Secret Weapons

by Brian Ford

  One of the first initiatives after the Allies invaded Peenemünde was to test the V-2 rockets before any were moved to other countries. In October 1945, the British Operation Backfire fired several V-2 rockets from northern Germany. There were many reports of what became known as ‘ghost rockets’, unaccountable sightings of missile trails in the skies above Scandinavia. These were from Operation Backfire: not only did the Nazis fire their monster rockets from Germany, so too did the British.

  The Soviet option

  It has been widely reported that the Germans unanimously decided to surrender to the Western Allies. This is not the case. Some of the scientists were more impressed by the Soviet system than they were by American capitalism, and Helmut Gröttrup was the most conspicuous of these. Gröttrup was an electronics engineer who no longer wished to ‘understudy’ Von Braun as he had done in the development of the V-2 rocket. Gröttrup decided to approach the Soviets and was offered a senior position in Russian rocket development. Between 9 September 1945 and 22 October 1946 Gröttrup with his loyal team of researchers worked for the USSR in the Soviet Occupied Zone of Germany (later to become the German Democratic Republic). His director of research was Sergei Korolev, Russia’s leading rocket scientist. In the autumn of 1946, the entire team was moved to Russia. Gröttrup had cooperated with Russia in bringing 20 of the V-2 rockets to the newly established rocket research institute at Kapustin Yar, between Volgograd and the deserts of Astrakhan. The base is known today as Znamensk and it had opened on 13 May 1946 specifically to offer facilities to German experts. In charge was General Vasily Voznyuk and on 18 October 1947 they launched the first of the V-2 rockets brought in from Germany.

  Gröttrup worked under Korolev to develop the Russian R-1 project; these were in reality V-2 rockets built using Russian manufacturing and materials with the German designs. The People’s Commissar of Armaments, Dmitry Ustinov, requested that Gröttrup and his team of technicians design new missile systems, culminating in the projected R-14 rocket which was similar to the design of long-range missiles that Von Braun was developing during the war. The site at Znamensk developed into a top-secret cosmodrome and the small town itself was expanded to provide a pleasurable and civilized lifestyle for the families of the research teams working on the rockets. It was no longer included on Russian maps, and there were strict rules against disclosure of what was going on.

  The value of the German expertise to the Russians proved to be limited and, in due course, the authorities allowed the research workers to return to their homes in Germany. The design of rocket motors in Russia by Aleksei Mikhailovich Isaev was already superior to the German concepts used in the V-2 rockets, and their lightweight copper motors gave rise to the first intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7. It was this design advantage that gave the Russians technical superiority in rocketry and led to their launching the world’s first satellite Sputnik 1, and subsequently to the launch of Yuri Gagarin as the first man into space.

  The same technology gave the Russians the capacity to launch the first lunar probe, and later the spacecraft sent out towards the planets. Indeed, this design of rocket is still in use today. Once it was recognized that there was little point in keeping the German rocket specialists in Russia, on 22 November 1955 Gröttrup was given leave to return to his native Germany. In cooperation with Jürgen Dethloff he went on to design and patent the chip card which was to become so important in modern banking systems, and so his post-war genius is with us today.

  Moving to America: Operation Paperclip

  Most of Von Braun’s team opted to surrender to the Western Allies, rather than the Russians. With the position of Germany deteriorating rapidly, conflicting orders began to arrive. The rocket technicians were ordered to move en masse to Mittelwerk; then they received orders to join the Army and stay to fight the invading Allies. Von Braun opted to hide in the mountains, out of harm’s way and nearer to the advancing American and British forces. Several thousand employees and their families left their homes, voyaging south in ships and barges, by rail and road. They had to dodge Allied bombing raids and deal with Nazi officials at checkpoints. Von Braun was fearful that the defeated SS might try to destroy the results of their work, so he had blueprints of all their designs hidden in an abandoned mineshaft in the Harz mountains where he could later retrieve them.

