Wernher von Braun had his orders: Enough of the demonstration rockets. No more experimental small stuff. If he and his team expected increased support from the German army, they had to build more powerful, longer-range rockets capable of carrying sizable warheads. It was now early 1937, and Adolf Hitler was thoroughly entrenched in power now. Von Braun and his crew could dream all they wanted of sending rocket ships to the stars, but the military was paying the bills and it expected weapons.
Most of the corps of scientists and engineers at Kummersdorf made the move to the new R&D base that became known as Peenemünde. Occupying the northern end of the sandy, woodsy island of Usedom, about 180 miles north of Berlin, the installation would be two years in construction. It became a secret self-contained center, complete with housing, offices, laboratories, factories, warehouses, power plants, fire stations, stores, and, in wartime, a forced-labor camp with barracks for several thousand POWs and other prisoners. Here the army team would develop the latest and largest in its series of “A” rockets: the A-5 and A-4, in that order, while the air force would create weapons such as the winged V-l “buzz bomb.” For the army team, the move marked the start of what ultimately became—following Hitler’s mercurial priorities—a large facility with ten thousand workers.
But in early 1937, although war clouds may have been visible on the horizon, no open hostilities had yet erupted. The next year saw Hitler’s troops march uncontested into Austria and then into Czechoslovakia, dragging both nations into the Third Reich fold. Open warfare came the year after that, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Even von Braun’s father had warned his son as early as 1933 that war lay ahead. “But our Führer wants peace,” the young rocket zealot had protested. The baron had stiffened, von Braun recalled years later, and responded: “I’ve heard that the Berlin Art Gallery now has a huge picture of Hitler in shining armor. Men don’t wear armor unless they mean to fight.”1
Rocket engineer Ernst Klauss, who joined the Peenemünde army group during the early buildup in 1937, later recalled an incident that was not uncommon, perhaps, with so many new people arriving at the base. A newcomer himself, Klauss was working overtime on a new valve design one evening shortly after his arrival. He was alone in the office, and the only light came from the lamp at his table.
“Suddenly the door opened and as I looked up from my drawing board, a young man was standing next to me,” Klauss recalled. “He introduced himself, but I did not understand his name; my mind was still on the job.” The stranger, saying he had wondered who was working late, asked where Klauss had come from, where he had worked before, if he were married and had children, and how he liked the work and living at Peenemünde. The friendly conversation lasted fifteen minutes, and then the young man left.
Later that night a puzzled Klauss decided that his visitor was probably a low-level manager in the office, as he was so young. But he was deeply impressed by the interest the fellow had shown in him and in his personal life. The next morning he asked his supervisor about the visitor and gave a description. “I learned that the young man was Dr. Wernher von Braun, the boss,” Klauss related.2
The technical director’s youth—and even younger looks—sometimes caused him problems. These ranged from difficulty at first in commanding the respect of strangers, to not being able to buy a drink. He and Rudolf Hermann, a young aerodynamicist who joined the team at Peenemünde in April 1937, made frequent trips to German armed forces headquarters in Berlin while the base was being set up. After a busy day of meetings, the pair, both accomplished classical musicians, usually attended a concert. Then they sometimes had drinks in one of the bars nearby, where the minimum age was twenty-one.
Hermann later related: “One evening, the bar maid at the entrance ... asked von Braun: ‘Are you twenty-one? That is the law. May I see your I.D. card?’ Even with the card under her eyes, she would not believe that von Braun was twenty-five. He looked like eighteen with his blond hair, rosy cheeks, and boyish smile.”3
Another reality the youthful von Braun had to deal with was his reputation as a heavy spender for rocket development and prototype production. Decades afterward, one of the German missile experts reminded him of a March 1938 episode. “In the evening we had a happy get-together, and someone came up with a skit in which you and Colonel Dornberger appeared as defendants. During the funny one-act skit the “prosecutor” asked how it was possible that a youngster of twenty-six could expend so many millions in public funds!”4
Dornberger, who remained von Braun’s army boss at Peenemünde, came to know the young director’s spending proclivities only too well. “Von Braun had stressed to me again and again the importance of having our own wind tunnel for supersonic speeds, as designed by Dr. [Rudolf] Hermann. I agreed, but the cost frightened me; the estimate was 300,000 marks. I had had enough experience with building to know that there wasn’t the least chance of the cost remaining at that figure, especially with von Braun about.”5
There were many tales of von Braun’s alleged extravagances at Peenemünde. The comptroller general there, learning that parts of a certain switch on the experimental A-5 rocket were gold plated, was taken aback. “Why gold plated?” he wanted to know. “Solid gold would have been too expensive,” a straight-faced von Braun replied, not bothering to explain the technical reasons. “That settled the thing right there,” team member Helmut Horn recalled.6
In the prewar days at Peenemünde, von Braun could have as much fun as anyone. One cold night in February 1938, after they’d spent nine busy months there, Rudolf Hermann and his wife threw a party for about twenty guests. It was a costumed affair, and the theme—the first German party on Mars—“symbolized our deep involvement and enthusiasm for the future of space travel.” As Hermann later reminisced, the bachelor technical director came as the “distinguished Professor von Braun, with white hair” and looking fully seventy years old; he had just returned from a visit to an outpost on Mars. Partygoer von Braun joined with everyone in the dancing, drinking, lively conversation, and general merriment, Hermann noted. After all had left, the host found himself wondering, “How could you, Wernher, the embodiment of optimism, be so pessimistic as to assume you would be seventy years of age when we land on Mars?”7
Von Braun was able to indulge his love of music—and of making music—during prewar and wartime periods at the missile center as well as in the city. “He loved good music,” one of von Braun’s personal secretaries at Peenemünde, Dorette Kersten, recalled. “He played the cello then, for himself and with a chamber music group—a string quartet of engineers and scientists—at the base.”8 They usually played in a private room at the Officers’ Club, where von Braun also took lunch and dinner. Physicist Ernst Stuhlinger remembered the quartet vividly. “His cello was accompanied by Rudolf Hermann’s and Heinrich Ramm’s violins, and by Gerhard Reisig’s viola, when the four of them played works by Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert.”9
As development of the A-4 missile proceeded, security at the Baltic base tightened. One day, von Braun, normally calm and unflappable, took a hurried call about a problem that had arisen elsewhere at the rocket center. He rushed outside to make his way there—only to be stopped by a guard who would not let him pass.
