Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  To help them there was an ever-expanding workforce of German specialists recruited from the surrounding villages; staffing levels reached seven thousand during 1946. They set to work restoring the missing documentation and blueprints and building rockets for test firing. The relationship with the Germans was inevitably uneasy, the Soviets secretly fearful of acts of sabotage and the Germans ‘worried for their future’. Nonetheless, Helmut Gröttrup was rapidly proving indispensable. Apart from running a division setting out the detailed technical specifications of the A-4, he was also asked to design a special train. The Red Army wanted a vehicle that would enable them to launch a V-2 rocket from any far-flung desert in the USSR. With more than twenty specially designed carriages carrying power equipment, a launch table with cranes and platforms, an armoured carriage for the launch control equipment – not to mention accommodation for top officials, including shower rooms and restaurants – it proved such a success that an order was immediately put in for another.

  Surrounded by the bleak landscape of post-war Germany, the Gröttrups enjoyed a secure lifestyle. Irmgardt loved the twelve-room villa, the car and the chauffeur, the ponies in the stable, the cows in the meadow beyond the house, the generous extra rations and the maid. Helmut was inclined to rely on Irmgardt’s judgement and she had been right: it seemed they had made a good decision. Soon Gröttrup was promoted to director of all missile development under German production. He expanded his team, employing still more German specialists, and started making improvements to the original V-2 rocket. In the hope of increasing the range of the V-2 from two hundred to four hundred miles, he wanted the propellant tanks to be placed under pressure and rehoused the control equipment behind the tanks. As his workforce increased, Gröttrup was soon employing about five hundred men. He enjoyed his work and his team came up with more than a hundred ideas for how to improve the design of the V-2. The Soviets were relieved that there had been no evidence of sabotage, and the Germans found the Soviets generous masters, with no hint of repressive behaviour.

  Behind the scenes, however, the future for the Germans was less certain. With the unlikely wartime alliance of communist and capitalist regimes over, Stalin was in an isolated position. He was anxious to ensure that Soviet borders were not encroached upon again and endeavoured to strengthen his position in Eastern Europe, provoking hostility in the West. On 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, made mention for the first time of an ‘Iron Curtain’ descending on Europe. ‘From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,’ he warned. ‘Behind that line lie all the capitals of … central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia … all subject … to increasing control from Moscow.’ In 1946, the Americans discovered that Soviet spies had passed the secrets of atomic power to Stalin and feared that the Soviet Union would soon be as powerful as America. Relations between the two power blocs deteriorated still further. The Americans were anxious to see Germany reinstated as an economic power to counteract the communist influence in Europe; Stalin was determined to see Germany weakened beyond recovery. Suspicion between the wartime allies soon grew into hostility.

  In this atmosphere of mounting distrust, on 29 April 1946 the Allied authorities supervising occupied Germany issued a ban on rocket research for military purposes. This made it difficult to implement Soviet plans for test launches of the V-2, especially so close to the American zone. In May, NKVD Colonel General Ivan Serov, Deputy Commissioner of Soviet Military Administration in Germany, wrote to Stalin highlighting his concerns. Stalin acted quickly. Secretly work was proceeding on a Soviet atomic weapon, but a mostly landlocked Soviet Union needed a missile that could swiftly deliver an atomic warhead thousands of miles into the enemy heartland. On 13 May, he issued a decree effectively creating a Soviet rocket industry. This was to be based in Podlipki, on the outskirts of Moscow, developing the site of an old artillery factory to form a new scientific research institute, to be called NII-88. Many key staff from the older organization, NII-1, such as Chertok and Mishin, were to be transferred to the new institute, which was to have high importance. Meanwhile Serov, who was an expert in deportations, was beginning to formulate a unique plan which would have considerable implications for the Soviet and German rocket team, who for the time being felt secure in the knowledge that they would never leave Germany.

  The urgency with which he needed to implement his plan was brought home to Serov in early July that year when a British plane was seen flying over the Soviet facility where the V-2 rocket was being assembled. This was followed a day or two later by an American plane. Worse still, Serov accidentally came across plans that could rob the Soviets of their greatest prize. He hurriedly wrote to Moscow to inform senior officials at the MVD, the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, which had replaced the NKVD.

