But when Hitler appeared, smallish, thin, dramatic in general appearance, Kolff, like all other Germans present, was eager to assist him. They saw him as a leader in trouble, a man endeavoring to do his best for Germany, and he merited the love of his people. All the monstrous misbehavior of his underlings was forgotten and forgiven when the man himself stood forth, quiet, hesitant, smiling in his weary way, pleading for support.
“Kolff, tell me. What is the future of the A-4?”
“My Fuehrer, you know that with the ones that we’re firing on London from Wassenaar in Holland-”
“I know about that. So do the English.”
“We’re getting twenty-nine out of thirty excellent firings. I do believe the problems that halted us for so long-”
Hitler, weary of the continual excuses, abruptly ordered that lunch be brought: for the others a rich chicken stew with dumplings; for himself mixed vegetables lightly cooked and a large bottle of Fachingen mineral water. As they ate he asked in a sudden change of subject, “Kolff, have you ever been to Nordhausen?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“I want you to go. With Breutzl dead, you know more about production than any of the others. See if they’re on the right track.” When he rose to stride up and down beneath the protective ceiling, the others rose, too, but he bade them be seated.
“Now, General Funkhauser ...”
“General?”
“Yes. You’re now in charge of all A-4 rocketry. Peenemünde, Nordhausen, Wassenaar. We’ve had enough of scientists. Now we need warriors.”
“I’m ready,” General Funkhauser said in clipped accents that boded much trouble for scientists like Von Braun and his fellows.
[89] “Now tell me honestly, what’s been happening with the A-4,” Hitler said, resuming his massive oaken chair.
From his pocket General Funkhauser produced a slip of paper: “Excellent news! Five days ago, an A-4 hit a London cinema, 287 dead. Last week an A-4 hit Stepney at marketing hour, 197 dead ...” On and on he went, detailing the chance landings of chance rockets. Taken altogether they did not add up to a thousand deaths, nor to the interruption of one industrial operation. Yet the men in the subterranean center consoled themselves with the fact that the horrible English bombings of Germany were at last being revenged. General Funkhauser’s family in Hamburg had been wiped out in the terrible fire bombings of 24 July 1943, when fifty-five thousand civilians had died, and now with grim satisfaction he recited the retaliation: “Two weeks ago an A-4 landed in a small village near London-I had the name but forget it now-and more than ninety people were killed.”
Hitler rose from his chair, moved about with obvious delight, and cried, “We shall be revenged. Funkhauser, for every German soul that perished in your Hamburg, a thousand Englishmen will die. When we get the rockets flowing, that is.”
He looked directly at Dieter Kolff and asked, “They will keep flowing, won’t they?”
“That’s my job,” Kolff said.
“See that they keep working at Nordhausen,” Hitler said, and the conference was over.
General Funkhauser wanted very much to stop at Peenemünde to inform the insolent scientists that for the rest of the war he would be in charge, but Hitler had been so insistent that Kolff inspect Nordhausen that he deemed it prudent to fly directly to that extraordinary site, and within two and a half hours they were landing at a secret airstrip on the southern rim of the Harz Mountains. Small cars were waiting to carry them to the mouth of the tunnel that led to the underground works.
It was like descending into hell, Kolff thought, and when he saw the appalling conditions in which the thousands of slave laborers worked-dark cells with no sunlight or ventilation or toilet facilities or food-the grandeur of Adolf Hitler at Wolf’s Lair dimmed. This was hideous, the portrait of a beleaguered nation gone underground, [90] snarling like a pursued animal. The French prisoners who worked here, the Poles, the Dutch, the thousands of Russians, were slaves who would never again know freedom.
It was remarkable that such an installation, more than a mile deep, with branches running in all directions, cut into the stone by other slaves now dead, could produce the intricate parts needed to make an A-4 fly, but thanks to the dictatorial control of Himmler’s SS men, it did. Slaves who would never again see the light of day forged parts which carried messages to the stars.
