In the autumn of 1929 Wernher von Braun was seventeen. He had graduated from high school with honors and would soon be bound for higher education in Berlin. He knew what he had to do. He would arrange to meet his idol in rocketry, Hermann Oberth, and offer his voluntary services. The spaceflight theorist, mathematician, and teacher was an ethnic German, born in Romania. He had recently come to Berlin to do experimental rocket testing. His writings had sparked a burning ambition in the brilliant youth.
There were three major space pioneers at that time: Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, the Russian space-research theoretician; Robert H. Goddard, the American physics teacher and rocket experimenter; and Professor Oberth, who was the best known, at least in Germany. The idea of future space travel was a wildly popular topic in Germany in those days. Oberth had helped make it so. In addition to having written widely on the subject, after coming to Berlin he had also served as technical adviser for the 1929 science fiction movie hit, Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon). Before and during the making of the film, he conducted primitive rocket experiments at a site outside the German capital.
Oberth had attracted a band of mostly youthful rocket enthusiasts. Young von Braun needed to get an introduction to the famous professor. He decided to go to the Berlin home of one of Oberth’s followers, Willy Ley, who was vice president of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Society for Spaceship Travel), or VfR, that sponsored Oberth’s work. Von Braun had not met Ley before either. When he went to his house in Berlin, Ley was not home. The young visitor was admitted and allowed to wait in the parlor. Ley returned home to find the blond stranger seated at the piano playing gently and expertly Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Ley complimented von Braun on his playing. Wernher thanked him and explained his mission. The meeting with Oberth was soon arranged.1
By the time he had enrolled at Berlin’s Charlottenburg Institute of Technology to study mechanical and aircraft engineering in the spring of 1930, von Braun had signed on as an apprentice to Oberth. At the start, his duties included the nontechnical task of raising money for rocket research and development. It was a duty he would never be free of throughout his career. “My first job with Hermann Oberth,” von Braun recalled long afterward, “was helping him with a little display on interplanetary rockets in a Berlin department store. I stood on the stand there for eight hours a day telling shopping housewives how an interplanetary rocket would cost 7,000 marks [about $1,700 then] and take a year to build. Now, forty years later, I realize how little one billion dollars will buy and how little you can build in one year.”2 Also in his 1930 department store pitch, as von Braun remembered it, “I said, ‘I bet you that the first man to walk on the Moon is alive today somewhere on this Earth!’”3 It so happened that Neil Armstrong was then an infant in Ohio.
The Oberth group’s sponsor, the VfR, was an organization for students and other rocket enthusiasts. The Oberth assistants and members of VfR in 1930 included such future notables in the field as Rudolf Nebel, Klaus Riedel, and Rolf Engel, in addition to Willy Ley. Newcomer von Braun joined the VfR immediately. A chief purpose of the club was, in fact, to raise money to support Oberth’s work on his novel rocket engine concept, the “cone jet motor,” that he was developing and building to test in a Berlin laboratory and in flight trials. “In those days we lived from begging,” von Braun recalled. “We had to ask for every single penny to be able to pursue our dreams.”4 This “cash barrier,” as he later termed it, would often prove the toughest of all obstacles to putting rockets into space.
But there was far more to being Oberth’s assistant than fundraising. There were actual rocket-motor test firings, and danger was a constant presence. The thirty or so primitive “hot” experiments they conducted in 1928–29 were life threatening. Von Braun later described a typically “perilous” ignition system test. “Riedel lighted a rag soaked in gasoline. We opened valves that let the propellants into our tiny motor. Riedel hurled his torch over the motor’s mouth and ducked behind a barricade. The jet ignited with a thunderclap that turned into a roar. After 90 seconds our fuel was exhausted and so were we.”5
Even though there was a space craze in Germany at that time, many considered Oberth’s visionary notions of space travel delusional. Von Braun later observed that he considered himself very lucky to have been among “the few who thought Professor Oberth made one hell of a lot of sense.” He added: “Basically what he was trying to prove were four things far ahead of the comprehension of most people at that time. These were that you could build a machine which could climb beyond our atmosphere, that man could leave the gravity of Earth, that man could survive flight in a ship in space, and that the exploration of space could be profitable.”6
Despite its defeat in World War I and the dismal postwar economic period, Germany at that time excelled in science and technology. While studying at the Charlottenburg Institute, von Braun gained an appreciation for industrial craftsmanship via a profound lesson he never forgot. To teach him the practical aspects of engineering, the institute assigned him to work for a few weeks in the machine shop at a large locomotive factory. The shop was filled with gleaming, high-precision machinery, a sight that thrilled von Braun and reassured him that he would enjoy his work there. He happily presented himself to the shop foreman, a burly, mustachioed man with a dirty apron and a stern look.