  TOP SECRET

  From Berlin

  Moscow MVD of the USSR, General Kruglov

  … In recent days, the director of the Institute Rabe, engineer Gröttrup, has shown some passivity in work and has often been staying in bed ill. On 12 July, Gröttrup asked for leave from work due to family circumstances. We then conducted an interview with him and found there was no serious reason for his taking time off work. Gröttrup handed us a letter that he had received from an unknown German person who lives in Berlin. In that letter, Gröttrup was invited to take part in the work of rocket technology for the British … From the above one can conclude on the basis of the letter Gröttrup has decided to take leave of absence and then change sides and go over to the English. Gröttrup is currently under observation …

  COLONEL GENERAL SEROV

  The author of the letter was arrested and questioned. Behind the scenes, as Serov worked on his master plan, his agents were compiling lists of those experts in the Soviet zone in Germany who would be ‘cooperating’ with the Russians in creating the Soviet rocket industry, willingly or otherwise.

  While in Germany, Korolev had successfully re-established his career but the difficulties in his marriage had remained unresolved. Ideally he wanted to be reunited with his wife and daughter yet his relationship with his wife, Ksenia, was more and more defined by distance and silence. He was constantly busy in Germany; she was working long hours as a trauma surgeon at the Botkinskaya Hospital in Moscow. Cold indifference had taken the place of a once loving relationship. He was eager to see Ksenia and obtained clearance for his wife and daughter to stay with him in Germany. ‘We will all be home together, and go to the sea for a couple of months,’ he reassured her. ‘I am awaiting your arrival with anxiety.’

  Korolev was enchanted by his eleven-year-old daughter, Natasha. Trying to make up for lost time, he spoiled her and took her and Ksenia on holiday trips; they even explored Peenemünde and saw the gruesome Camp Dora together. Natasha was old enough to recognize that too much now separated her parents. ‘What happened should not have happened,’ she wrote years later. The eight-year separation had proved too much and ‘this long awaited family life did not make them happy’. When school was due to begin in September 1946, Ksenia insisted on leaving and would not hear Korolev’s protests. As he drove them to Berlin, ‘we were all sad and my mother was crying’.

  The following month, Serov put his plan into action. General Gaidukov called a conference for 21 October 1946 to discuss the proposed improvements to the V-2. It was a lively affair. Many new ideas were thrashed out and the meeting went on into the night. Afterwards, the general, who had been friendly throughout, provided a generous banquet for the two hundred German specialists. He insisted that everyone stay and celebrate their plans to test the first series of rockets.

  The Germans, accustomed to frugal post-war rations, eyed the bounty displayed on the groaning tables with enthusiasm. The food was ambrosia, with mountains of unseasonal fruit and half a dozen glasses set by each plate. General Gaidukov toasted the clever Germans; in turn, the Germans toasted their excellent host
s. General Gaidukov was irrepressible, rising to toast his guests at every opportunity. Only the previous month Gröttrup had produced a design for a rocket based on von Braun’s A-9 and A-10, which could potentially travel more than 1500 miles. The toasts were as abundant as the food, each demanding equally emotional responses from the guests. A great deal of vodka found its way down German throats and still the toasts continued. The vodka flowed copiously, but, strangely, only towards the Germans. If anything, the Russians were a ‘little gloomy’, according to Chertok, under strict instructions not to touch alcohol.

  While the party was in progress and the senior staff occupied, the Red Army, under NKVD guidance, was struggling with logistical problems. Heavy lorries with armed soldiers were rumbling through the quiet villages. The crisp night air echoed with the sounds of banging on doors, shouted commands and cries and protests.