“Can our production be maintained?” Dieter asked, judging it to be prudent for him to show interest.
Without attempting to answer this question, Funkhauser summoned the local manager, a brutal, scowling man who had once served as a policeman in a rural town: “We experience sabotage now and then. Can’t be prevented.”
“How do you handle it?” Dieter asked.
“We line all the men in the section against that wall and machine-gun them.”
“Don’t you lose skilled labor?”
“These are minimal jobs. We get replacements by the truckload. We can teach them in one afternoon.” He laughed. “They learn or we shoot them.”
At this moment Kolff chanced to see Funkhauser’s face, and for the first time he realized that the new dictator of the A-4 program did not approve of conditions at Nordhausen, but before either of the visitors could speak, the local man said with obvious pride, “Look at the high quality of work we do here,” and Dieter had to agree that it was miraculous: “You wonder how men in such conditions can do such fine work.”
“Discipline,” the manager said. “We wouldn’t dare assign German workmen to a hole like this. And the slaves we do get have to be guarded by SS men. We couldn’t trust anyone else.”
He was eager for his new commander to see Dora, the camp where the replacement slaves were kept, and when Dieter saw this miasma, this abhorrent place with its rows of shacks, its wall where saboteurs were shot, and its incredibly filthy kitchens, he wondered why the war did not halt tomorrow, but even as he protested inwardly, it occurred to him that the conditions under which German prisoners would in future live under the Russians were [91] apt to be equally bad, and he resolved that it he escaped he would run to the west rather than to the east.
When the tour ended and he was alone with Funkhauser he was afraid to say what he thought of the infamous things he had just seen, but the general felt no compunction. “As soon as we knock out England, places like this must be eliminated. Too much wasted human capacity.” And still Kolff kept silent, for he was thinking that any sensible observer of this war must know that throwing casual and almost accidental single rockets at London was never going to subdue that city or its allies. Good God, he thought, this is almost November, and only seventy-three rockets have hit London, with twenty-six of them landing in remote suburbs. Really, nothing had been accomplished, or would be. Wernher von Braun was right in thinking, if he did so think, that the major justification of the A-4 would be in its peaceful application, in its offering man the chance to travel outside the limitations of Earth.
In the meantime, he would return to Peenemünde, no longer the major center of the rocket effort, and do whatever was required to stay alive under General Funkhauser’s monitoring eye. In his spare time he would continue his experiments on the A-10, which in years to come would be able to bomb New York and Washington, for he shared the emotions of the men at Hitler’s headquarters: Allied bombers had pulverized German cities, so Allied cities must be terror-bombed in return. It was illogical, considering his basic concern about escape, but it was understandable. He, too, wanted revenge.
These contradictions were eliminated shortly after the turn of the year, for Russian troops moved ever closer to Peenemünde, while the Americans and English applied heavy pressure along the western front. One day Von Braun appeared unannounced at Kolff’s research hut, announcing a meeting of the leading scientists at a time when General Funkhauser would be absent from the island. It was a grim assembly, made more so by their leader’s ominous words: “Russian troops will be here soon. It’s inevitable. Our task is simple. Keep our
cadre together. Take our papers with us. And move west to be captured by the Americans.”
One young scientist, terribly frightened, asked, “Won’t [92] we run the risk of being shot by Funkhauser?”
Without flinching, Von Braun turned and smiled at the young fellow. “We run four risks of being shot. In the closing days the SS may shoot us to prevent the spread of our knowledge to other countries. Out of sheer hatred the Russians may shoot us when they arrive. The Americans may shoot us if we can’t explain things fast enough when they overrun us. And wherever we move, some damn-fool sentinel may shoot us by accident.”
“But why do you choose the Americans?” another asked.