  In March 1945, his driver fell asleep at the wheel and Von Braun was left with a compound fracture of his left arm. Insisting on being mobile, he had the fracture roughly set in a cast. It was unsatisfactory, and so in the following month he had to return to hospital where the bone was broken again and re-aligned correctly. He was still in plaster as the Allied troops advanced.

  Suddenly the team was ordered to move to Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps. They were placed under guard by the SS who had orders to shoot everyone if they were about to fall into Allied hands. Von Braun got wind of this, and persuaded the SS officer in charge that keeping them together made them a sitting target for Allied bombing raids. Since they were important personnel, Von Braun argued, it would surely be safer to distribute the members of the team among the nearby villages. In one of these villages, on 2 May 1945, Von Braun’s brother Magnus — also a rocket engineer — suddenly encountered an American private of the 44th Infantry Division named Fred Schneiker. Magnus von Braun rode up on his bicycle, and announced: ‘My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. Please, we want to surrender.’ Von Braun was immediately locked up, and so were thousands of the others, as war criminals. The factories were quickly overrun and between 22 and 31 May 1945 a total of 341 railway trucks were used to move as many V-2 rockets as possible and the manufacturing equipment to Antwerp, from where 16 Liberty ships transported them to the port of New Orleans. From there the rockets and equipment were transferred to the New Mexican desert under conditions of extreme secrecy.

  The German rocket engineers themselves were also taken to the United States covertly, as part of Operation Paperclip. This secret scheme was set up by the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which in turn gave rise to today’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It had been assumed that the personnel involved in creating the weapons of mass destruction would be put on trial for war crimes, but during the closing stages of the war it was decided instead to see if the United States could secretly harness their knowledge. Agents within the United States resolved to bring these people to America and use the benefits of their research, at the same time denying the benefits to their allies, the Soviet Union and the British.

  Although relatively unknown, there was a similar scheme operating for the British. This was code named Operation Surgeon and it was intended to bring promising research engineers to Britain and to deny them to the Soviet Union. The official policy was not to involve suspected war criminals, but to capture some 1,500 research personnel and to remove them forcibly. The document setting this out was entitled Employment of German Scientists and Technicians: Denial Policy, and it survives to this day at the National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. It was explicit about the need to obtain personnel, and said they would be removed ‘whether they liked it or not’. Many of the individuals on the lists offered their services to other Commonwealth countries, with some opting to go to South American countries (including Brazil) and others going to Scandinavia and Switzerland. The scheme was the first to come into operation, and ran from the time the British forces overran the German research establishments until all the scientists and engineers had been accounted for.

  Not until September 1945 was Operation Paperclip authorized by President Harry S. Truman. The President’s orders stated that nobody should be included who had ‘been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism’. Included under that clause as Nazi sympathizers were many of the senior figures like Von Braun who was stated, at the time, to be ‘a menace to the security of the Allied Forces’.

  As a result, the aims of Ope
ration Paperclip were clearly unlawful and what is more OSS agents acted in direct defiance of the President’s orders. In order to make the most desirable personnel seem acceptable, the representatives of the OSS constructed false employment and faked political biographies for the chosen scientists. All references to Nazi party membership, and any political activity in Nazi Germany, were removed from the record, and new résumés were concocted by the American secret service. At the end of each exercise, a German specialist — often with enduring Nazi sympathies — had been provided with a fictitious political history and an imaginary personal life. The documents were typed up, carefully countersigned, and attached to their birth certificates with paperclips — which gave the operation its name. In the meantime, Von Braun had disappeared. He found himself secretly jailed at a top-secret military intelligence unit at Fort Hunt, Virginia, in the United States. It had no name, and was referred to only by its postal code ‘PO Box 1142’. This was a top-secret confinement facility undeclared to the Red Cross and was thus in breach of the Geneva Convention.

