German precision engineering was now the official property of the Soviet government. The specialists back home were anxiously awaiting the war trophies. Epic bureaucratic battles would later erupt in Moscow over who got the booty. Fortunately for Chertok, his initial role in this national technology transfer was restricted to inventorying, packing, and shipping the loot. Others would have to fight over it. At times he felt like a wide-eyed child that had been handed the keys to the Detsky Mir toy store across from NKVD headquarters in Dzerzhinski Square. “Oh, this German love for details and this exactness, which has ingrained such top-notch work into the culture,” he declared in an April 29 diary entry. “I am envious.”
Anything was for the taking—exquisite Khulman drafting tables, vibration benches, entire photochemical laboratories. And what brand names: Philips, Rohde & Schwartz, Lorentz, Hartmann-Braun, Haskle, AEG, Karl Zeiss. Chertok had read about these famous firms in the Western journals that were selectively circulated at NII-1, but until now they had been as familiar and unavailable as a Lana Turner pinup.
Taking it all seemed only fair. “We have every right to this,” Armaments Minister Dmitri Ustinov explained. “We paid for it with a great deal of blood.” After all, it was the Germans who had violated the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, who had attacked unprovoked two years later and slaughtered millions of Soviet citizens. In Russia, they lacked everything, while Germany had an overabundance of everything. “The thing that every laboratory needs the most and is in the shortest supply,” Chertok continued in his diary, “is the Siemens four mirror oscillograph. In Moscow, at NII-1, we only had one for the entire institute. And these Germans had so many!”
Surveying the marvels of German science, Chertok could not help being swept up in the moment, pushing aside the fact that the Nazis had murdered his Jewish relatives in Auschwitz and ravaged his homeland. “No,” he wrote on April 30, “we no longer felt the hatred or thirst for revenge that had boiled in each of us earlier. Now it was even a pity to break open these high-quality steel laboratory doors and to entrust these diligent but not very careful soldiers with packing priceless precision instruments. But faster, faster—all of Berlin is waiting for us! I am stepping over the body of a young panzerfaust operator that has not yet been cleared away. I am on my way to open the next safe.”
• • •
Five hundred miles west of Berlin, ensconced in the Parisian luxury of the Plaza Athénée Hotel, Colonel Holger N. Toftoy had been issued almost the same instructions as Boris Chertok. Only his scavenging list consisted of one item: the V-2.
Like Moscow, Washington wanted the rocket. The U.S. Army had quickly grasped that the V-2 represented a new type of weapon that could revolutionize warfare. The rocket had demonstrated that it could deliver significant explosive charges over long distances with relative accuracy. It could be mass-produced (Hitler had ordered twelve thousand units made) and easily transported. Its potential was obvious. It was even possible that guided missiles might someday replace artillery and make long-range bombers obsolete. The U.S. brass was not about to pass up the chance to grab this promising new weapon, as Toftoy’s boss, Major General Hugh Knerr, made clear in a 1945 memo. “Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research,” Knerr wrote. “If we do not take this opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it… we will remain years behind. Pride and face-saving have no place in national insurance.” Knerr’s boss, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, put it even more starkly in a cable to Washington. “The thinking of the scientific directors of this group is 25 years ahead of U.S. Recommend that 100 of the very best men of this [V-2] organization be evacuated to U.S immediately.”
Toftoy’s marching orders were equally terse. “Get enough V-2 components to make 100 complete rounds,” he instructed in the spare tone preferred by the military. “Ship to US.” Attached to the directive was a “black list” of names headed by Wernher von Braun, the boy wonder who at the age of twenty-four had been put in charge of what would become the Third Reich’s most important military project. It sounded so simple: round up one hundred rockets and one hundred men. Little did Toftoy know that the assignment would preoccupy the next ten years of his life.