“I have never understood how the English do business. They seem to despise anyone who works for them, even their own people. I have no feeling for the French at all. They’d be too stingy to support a real space effort. The Russians? They’re abominable, and those of us who side with them will do poorly. The Americans have the money, and after they see what we’re able to do with the A-4, they’ll be willing to let us spend it in building a real space program.”
Amazingly, more than a hundred scientists, fully realizing the risks they were taking, agreed that when the distant guns began to echo at Peenemünde, they would put together a cavalcade that would wander the face of war-torn Germany trying to find Americans to whom they could surrender. They could not know, at this painful stage of Germany’s impending defeat, that in France, Professor Stanley Mott, a practical engineer like themselves, had put together his team of experts whose job it would be to scour Germany in search of Wernher von Braun, General Eugen Breutzl and Dieter Kolff, trusting that the Germans would have sense enough to bring their papers with them. Mott had heard rumors that General Breutzl had been killed in the big air raid of 24-25 October, but he hoped that this was not correct, for it was the managerial genius of this man that would be most sorely needed during the first stages of America’s effort to build a rocket.
When the rolling thunder of Russian artillery barrages could be heard in the south, announcing that Stettin was about to fall, the scientists of Peenemünde made their move. In large convoys of trucks, small cars and anything else that could run, they headed west toward Nordhausen and the underground horror in which their A-4s were [93] stubbornly being fabricated, in the last wild hope that some miracle would enable them to destroy London, or at least Antwerp.
On the day of departure, with doom darkening the sky and the mind, Dieter Kolff faced a series of difficult decisions. He realized that once aboard one of the trucks leaving Peenemünde’s island, he would have no chance of disembarking on the mainland side to pick up Liesl. It might be practical to leave the area with the others, then double back to fetch her, but this seemed illogical. Or he could simply ride with his colleagues and forget her, but that he could not do; he loved Liesl and appreciated her heroism in sharing with him the dangers of hiding the papers. Overriding these personal considerations was the fact that whereas the trucks carried tons of documents, to keep them away from the Russians, he better than anyone else, better even than Von Braun, knew that what they carried were the simple equations, the easy solutions that any Russian or American scientist could reconstruct in a few weeks, given a real A-4 to analyze. The knapsack that Liesl had buried on her farm contained the secrets of the A-10, the rocket that could soar four thousand miles across oceans to attack other continents. These papers were irreplaceable, and to leave the area without them would be insane, so when the big trucks rolled away they left Kolff standing alone.
After Von Braun’s team disappeared in the west, he stuffed a few valued belongings in his knapsack-a slide rule, a drawing compass, an S curve-and went to his bicycle, but before he could leave the island a member of the skeleton SS Troops commandeered him for a painful duty: “Himmler says we’re to blow up any remaining A-4s.” So with great concentrations of Trialen, Dieter had to destroy the majestic engines he had helped create. Those lying partially completed on the ground were easily pulverized, but when the SS men came to the last rocket, standing upright on its pad, they did not know how to handle it, so the job was given to Dieter.
There it stood, the last A-4 at Peenemünde. It rose sleek and silvery forty-six feet in the air, like some monstrous artillery shell waiting to be loaded. Beautifully proportioned, aerodynamically perfect, it looked as if it longed to be on its way to some distant target, its fins ready to [94] keep it stable as it slashed through the atmosphere. It was magnificent, and it was doomed.
“We’ll fire it,” Dieter said. “Out over the Baltic. The Russians must never get a rocket like this.”
He was the only one who knew how to prepare it for firing, and when the controls were set, he advised the SS men to take cover behind the log-and-stone revetments, for, as he warned them, “The noise and flame will be terrific.”
He was the last man at the launching pad, a mere five feet four inches looking up at the rocket nine times taller than he. As he stood there he could see marks from the hundred improvements he had made, the thousand that Baron von Braun had suggested. This was one of the noblest instruments yet made by man, a messenger to a new age, and it would soon fly aimlessly.