  Another of the senior scientists who was taken to America by the Allies was Adolf Thiel. Before he had joined Von Braun at the Peenemünde research laboratories, Thiel had been Associate Professor of Engineering at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology. After the war, as part of Operation Paperclip, Thiel was taken with Von Braun to Fort Bliss, Texas, and later to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and on to Huntsville, Alabama. His prime responsibility in America was the refinement of the V-2 design into the Redstone missile, and he later adapted it to become the Thor ballistic missile, which was the first stage rocket for the Explorer spacecraft. Thiel was made a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society in 1968 and died in Los Angeles in 2001 aged 86. So he lived into the new millennium, and saw the realization of the dream of space exploration.

  Dörnberger was also brought to America and went on to work for the United States Air Force developing guided missiles. Later he was a key figure in developing the X-20 Dyna-Soar which was, in many ways, the ancestor of the space shuttle; he also worked on the Rascal, an air-to-surface nuclear missile used by the Strategic Air Command. He later retired to Germany and died in 1980 at home in Baden-Württemberg. On 8 July 1944 he had received a handwritten note from Hitler: ‘I have had to apologize only to two men in my whole life,’ the Führer had written. ‘The first was Field Marshal von Brauchitsch. I did not listen to him when he told me again and again how important your research was. The second man is yourself. I never believed that your work would be successful.’

  America conquers space

  Von Braun was soon working for the United States as their senior rocket designer. Within two years, the United States had test-launched her first spacecraft — a two-stage rocket code named Bumper.

  Shortly afterwards, they proudly announced the inauguration of their successful Redstone rockets. The Redstone was described to the world as the first American ballistic missile and it was in service with the United States Army in Germany between June 1958 and June 1964 as part of the Cold War deterrence policy of NATO. The Redstone was also involved in the first United States nuclear missile tests in the Pacific and in 1960–61 a Redstone was used for the pioneering Project Mercury manned space flights. Its predictability earned the Redstone nicknames including the ‘Army’s Workhorse’ and ‘Old Reliable’. This rocket had its final flight when it launched Australia’s first earth satellite in 1967.

  Although Bumper and Redstone are claimed as pioneering names in American rocketry, both were actually V-2 rockets. The Bumper, heralded as the first two-stage rocket when it was initially tested on 13 May 1948, was a German V-2 fitted with a little United States Wac Corporal solid-fuel rocket as a second stage. The Redstones were also V-2 rockets, some with later modifications, but all based on the Nazi-funded research during World War II. When John Glenn rose into space, it was on top of a modified V-2. And when the Australians launched their WRESAT satellite into orbit on 29 November 1967 from Woomera, it was one of those modified V-2 rockets that provided the launch.

  Ten years after entering the United States, Von Braun became a naturalized US citizen. He went on to work on the US Army intermediate range ballistic missile programme until this project was absorbed by NASA. Von Braun was appointed Director of the new Marshall Space Flight Center and was the chief designer of the Saturn V launch vehicle which was the rocket that launched the Apollo spacecraft. NASA said he was the greatest rocket scientist in history and his crowning achievement was the Saturn V rocket that led to men on the moon in July 1969. In 1975 Von Braun was awarded the National Medal of Science.

  On 16 June 1977, Wernher von Braun died of pancreatic cancer in Alexandria, Virginia, at the age of 65. He had, after trials and tribulations, realized his dream. His experience and training in Nazi Germany had put an American on the moon, and his wartime adventures in designing weapons to aim at the Allies had given the American nation their lead in space.

  CHAPTER 5

  DOCTORS AT WAR

  Medicine became a focus for secret science during World War II. Research workers were instructed to do all they could to find ways of improving the lot of the military, and to find innovative ways of saving lives. New treatments, super-drugs and extraordinary new surgical procedures and many other ways of saving lives and returning trained wounded soldiers to the front as quickly as possible were all developed during the war years. Yet the same specialities were also harnessed to produce new, lethal secret weapons of terrifying potential. Modern medicine owes much to the rapid research of World War II; yet many of the worst excesses were perpetrated by doctors.