“Make this into a perfect cube,” ordered the foreman, handing the youth “a chunk of iron as large as a child’s head.” Every angle had to be a perfect right angle, every side equal, every face smooth. The foreman gave the apprentice one file and pointed to one vise. “Here are your tools,” he said. An angry von Braun stormed over to a workbench and began filing away. After a few days of work he showed his handiwork to the foreman. It was measured. The angles were off. “Keep filing,” ordered the supervisor. For two weeks, a seething von Braun filed. Again he submitted his work product to the man; again, imperfection and the order, “Keep filing.” As von Braun’s determination grew, the block of metal shrank. Five raw-fingered weeks went by.
“Finally I handed him my supreme effort,” von Braun later recalled. “It was slightly larger than a walnut. Peering over his dusty glasses, he measured every side. My heart pounded. My reward was one word. ‘Gut!’ He said, ‘Ja, gut! This is what we mean.’” The student had learned “the value of self-discipline and perfection in small things.”7
Later in 1930, after Professor Oberth had left Germany to resume teaching in Romania, von Braun and the group of rocketeers formed a small company and continued their mentor’s experimental work on their own. They operated at an abandoned, three-hundred-acre ammunition storage depot and proving ground at Reinickendorf on the outskirts of Berlin, having talked the municipal authorities into giving them a lease to the place for pocket change. The group named the site Raketenflugplatz Berlin (Rocket Flight Field Berlin).
The begging and scrounging for money, materials, machinery, and labor continued. The young men fast-talked manufacturers out of materials by touting the bright future of rocketry. They recruited unpaid mechanics and other technical workers from the Depression-era ranks of the unemployed by offering them free meals and housing in the concrete igloos and warehouses at the site. Extra money was raised by staging public shows and charging admission to rocket launchings. Sometimes included, at no extra charge, were the fireworks of liftoff explosions or zigzag flights or sudden plunges to the ground, to the chagrin of the rocketeers.8
As von Braun juggled his time between his academic studies and practical propulsion research and development at the old dump, the little liquid-fueled rockets gradually got bigger. Some flew and some failed, and he and his associates learned valuable lessons, not only in technology but in resourcefulness and persistence as well.
Following the European custom of university students spending a semester or two at another institution to broaden their perspectives, von Braun registered in the spring of 1931 to attend the summer semester at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Federal Technical University) of Zurich. There he met Constantine D. J. Generales, a young medical student from the United States who was also studying in the Swiss city.
The Greek American soon discovered that this tallish, blond, nineteen-year-old budding scientist had a fervent interest in rocketry and space travel. Von Braun showed Generales a letter of reply he had received from a young theoretical physicist named Albert Einstein, complete with formulas for the design and propulsion of rockets. The bold German student had written to the respected physicist about his strong interest in rocketry and space travel and asked Einstein for any helpful thoughts or specific information he might be kind enough to share. With his new friend Generales, von Braun also discussed in detail his own concept of sending a manned spaceship to the Moon.