Throwing the switches, running from the launching area, he leaped behind a bulwark as the mighty engine exploded. Upward through the autumn sky rose the last rocket, out toward the Baltic it roared, and far from Germany it plunged harmlessly into the dark waters.
Dieter feared that the northern ferry might be guarded by new SS men who would not let him pass to the mainland, so when the rocket disappeared he pedaled south to the bridge where the guards would recognize him. When they asked where he was going he said, as always, “To see my girl,” and as soon as he reached the Koenig farm he announced, “Time to dig up the papers.”
“Are we leaving?” Liesl asked.
“Haven’t you heard the Russian guns?”
“I’ve been terrified.”
She did not seem like a woman who could be easily terrified, yet it was clear that she had for some weeks been obsessed by the approaching enemy and was now relieved that steps were to be taken. It was she who produced the shovel and started digging; it was she who knelt down to retrieve the knapsack.
Her father and mother, tied to the land their ancestors had farmed in Pomerania for generations, preferred to trust their fortunes with the Russians; they had despised what they had seen of the Nazis and judged that things could not be much worse under Communism. The [95] farewells were not tearful; all over Germany families were being torn apart, and most took solace from the fact that their members were at least alive. Herr Koenig did not kiss his daughter but did shake her hand, as if she were a stranger from the village. Frau Koenig, standing in the doorway that led into the barn beneath the bedrooms, wept. She, too, shook hands first with Liesl, then with Dieter. At the last moment Liesl ran to the cow she had raised and kissed it on the side of its placid face, embracing it with her arms.
So they started on their hegira, he walking, she on the bicycle with the precious knapsack strapped into a large bundle behind. They headed south for Berlin, but whenever they came to a crossroads, armed guards kept shoving them north and away from the capital, which was already overcrowded.
“We are ordered to Nordhausen,” Dieter explained again and again. “They are waiting for us in Berlin.”
“Blocked,” the guards said. “You must keep to the north.”
If they did this, Dieter realized, they must sooner or later come into conflict with the SS units guarding the Baltic coast, so with all the energy he had he pressed for a southerly direction, and it was this stubbornness that caused the perilous shooting.
They were on the outskirts of Neustrelitz, a small city halfway between Peenemünde and Berlin, when an SS guard, determined to protect his post, even against Russians, directed them to stop pressing south and head westward. Dieter pointed out, quite correctly, that to do so would take them in the Lake Müritz region, which would be difficu
lt to negotiate.
“West!” the guard ordered, and later when he spotted the Kolffs trying to sneak down a lateral road, he took aim at Dieter and hit him in the left shoulder. When the guard saw his target go down in a heap, he was satisfied that he had killed him, so he took careful aim at Liesl, but as he did so, she saw him, and in a flash fell to the ground, encouraging him to assume that he had killed them both. For a moment he contemplated running over to pick up their bicycle, but he knew he himself might be shot if he abandoned his post, so he thought no more about the matter.
On the ground, Liesl saw that her husband was [96] bleeding copiously, so keeping low, she tended his wound, satisfying herself that he was not about to die. When she had the blood stanched, she turned her attention to the bicycle, pulling and hauling until she could work it into a position outside the line of sight of the trigger-hungry SS man. When she succeeded in getting both her husband and the loaded bicycle in safe terrain, she slapped Dieter’s face several times, challenging him to get on his feet and out of Neustrelitz.
He could do neither. His wound was more serious than she had detected, and after a few steps he fainted dead away. Now she had to make grave decisions.
Lugging first him, and then the bicycle, she worked her way almost to the outskirts of the town, but by then she was exhausted. Sitting under a tree, she breathed heavily and listened to her husband’s irregular panting. When a farmer came by she commandeered him: “Good fellow! My husband has been hurt. Can you find a doctor?”
The man had his own preoccupations: “The Russians are coming. Who cares about doctors?”
“My husband is dying,” she pleaded.
“I’ll watch him. You fetch the doctor.”
“You’ll steal my bicycle.”
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