Unlike Chertok, “Ludy” Toftoy (as he was oddly nicknamed by his classmates at West Point) was a career military officer, a graduate of numerous advanced programs at the Command and General Staff School, the Ordnance School, and the Army-Navy Staff College. He was a crack marksman, a recipient of the Knox artillery trophy and the Distinguished Pistol Shot medal. Slim and square-jawed, Toftoy was the embodiment of the American soldiering spirit. He had brains and brawn, and an innate talent for organization, which he displayed amply and eagerly from his earliest days at West Point, where he was chairman of the Ring Committee, designer of the 1926 Class Crest, president of the Dialectical Society, art editor of the student newspaper, and a four-year letterman on the pistol team. The West Point yearbook, the Howitzer, summed up his busy stay on the banks of the Hudson: “It is no exaggeration to say that almost everything that [the class of] ’26 has done during the past two years has felt the guiding hand of little Ludy.”
Little Ludy, now grown up and newly promoted to chief of Ordnance Technical Intelligence in the European theater, was for once having difficulty carrying out his orders. Though the V-2s he was supposed to find had been mostly fired from mobile launch sites in Holland and France, there were no rockets in either country. The missiles, apparently, had not been designed for lengthy storage periods, and firing batteries like the 2./485 that had launched the first strike against London tended to run through the German rocket supply faster than factories could replenish it. So Toftoy had to go to the source, which was problematic since the First Belorussian Red Army Group had overrun the V-2’s original production facility, a sandy islet in the Baltic Sea called Peenemünde. Fortunately, Peenemünde was of limited value to the Soviets because the SS had moved the V-2 assembly lines to a secret location after a series of Allied air raids in August 1943.
Despite Toftoy’s numerous and increasingly frantic entreaties, army intelligence still hadn’t located the new facility. It could be anywhere in Germany or Austria. Worse, it could be in Soviet-occupied territory, like Peenemünde, in which case Toftoy would never be able to carry out his mission. As Ludy contemplated the unpleasant prospect of a strikeout blemishing his stellar service record, a message clattered off the Teletype machine at G-2 army intelligence headquarters in Frankfurt. The 104th “Timberwolf” Infantry Division had apparently stumbled across something horrible in the Harz Mountains in central Germany.
John M. Galione, a private with the 145th Regiment, had made the grisly discovery by literally following his nose. “Hey Sarge, what do you think that odor could be?” he asked early on the morning of April 5. The smell was the stench of decaying corpses from a passing prisoner transport train. For four days, Galione followed the rail tracks, convinced they led to a concentration camp. He walked more than one hundred miles, mostly at night and by himself. “Something overpowering came over me,” he recalled fifty years later. “I don’t know what it was. My legs just kept walking. It was as if someone was pushing me from behind.”
Finally, early on April 10, after hiking again all night, he came across an abandoned railcar shortly before dawn. It was filled with dead bodies. Behind it, some sort of a camp emerged in the morning mist. As the sun rose, piles of dead bodies grotesquely materialized. “They were gray in color, and they looked like skeletons wrapped in skin. Some of them were so thin you could see their backbones through their stomachs.”
But amid the horror, something else caught Galione’s eye. “From where I was standing, I could see a hidden tunnel coming out of the side of the mountain. That’s how I knew I had found something big the Nazis were trying to keep secret.”
What Galione had found was Mittelwerk, the giant subterranean V-2
factory, and Dora, its attendant concentration camp.
When word of the find reached Toftoy at the Plaza Athénée Hotel a few days later, he immediately grabbed a map. Mittelwerk was near Nordhausen, in Thuringia. Oh my God, he thought. That region of Germany was slated to become part of the Soviet occupation zone. His closest inspection team was in Fulda, eighty miles away. It would take weeks just to inventory the more than one million square feet of caverns that connected Mittelwerk’s two-mile-long assembly-line tunnels. Subassemblies with tens of thousands of often highly complex component parts for fuel pumps, guidance systems, electronic relays, and everything else that made a rocket fly would need to be carefully examined and cherry-picked. The few intact rockets that had been completed just before the Nazi evacuation would have to be partly dismantled and readied for transport. Specialized troops with the necessary mechanical skills to handle such fragile cargo would need to be found. The only unit that remotely fit the bill was the 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly Company. And it was currently in Cherbourg, France, 770 miles away. And, as if all that wasn’t challenging enough, German engineers that could put all this stuff back together in working order would need to be located and their cooperation enlisted. Months could pass for an operation of this scale to be mounted.