“It was my suggestion,” Dr. Generales recalled years later, “that before he attempted a lunar flight, it might be worthwhile to try it with mice as ‘passengers’ first. Wernher agreed it was a good idea. And so we found ourselves spinning white mice on a specially mounted bicycle in Wernher’s rooms.”9 But disaster struck some of the experiments. As the homemade centrifuge, designed to simulate rocket takeoffs, spun faster and faster, the blood of “a number of these unfortunate beasts” was flung against the ceiling of the room—with unpleasantly messy results, as von Braun later reported. “Our ... inquisitions were summarily interrupted by my landlady’s violent objections to a ring of mouse-blood upon the walls of my otherwise neat Swiss room.”10 Medical student Generales dissected the mice and reported to his space-minded friend that the high acceleration had caused cerebral hemorrhages in the subject animals.11
Von Braun returned to Berlin in 1931, resumed his studies at the Charlottenburg Institute, and rejoined the raketen group. Through the rest of that year and into the next the experimenters test launched eighty-five rockets to altitudes of up to twelve hundred feet in free flight.12
The year 1932 proved to be even more eventful for von Braun and the group. At age twenty, he received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, with an aeronautical emphasis, from the Charlottenburg Institute. Word spread of the growing successes of the, as always, cash-hungry rocket club. Special visitors came to call. Writer Daniel Lang of the New Yorker described one such visit in his 1951 profile of von Braun:
One day in the spring of 1932, a black sedan drew up at the edge of the Raketenflugplatz and three passengers got out to watch a rocket launching. “They were in mufti, but mufti or not, it was the Army,” von Braun said to me. “That was the beginning. The Versailles Treaty [post–World War I] hadn’t placed any restrictions on rockets, and the Army was desperate to get back on its feet. We didn’t care much about that, one way or the other, but we needed money, and the Army seemed willing to help us. In 1932, the idea of war seemed to us an absurdity. The Nazis weren’t yet in power. We felt no moral scruples about the possible future abuse of our brainchild. We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.”13
Von Braun and the small group proceeded to milk the military cow well. The visitors in the black sedan that spring day included a general, a colonel, and two captains. The junior officer, Capt. Walter Dornberger, age thirty-five, was a key person, the holder of a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and his superiors observed demonstrations of the “liquid shell rocket,” as von Braun termed it, and received technical briefings by him and other members of the group. The army contingent was mildly impressed, requested more scientific data, and soon awarded the rocketeers a 1,000-mark contract for improved measuring equipment for thrust, propellant flow rates, atomization of fuel, and other needs. Dornberger remained in contact with the group, and in July a demonstration flight of its Mirak II rocket was arranged at the Kummersdorf Army Proving Ground, secluded in a pine forest an hour’s drive from Berlin. There the army had set up a dazzling array of its state-of-the-art measuring instruments. The test did not go well. The rocket rose about two hundred feet but then veered crazily and crashed to earth. The army’s interest plummeted along with it.
At this point, von Braun, who was barely out of his teens, showed the persistence, leadership, and aggressive opportunism that were to become hallmarks of his operating style. He collected all of the test information from the rocket society’s experiments and went to see the senior army officer. Col. Karl Becker, who was a scientist and the army chief of ballistics and ammunition, heard von Braun’s appeal for serious financial assistance so that the rocketeers could become more professional in their work. Impressed, Becker agreed, on condition that the group would work in secrecy within the confines of an army installation. Apparently, the secrecy was for simple military control and security and not because of any potential violation of the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which did not address rocketry.
When von Braun took the offer back to his colleagues, not everyone wanted to accept. Senior members Nebel and Riedel, for example, objected to it, preferring a struggling enterprise with private support to a restrictive military arrangement. The pragmatic von Braun disagreed. In time he sold the plan to most other members of the group. Eventually, even Nebel and Riedel agreed that he should accept the army’s offer—but without their participation. (It was five years before the pair would rejoin forces with him.)
Captain Dornberger acted as the army’s go-between with von Braun. Aside from the latter’s willingness to cast his lot with the military and the defection of more experienced, senior members of the group, what made von Braun the army’s choice as leader? Years later Dornberger wrote that at the time, he was deeply impressed “by the energy and shrewdness with which this tall, fair young student with the broad massive chin went to work, and by his astonishing theoretical knowledge.”14
By the autumn of 1932, the German army’s Ordnance Department had put the rocket society under contract to pursue rocketry R & D. It was the beginning of a long relationship, and thus, at the impossibly tender age of twenty, von Braun became the civilian head of what was suddenly a closed and classified operation located at the Kummersdorf site. But, as he later pointed out, “this was not quite so glorious as it sounds.” In the beginning, his total resources, besides his small group of fellow rocketeers, consisted of one mechanic, the use of one rocket test pit, and permission to requisition a limited amount of equipment and materials.15
Still, von Braun had made his deal. If advancing rocketry toward the ultimate goal of space flight meant joining forces for the present with the military, with those he knew were primarily interested in weapons development, then so be it. They had the funds and facilities, and he and his group needed them to continue. It was that simple.
