket research. Between 1946 and 1951, nearly seventy V-2 rockets were fired. Instead of explosives, instruments flew inside some of the V-2 nose cones, measuring temperature, pressure, and cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. Nose cone cameras captured photographs of the Earth’s atmosphere, a precursor to future weather satellite technology.

  Although the government continued to ignore von Braun’s early proposals for a space program, another of his proposals received an enthusiastic “Yes!” Von Braun was in love with a beautiful young woman named Maria von Quistorp, his eighteen-year-old first cousin, who lived in Germany. Marriages between first cousins are less common in American society, but historically were not unusual among European aristocracy. Von Braun’s feelings for Maria had not diminished in the two years since he had last seen her. “I had secretly hoped for her hand if ever the world settled down,” he wrote. In a letter to his father, Magnus, von Braun asked him to find out if Maria still had feelings for him. The elder von Braun, eager to arrange the marriage for his son, immediately went to Maria. With the “subtlety of a bulldozer,” he blurted out, “I am supposed to find out if you will marry Wernher. What shall I tell him?” She wrote to von Braun in the US, “I’d never thought of marrying anyone else.” Given von Braun’s immense value to the United States government, he required special permission to travel to Germany for the ceremony. The army worried that the Soviets could attempt to kidnap him. To ensure his safety, an army escort was provided for the entire trip. The couple was married in Landshut, Germany, on March 1, 1947.

  When von Braun returned to the US with his new wife, he was welcomed with a harsh reminder of the secret past he wanted to keep buried. A war crimes investigator was in El Paso to interview members of his team. Nazis were standing trial in Dachau, Germany, for crimes committed at the Dachau concentration camp and the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in central Germany, where the Mittelwerk V-2 factory was located. As the general director of the secret rocket manufacturing plant, Georg Rickhey stood among the accused. He was a Nazi working as an administrator at Mittelwerk, tasked with organizing the underground V-2 operation. It was a tough job. The brutality of the SS made it nearly impossible to maintain a prison labor force, because so many of them died.

  A number of von Braun’s team members in El Paso were deposed for Rickhey’s trial, but for reasons still unknown, von Braun was not interviewed at the time. Those who were questioned, including von Braun’s longtime colleague Arthur Rudolph, played it close to the vest and provided a highly sanitized version of conditions at Mittelwerk to minimize Rickhey’s role. They stressed that he was little more than a figurehead and questioned the fairness of blaming Rickhey when it was the SS and their appointed guards inside the factory who actually carried out the atrocities against the prisoners. Those who were interviewed fell back on the tried-and-true tactic of scapegoating the SS, thereby deflecting attention from their own complicity in the war’s atrocities. The bloody reputation of Hitler’s elite guard made it easy to assume they were to blame.

  Von Braun was later called as a witness for Rickhey’s defense. Citing security concerns, the US Army refused to allow von Braun to travel to Germany to testify in person. Instead, he submitted written sworn testimony. Like Rudolph and the other rocket group members, von Braun echoed denials of Rickhey’s responsibilty in the Mittelwerk operation. He wrote: “I am not acquainted with the formal position which Mr. Rickhey had in the corporation as well as with his duties, competences and authority. However, I do know that Mr. Rickhey had very little influence in the actual deciding powers that determined the activities of the Mittelwerk.” By December, the Dachau-Nordhausen trial ended and Rickhey was acquitted. This brush with the war crimes trial reminded von Braun and his group that their favorable position with the United States government was not guaranteed. Careless conversations about their lives and work during the war could invite more questions from their American hosts—questions that could cost them—and especially von Braun—everything.

  For thousands of years, the swastika was an emblem of health, well-being, and peace. The Nazis adopted the symbol, twisting it into an icon of hate. In this 1947 photo of von Braun (third from right) and company, the swastika appears on the store’s sign, ironically, in its original ancient form.

  Kapustin Yar Test Range

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1949


  While von Braun waited for the US government to give him and his team a meaningful assignment, in the USSR Sergei Korolev was beginning to make progress. After two years of painstakingly recreating V-2 schematics, his team of engineers had built and launched a replica of von Braun’s rocket. This milestone prompted Stalin to approve the design and development of the first original Russian rocket, known as the R-2. On the launchpad at Kapustin Yar, it was ready for flight. The sixty-foot, twenty-ton vehicle had an improved guidance system and achieved twice the range of von Braun’s V-2. Korolev’s biggest innovation had been the R-2’s detachable nose cone. Once the rocket’s fuel was spent, the tank fell away. Now lighter, it could travel farther and faster. The military planned to pack the nose cone with a bomb, but Korolev had something else in mind. He wanted his R-2 to carry and release a satellite into Earth orbit. But he hid this secret aspiration from the NKVD, who watched him closely. If they suspected Korolev was working on anything other than national defense, he could be arrested again.

  Korolev watched the R-2 lift from the pad, slowly at first, then gaining speed and arcing into the sky. It landed 370 miles from the launch site. His dream of launching a satellite was within reach.