  CHEMICALS IN WAR

  Medical science had already shown that many chemicals have a burning, blistering or destructive capacity against human victims, and experiments to use them against soldiers during wartime date from World War I. Gas shells had been used by the British, the Germans and the French, among others. The choice of poison gases was wide, and they ranged from irritants that incapacitated and temporarily blinded the enemy, to gases that burned the body, destroyed the lungs and liquefied the tissues. First to be used in World War I was a tear gas, xylyl bromide. Most accounts state that this was first used in that war by the Germans in 1915, but it had been used by the French against German troops in August 1914 as the Germans were advancing through Belgium towards northern France. Within a year the Germans retaliated. They launched a well-planned attack by releasing their latest secret weapon, chlorine from gas cylinders, up-wind from the Allied positions at Ypres in April 1915. The Allies immediately condemned Germany for breaching the Hague Convention, with the British a leading voice of protest (though in fact it was the British who by then had the largest stockpiles of poison gas, ready for use in war). The Germans retorted that the Convention spoke only of projectiles — and they had simply unleashed the gas from containers. They added that the French had already used gas against their troops, without similar censure.

  In any event, the secret was out and gas war had been officially declared. Within weeks, thousands of the chlorine gas cylinders had been installed by the British on the front line inland from Calais at Loos. But no mention was to be made of the word ‘gas’. The cylinders were called ‘accessories’, and the use of the ‘g-word’ was a punishable breach of the rules. The attacks were easy to launch — taps on the cylinders were simply opened and the gas rolled along with the breeze. Once launched, they were less easy to control, however; on the day in question the breeze shifted direction and most of the casualties of the first attack were British soldiers, rather than German. It was an historic example of what we now call, with bitter irony, ‘friendly fire’. The experience taught a crucial lesson: the gas could not simply be released by an army without compromising its own troops. After this episode, the gases were packed in artillery shells and the Hague Convention was conveniently ignored.

  The Germans fired the gas in shells against the Russians in 1915 under the code name T-Stoff. These attacks failed, be
cause the temperatures were low and the liquid did not vaporize as expected. It either lay on the ground, or was wafted back towards the German lines. Other tear gas agents were later used. They were a range of dangerous chemicals including ethyl bromoacetate, bromoacetone (known as BA), bromobenzyl cyanide (Camite), bromomethyl ethyl ketone (Bn-Stoff) and chloroacetone (Tonite). The Germans used them either singly or in combination under the general name Weisskreuz (White Cross). The name came from the identifying symbol that was stencilled on each shell.

  Chlorine was brought into use as it acts as a disabling tear gas when used in small amounts, but kills painfully by destroying the lung tissues if inhaled in significant quantities. It is a heavy gas and rolls across the countryside, filling holes and trenches where the enemy might be in hiding. It forms a greenish-yellow fog with a penetrating, acrid smell and was also known as Bertholite. Chlorine reacts with the water in the body to produce hydrochloric acid which burns the lungs from within. Germany was the first to use this in World War I at Ypres; there are reports that it was last used in Iraq against coalition forces in 2007.

  Phosgene followed, after being first used by the French in 1915. It was a similarly suffocating gas but did not produce coughing, like chlorine; as a result, more of it was inhaled by the victims. The effects also took longer to appear, and often more than a day passed before soldiers started to collapse. It was eventually used by both sides in World War I and was blended with chlorine to produce a mixture called White Star. The gas produced devastating effects by damaging the eyes, burning into the skin — even slight lesions are like frostbite — and causing the lungs to burn and fill with fluid. Sufferers from an attack drown from within. This was used in many weapons during World War I; it was later used against the Chinese by the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938. Huge amounts of phosgene were stockpiled, ready for use in World War II, but in the event it was never employed. Hitler was the victim of a gas attack in World War I and resolved never to use it in war. He was well aware of the devastating consequences of retaliation by an enemy using phosgene and knew it would be a dangerous tactic to adopt, in case the Allies hit back with it.