About the time young von Braun went to work for the German army, Captain Dornberger helped him enroll at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin. There he pursued a doctorate in physics, studying under professors that included Nobel laureates Erwin Schroedinger, Max von Laue, and Walter Nernst. While still a doctoral student, von Braun made a holiday visit in 1934 to a destination that later figured prominently in his life. It was the city of London, where both his mother and father had lived for a time.16 His theoretical and applied research, supported by hands-on experiments with a 1933 version of a liquid-fueled rocket, served as the basis for his doctoral thesis. Because of military security, that document carried the cryptic title “About Combustion Tests”—and was classified “Secret” for many years. Before 1934 ended, Wernher’s blandly titled thesis earned him a PhD. At age twenty-two, when most university students were receiving their bachelor’s degrees, he had become Dr. Wernher von Braun. His work status also shifted that year, from private contractor to civil service employee of the German army’s Ordnance Department. He would work only for a government, or governments, for nearly the next four decades.
The year before, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler had come to power, appointed chancellor after receiving merely a plurality of the vote. Baron Magnus von Braun, the father of the new young civilian rocket chief of Germany’s traditionally nonpolitical army, “quit all public offices when Hitler came into power” and retired with Baroness Emmy to private life at their estate in Silesia, their middle son wrote later.17 The estate was Oberwiesenthal, a property of five hundred acres in Loewenberg County that the baron had earlier purchased for retirement.18 The elder von Braun never joined the Nazi Party.
Although rocketeer Rudolf Nebel, a World War I fighter pilot, had joined the Nazis, von Braun had not, and did not for several more years. In fact, “most of the other [rocket society] leaders, including Willy Ley, were strongly anti-Hitler,” according to British aerospace historian Patrick Moore.19 As persecution of Jews intensified in 1935, von Braun’s friend Ley, who had some Jewish ancestors, left Germany for the United States.20 Other observers characterized the group as a whole as largely apolitical and focused on their work.
An eventful 1934 had brought cheering successes for the von Braun group. Its work that year climaxed with two successful, pre-Christmas launches of A-2 (A for Aggregat [Aggregate]) liquid-fueled rockets from the North Sea island of Borkum to altitudes of more than one and a half miles. The team apparently had maintained its sense of humor through rocketry’s heartaches leading to the twin successes. They had named the two A-2 rockets “Max” and “Moritz,” after the popular pair of German cartoon characters who were the models for the American Katzenjammer Kids.
Feats such as the A-2 flights soon caught the attention of the Luftwaffe (German air force). It offered the von Braun group a project budgeted at 5 million reichsmarks (about $1.2 million) to develop a rocket-powered fighter plane at a proposed facility larger than Kummersdorf. The German army would not allow the Luftwaffe to get the upper hand, so it came up with a 6-million reichsmark allocation in 1935 to support the group’s rocket work along existing lines. It was not the last time competing forces maneuvered to gain the team’s services. For von Braun, now twenty-three years old and responsible for 11 million reichsmarks in funding, rocketry was no longer small potatoes. Rather, it had “emerged into what the Americans call the ‘big time,’” he later observed. “Thenceforth million after million flowed in as we needed it.”21 That was true for a time, at least. Many of the millions were spent during the next two years on planning and building a future joint air force and army rocket R&D center on the Baltic. Financial support there waxed and waned in later years, depending on the mercurial moods of Hitler and others.
In the mid-1930s, army civilian employee von Braun began fulfilling a national requirement of military service. He served the two one-year stints in, not the army, but the air force—with time off to tend to his work in rocketry. Bitten early by the flying bug, von Braun began with glider lessons, where a classmate was the future German aviatrix, Hanna Reitsch, with whom he remained friends for life. He earned his glider pilot’s license at nineteen. By twenty-one, he had received his regular pilot’s license and had followed his mechanical engineering bachelor’s degree with a master’s in aeronautical engineering. Later, in the air force reserve, he flew military aircraft.
In May 1936, while running things at Kummersdorf, he began pilot training as a Luftwaffe cadet. By the time he completed training in June 1938, he was an air force reservist qualified to fly military aircraft and was detached to the German army for service as its technical chief at a place called Peenemünde, where the Luftwaffe also had a base. Flying put von Braun into the third dimension—and a step closer to outer space.
Dornberger, promoted to major during the Kummersdorf period, may have been one military man who shared von Braun’s and the Kummersdorf group’s ultimate peaceful goals. “Our aim from the beginning was to reach infinite space,” he declared in 1958.22 Scientist Ernst Stuhlinger later observed that Dornberger was “an extremely capable and energetic leader who combined the analytical mind of a top-flight engineer with the military authority and courage” that proved essential for success, especially in the dark times that lay ahead.23 The well-matched space-minded team of Dornberger and von Braun, even during the initial budgetary penny-pinching at Kummersdorf, continued to attract rocket and space enthusiasts to the operation.