Don’t touch anything, Toftoy ordered. I’m on my way.
• • •
When Chertok and the Russians arrived at Mittelwerk, on July 14, 1945, the place had been virtually picked clean. The Americans had hauled away one hundred intact rockets and had filled sixteen Liberty Ships with 360 metric tons of component parts for transfer to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. They had made off with an entire liquid oxygen plant, all sorts of fueling equipment, static test-firing rigs, and a dozen mobile launchers. Most of Mittelwerk’s precision tools and sensitive bench instrumentation panels were gone, as were the German engineers who knew how to operate them. Even the giant overhead tunnel lights that illuminated the underground production lines had apparently been tinkered with, so that Chertok and his team were left to grope dangerously in the dark.
“The problem is this,” another Soviet rocket scientist, Colonel Grigori A. Tokady, glumly reported to Moscow. “We have no leading V-2 experts in our zone; we have no complete projects or materials of the V-2; we have captured no fully operational V-2s which could be test launched right away. We [only] have lots of bits and pieces.”
At least the Americans had buried the dead at Dora—nearly five hundred Russians, Poles, and Hungarian Jews—and nurtured the skeletal survivors back to a semblance of life. Still, Chertok could barely bring himself to visit the concentration camp, where mounds of human ash still littered the crematorium, and the horrors of working at Mittelwerk still haunted the hollow features of its freed slave laborers. The majority of the factory’s twenty thousand victims had been Russian POWs—often hanged a dozen at a time for minor infractions from the overhead crane that ran the length of Tunnel B. A French prisoner, Yves Beon, described being forced to file past the corpses dangling above the V-2 assembly line: “Most of their bodies have lost both trousers and shoes, and puddles of urine cover the floor. Since the ropes are long, the bodies swing gently about five feet above the floor, and you have to push them aside as you advance…. You receive bumps from knees and tibia soaked in urine, and the corpses, pushed against each other, begin to spin around…. Here and there under the rolling bridge, truncheons in hand, the S.S. watch the changing of the shifts. They are laughing: it is a big joke to these bastards.”
For each of the 5,789 V-2s produced at Mittelwerk, which had been built by the same engineer who designed Auschwitz, nearly four prisoners had died. But those who survived now came forth to offer their intimate knowledge of the factory’s intricate cavern network. One former prisoner told Chertok, “I know places where the SS hid the most secret V-2 equipment that the Americans didn’t find.” As Chertok later recalled, “He led us to a distant wooden barracks hut, where in a dark corner, after throwing aside a pile of rags, he jubilantly revealed a large spherical object wrapped in blankets. I was stupefied. It was a [next generation] gyro-stabilized platform, which still hadn’t become a standard V-2 instrument.”
The find brightened morale among the despondent Soviet scientists. Perhaps the Americans hadn’t taken everything of value after all. Toftoy had left enough exterior rocket parts—tail fins, middle-section casings, and nose cones—to piece together fifteen to twenty whole V-2 bodies. Without the innards, though, the shells were largely useless. Yet the gyroscope gave Chertok hope: if an advanced version of the V-2 guidance system could be so easily located, what other buried treasures might the Americans have missed?
Over the next eighteen months, Chertok and an increasingly crowded field of German and Soviet experts began fitting together the missing pieces of the V-2 puzzle. In nearby Bleichrode, at the bottom of a dead-end drift in a potassium mine, they found more guidance system components: Viktoria-Honnef range-control and lateral radio correction sets. In a forester’s cabin, in a hunting reserve just over the demarcation line of the American sector, two sets of relay boxes and firing control panels were unearthed. One of the biggest windfalls was dug out of a sand quarry in Lehesten: fifty brand-new combustion chambers and crates with enough fuel pumps, injectors, and engine parts to fill fifty-eight railroad cars.