  At three in the morning, the telephone by Irmgardt Gröttrup’s bed rang. The caller was a woman friend, almost incoherent, screaming ‘the Soviets are coming. They are taking us away.’ More phone calls followed. Irmgardt tried to ring her husband but he could not be found. She remembers looking ‘from every window: all I could see was the Soviet military. The house was surrounded by soldiers with machine guns. Outside were cars and lorries, nose to tail. Someone pressed the doorbell and kept his finger on it. Fists hammered on the door – the noise echoed through the house.’ When she answered the door she was told: ‘You are being taken to Moscow. You will be there for five years. Get dressed. You have one hour.’

  Everyone was caught by surprise. One engineer, Hans Ulrich, was at home when the soldiers came. He told his wife that they were being moved to Moscow. Fearful that their three children would not survive the Russian winters, he and his wife pleaded to stay in Germany. His wife did not know what to do. ‘For a moment,’ she said, ‘I tried to find an excuse for us. I looked at the three armed soldiers and the interpreter, who was trying to convince me that it was nothing scary, we were just moving house. I realized that there was no way out, we had to follow the orders.’

  The exodus to Moscow was not confined just to rocket engineers. Up to seven thousand German experts from many branches of industry were transported to the Soviet Union within a couple of weeks. The wholesale transportation of German skill came under the terms of war reparation from which Stalin claimed he was owed twenty billion pounds’ worth of goods. ‘They may take all their belongings,’ Serov is alleged to have said, ‘furniture, cats, dogs, wives. If a wife is not available, any obliging female may be substituted.’ Irmgardt Gröttrup was unwilling to comply with such Soviet unreasonableness, Chertok noted. She would not leave her comfortable home. Her furniture, however, was being piled on to the waiting lorries as she protested. She refused to endure the horrors of a Russian winter without her cows; her children would starve. Helmut Gröttrup refused to go without his family. Frantic calls were made to high command, who issued a guarantee that a freight car with hay was at the disposal of the Gröttrup cows. There really was no choice.

  Throughout the night of 21 October, lorries delivered families to the waiting sixty-carriage train in the nearby town of Klein Bodungen. The journey, which lasted almost three weeks, ended with the train waiting silently overnight in a siding. Irmgardt remembers passengers being unnerved by the delay. There was much speculation. Were they going to the gas chambers or to a reception in the Kremlin? Some freshened up, putting on suitable clothes so as to be presentable for the gas chamber; others dressed for a fine reception. Irmgardt Gröttrup herself was intent on getting rid of a box in which were housed the bugs and lice she had collected on the train.

  In fact it was neither the gas chambers nor the Kremlin to which the passengers were taken, but to an excellent meal with real coffee and sugar on trestle tables in a large hall decorated with frescoes depicting the five-year plan for industry. On the platform, the head engineer of Scientific Research Institute NII-88, Colonel Yuri Pobedonostsev, was standing talking to Korolev. He greeted Irmgardt with a magnanimous gesture and enquired: ‘What have you brought for me? A cheerful mood I hope,’ whereupon she handed him the box of bugs.

  The Gröttrups were treated well and given a six-room house in the leafy Moscow suburbs. Under Dimitri Ustinov, People’s Commissar of the Armaments, who was running the newly created rocket sector, Gröttrup was assigned a German rocket ‘collective’ with the task of assisting in the creation of a production line and successfully firing the V-2. By Soviet standards, Gröttrup was paid well; he also had the usual extras such as a car with a chauffeur, and domestic help and extra food rations for his family. Housing, however, was in short supply in Moscow and many of Gröttrup’s team found themselves much worse off, given one room to a family of three, sharing the faded glory with the ghosts of long-vanished aristocrats in the twenty-room mansions of pre-Revolution days. The less skilled Germans eventually found themselves on an island called Gorodomlya, almost two hundred miles from Moscow. It was a bleak place, not much more than a wasteland and the end of the world as far as human comfort was concerned. The housing was poor and services equally minimal since its few inhabitants held a fervent hatred for Germans, having survived particularly bitter fighting during the war.