One was Arthur Rudolph, who had worked in Berlin—not with Oberth and the VfR, but with another group of German rocket experimenters that included Max Valier and Walter Riedel. He and von Braun had first met in 1932. That was one year after Rudolph had developed and demonstrated his own rocket under another army contract.24 He continued to work with others until early in 1935, when, at age twenty-eight, he signed on with the expanding Kummersdorf organization.
He and von Braun soon became friends as well as colleagues. As Rudolph later recalled: “At heart, von Braun was an astronomer who wanted to journey into space, not just look at it. We would sit up late at the bachelors’ quarters [at Kummersdorf] designing rockets and talking of space travel. And besides rockets, we had two things in common: Neither of us liked to go to bed at night or get up in the morning!”25
And still later, writing to congratulate von Braun on his sixtieth birthday in 1972, he reminded von Braun of “the continuous work at Kummersdorf-Schiessplatz, where you already developed your first concrete ideas on space travel (in the evenings at your quarters at the Officers Club), which 20 years later were published in Collier’s magazine; or when you tried to convince General Dr. [Karl] Becker that space travel was possible.”26
Although he had to work on weapons while his true preoccupation was with space travel, von Braun kept an active sense of humor. One cold day in the winter of 1935–36, when he opened the door to a construction office at Kummersdorf, von Braun found half a dozen staffers shivering inside. All of the windows had been thrown open and frigid air was streaming in.
“What’s going on here?” asked von Braun. As one of the men present, Otto Kraehe, recalled many years later: “I told him, ‘We’re just letting fresh air in.’” Von Braun quickly sniffed out the situation: one or more of the men had broken wind inside the closed office. “Remember this,” advised the young rocket boss, “a lot of folks have frozen to death, but nobody ever suffocated from a foul-smelling odor!”27
But humor was not always easy to come by in 1935. As the year wore on, the clandestine German military buildup continued. Then, as von Braun recalled, “One day . . . Dornberger said to me, ‘The Ordnance Department expects us to make a field weapon capable of carrying a large warhead over a range much beyond that of artillery. We can’t hope to stay in business if we keep on firing only experimental rockets.’”28
By then, von Braun’s group had grown to a staff of almost twenty and preliminary work had started on their next-generation rocket—the A-4, which was later renamed the V-2. Dornberger and von Braun began to think of finding a place for bigger and better facilities to pursue their burgeoning work.
The New Yorker later described the situation. “He [von Braun] spent the Christmas of 1935 at his father’s estate in Silesia, and while there he mentioned that he was scouting for a coastal site that could be used as an experimental station. ‘Why don’t you look at Peenemünde?’ his mother asked. ‘Your grandfather used to go duck-shooting there.’ Von Braun did so. ‘It was love at first sight,’ he told me. ‘Marvelous sailing.’”29
And so Peenemünde, on the island of Usedom along the Baltic seacoast, was selected in 1937 as the location for major R&D operations, pilot production facilities, and long-range test flights. The site, providing a 250-mile test-flight range in relative seclusion, was secretly acquired. Construction began on a laboratory and other facilities to provide for tests and to build prototypes of A-4 missiles, which was then a high priority of the Hitler regime.
Back at Kummersdorf, von Braun’s team, now numbering about eighty men, were at work on a fully inertially guided, or self-steering, rocket called the A-3. It was designed to go fifteen miles up with a one-hundred-pound warhead or other payload.
That same year, the Luftwaffe conducted the first successful test flights with a liquid-fueled rocket engine installed in a stock propeller-driven fighter plane. It was called the HE-112, and it was the rudimentary first jet aircraft. Air force successes like that led to plans for the Peenemünde rocket center to be a dual operation of the air force and the army. Von Braun (in his mid-twenties) would serve as technical director on the army side at Peenemünde-East, while the air force occupied Peenemünde-West. In the German society of the 1930s it was unheard of for one so young to hold such a high post.
In the month following von Braun’s twenty-fifth birthday celebration in March 1937, the advance group left Kummersdorf and transferred quietly to the base at Peenemünde. Its army commander was Walter Dornberger, by now the holder of an honorary doctorate in mechanical engineering from the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin. With the move to Peenemünde, he gained a promotion to the rank of colonel.