When the Russians first fire-tested one of those engines on September 7, 1945, the results stretched the limits of Soviet scientific imagination. The V-2 generated twenty-seven tons of thrust. The biggest Soviet rockets, by comparison, could not even manage a ton of lift. The difference amounted to a quantum technological leap. Every detail of German engine design seemed to reveal a minor engineering miracle. The Germans used alcohol as propellant, instead of kerosene mixed with liquid oxygen. The alcohol ingeniously did double-duty as a coolant for the combustion chamber to prevent meltdowns, snaking around its outer walls in coils, like a refrigeration unit. At the bottom end of the chamber the exhaust nozzles had been counterintuitively shortened and flared, creating a larger opening for the hot jet gases to exit. Such a configuration had long been rejected by Soviet designers on the theoretical principle that a larger outlet would dissipate the intensity of the escaping gases and thus reduce power. In fact, the simple and yet radical alteration increased output by 20 percent. “Pure genius,” whistled Soviet propulsion specialists in evident admiration.
With several combustion chambers fully assembled, the Russians had solved part of the reverse-engineering puzzle. But twenty thousand separate parts went into each V-2, and correctly putting the remaining pieces together into an operational guided missile was another matter. Even the scattered component parts initially had to be disassembled “down to the last screw,” Chertok recalled, so that detailed drawings could be made to glean a basic understanding of how they worked.
Maddeningly, for the Russians, more than one thousand qualified German engineers were just beyond reach in the American zone, across the Werra River. To make matters worse, the engineers had hidden all the assembly instructions—six truckloads of assorted owner’s manuals, including more than sixty thousand blueprint modification drawings—at the bottom of a mine, to be used as a bargaining chip with Toftoy, their new American benefactor. “These documents were of inestimable value,” recalled Dieter Huzel, one of the German scientists entrusted with concealing the trove. “Whoever inherited them would be able to start in rocketry at the point where we had left off, with the benefit of not only our accomplishments but of our mistakes as well.”
The B-team that Chertok was left with had neither the benefit of experience nor documentary guidance. It might have been numerically superior—by 1946 some six thousand Germans were on the Soviet payroll, resurrecting the V-2 program—but it consisted mostly of technicians, draftsmen, and lower-grade engineers whose knowledge rarely exceeded subassembly levels. What was missing from the Soviet effort were German scientists with knowledge of the big picture. And no amount of extra egg rations,
tax-free salaries, bonuses, and bribes could entice stars of von Braun’s caliber from the American side. The one exception was Helmut Grottrup, von Braun’s deputy for electric systems and guidance control. Unfortunately for the Russians, he came in a package deal with the imperious Frau Grottrup, who viewed the Red Army as her personal catering service, right down to the show horses she demanded for the stables of the sprawling villa she had selected for her residence. Frau Grottrup fired cooks and assistants on a weekly basis, and the never-ending shopping list she presented to her husband’s astonished Soviet employers required the full-time attendance of a colonel. “My sister goes to university wearing men’s boots,” wrote one of Frau Grottrup’s indignant Russian minders. “She is selling her last dress to buy food for our sick mother. My young wife Tamara had to quit her studies because she can’t make it without my help—and here we are getting saddle horses!”
But Frau Grottrup got her horses, her BMW, a pair of cows for fresh milk, even her insistence on a Soviet officer as a riding companion. She got whatever she wanted because back in Moscow Stalin was furious that no other senior German scientists had come over to the Soviet side, and he was demanding that something be done. “We’d even hatched a plan to kidnap von Braun,” Chertok reminisced, but the abduction efforts proved amateurish, as one U.S. intelligence report recorded: “One day, a group of men in American Army uniforms entered the schoolhouse in Witzenhausen. They began a friendly conversation with several members of the team and suggested they all go into the village for a few drinks. However the Germans were suspicious of the English they spoke—it was neither American English nor British English. The Russians left without captives.”
What the Russians lacked in subtlety and senior scientists, they compensated for with an excess of Red Army zeal for pillage. As the Soviet-controlled part of Germany was systematically dismantled and shipped east, the crucial missing blueprints began turning up in the unlikeliest places: behind woodpiles, in toolsheds, in the homes of former factory directors, and in partially destroyed attics. Among the trove of documents, one set of plans particularly caught the Soviets’ attention. It was a proposal for the design of a far more powerful version of the V-2, the one-hundred-ton-thrust A-10, which was to have gone into development once Hitler’s European adversaries had been vanquished. The A-10 was a long-range two-stage rocket that had one purpose: to strike New York and Washington.
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