  Gröttrup soon found that he had come to a land where everything was in short supply. Despite the priority that Stalin had given to rocket research, the grandly named Scientific Research Institute NII-88, just a few miles north of Moscow, had a leaking roof and the heating was nonexistent. Invariably, temperatures were well below freezing. It lacked basic requirements such as tables, chairs and workbenches. After four years fighting Germany, life in the Soviet Union was grim. The winters were long. The summers were but brief forays into the sunshine to harvest crops. Finding food was a continual struggle and occupied most of the day. The freezing cold winds from Siberia brought temperatures to 30 degrees C below zero. Equally chilly fingers of austerity touched all life in Moscow. Everywhere dark shapes huddled, people waiting in the snow, forming long queues in the hope that the whispered rumour of a food delivery to an empty shop was correct and that there might be bread or sausage. Irmgardt Gröttrup, with her two cows producing milk, butter and cheese had, it seemed, found paradise.

  Gröttrup soon found that the lack of materials and organization made his task of creating V-2s very difficult. There were few tools and essential plans were missing, lost somewhere in the Soviet system. Each day on his way to work, Gröttrup saw the V-2s and test stands brought all the way from Germany still waiting in the railway sidings – exquisite precision engineering, corroding and corrupting, slowly turning into rusting hulks, mournful reminders of life in Moscow. In these conditions, the Germans had to use whatever they had brought with them. ‘One of the men even took the kitchen alarm clock to pieces because the clockwork had the very spring he need urgently,’ Irmgardt Gröttrup recorded in her diary. ‘When his wife asked why there were no springs of this strength in all of the Soviet Union, he replied “they were not in stock and it would take a year for the head of the buying department to get them”.’

  Apart from helping with the construction of a Soviet copy of the V-2, Gröttrup and his team were also starting to work on designs for the next generation of missiles. Gröttrup was developing a prototype that would go beyond the V-2 called the G-1. Gradually the Germans became aware of the logic behind Soviet working methods. Inexperienced Soviet engineers would work alongside the Germans and when the project they had been working on was completed and the Soviets had absorbed all the information possible, strangely they would then disappear and be replaced by another group of innocent Soviet recruits seeking information. It was almost as though a mastermind was stealing German brains.

  When Korolev was permitted to return permanently from Germany early in 1947, he was promoted once again to Chief Designer for long-range ballistic rockets and given his own division to run within NII-88; this was known as SKB-3. It was with a sense of urgency that he began preparations for test launching the V-2
later that year and continued development on a Soviet version of the V-2, the R-1. He was not satisfied with making a straight copy of the V-2 as by this time he was critical of what he thought was an outdated vehicle. Nevertheless, he followed orders using the basic V-2 plan.

  There were four main sections: the tail assembly and stabilizing fins, above which were the fuel tanks followed by the control equipment and finally the warhead. Korolev made modifications to the tail assembly to increase its range. Glushko’s 25-ton thrust engines gave a longer range than the V-2. The lower fuel tank held liquid oxygen and the one above held ethyl alcohol and both were separated from the outer casing of the rocket and insulated with glass wool. In later rockets, to save space and weight the fuel tanks were incorporated into the shell of the missile. Above the fuel tanks the instrument section was redesigned for greater accuracy. It housed the controls and the gyroscopic instruments which guided the rocket. It stood an impressive 47 feet in height and had a range slightly further than the V-2 – just over two hundred miles.

  Plans were soon underway to create detailed designs for the R-1 and even to develop prototypes later in the year. Even more important, Korolev was anxious to get the go-ahead to build a Soviet rocket of twice the range, now formally designated the R-2. He intended this to be a leap forward in design with improved fuels and fuel pumps, increased size and power of the engines and more advanced guidance technology to ensure accuracy. He was aware that he was in competition with Gröttrup’s G-1, which had similar design features and might be favoured by the military in place of his own R-2.

  As Korolev understood it, there was only room for one man to head the Soviet rocket programme – and that man would not be a German. Korolev’s years in the Gulag system had taught him how to survive. The groups of inexperienced men who were sent to work with Gröttrup were absorbing all the information about German technology they could and systematically relaying it to Korolev’s team. No details of Soviet plans and progress were ever made known to the Germans. All that was required of them was that they should transpose their knowledge – and Gröttrup had no idea what his fate would be when they had taken all he knew.