“You aren’t wearing your security badge,” the guard said.
“But you know me!” von Braun protested. “It doesn’t matter that I’m not wearing my badge! Now let me pass!”
The guard refused to budge.
Smiling as he reminisced about the incident years later, an eyewitness recalled: “I thought von Braun was going to knock the guy down, he was so mad! Even afterward, though, he often didn’t—or wouldn’t—wear his badge.”10
The team developing the A-4 (later the V-2) in the late 1930s at Peenemünde-East called it “The Project.” It dominated life and work there, even though its first test launch did not come until June 1942. It was a forty-six-foot-tall, fourteen-ton, liquid-propellant (alcohol and liquid oxygen) rocket weapon designed to carry a one-metric-ton warhead over a range of about 210 miles. With an arcing ballistic trajectory that would take it deep into the upper atmosphere, approaching the fringes of outer space, it was originally intended by the German army for attacking battlefield rear areas beyond the reach of the heaviest conventional artillery. There would be no defense against it, except to burrow deep in the ground.
In 1939, the A-4 development and further construction at Peenemünde continued by virtue of remaining initial funding but without the priority it once enjoyed. Hitler and his coterie had lost interest because of the slow pace of progress. Von Braun wrote years later that even the German invasion of Poland and “the outbreak of war in the autumn of 1939 brought no acceleration of work at Peenemünde.”11 And in February 1940, with the war going Hitler’s way through the use of conventional armaments only, he ended support for all weapons development efforts that could not be fielded within a year.12
In the prewar months of 1939, however, von Braun still had enough residual start-up funds to continue expanding his force of qualified technical personnel, although he had trouble finding them. Ernst Steinhoff, a former engineering professor who then headed the missile guidance department, promised to personally recruit one thousand competent engineers and scientists—if von Braun would give him a free hand in hiring.
Von Braun agreed, although he seriously doubted Steinhoff could do it. The rocket guidance chief immediately began approaching prospective employees—men he knew in private industry, on university faculties, at research institutes, and former students. Not long afterward, when von Braun and Steinhoff ran into each other in Berlin, the latter reported excellent progress to his boss.
“Well, Steinhoff,” said von Braun, still somewhat dubious, “let me see one of these characters on your list.”13 Steinhoff promptly arranged a lunch meeting between von Braun and the man who was second on his long list because of his talent and promise: Erich Neubert, a young engineer and former pupil of Steinhoff. Decades later Neubert recalled being greatly impressed with von Braun. “And naturally, my wife, whom I had brought along, was fascinated with him, as all the girls [were]!”14 And von Braun apparently liked what he saw in Neubert. The latter soon signed on at Peenemünde and remained for decades in key positions with “the team.”
Possibly at the suggestion of Karl Emil Becker, army general and chief of ordnance, and certainly with the approval of this original rocket supporter, Peenemünde early in the war extended its workforce numerically and geographically.15 With the imperatives of war helping to lift certain secrecy restrictions, this expansion was accomplished through association with academic institutions and development contracts with private industries throughout Germany. Selected university professors, working under applied-research grants, attacked specific technical problems in their own laboratories. Von Braun periodically visited them to monitor progress, and these outside researchers also visited Peenemünde for consultations. Among these academics was Professor Oberth, von Braun’s early idol and mentor. In the tense late 1930s, Oberth had returned to Germany from Romania and had settled in Felixdorf.
Von Braun saw to it that Oberth, basically a theorist, was nevertheless hired as a consultant to the Peenemünde R&D operations. Because Oberth was not part of management there, it is unclear what purpose he served beyond on-site father figure, inspiration as rocket futurist—and feel-good icon for von Braun. The arrangement allowed the professor-mentor to be a frequent observer of rocket test firings and launchings at the base on the Baltic Sea.
Many years later, Oberth wrote to von Braun, “I will forever remember in the spring of 1940 when you came to see me in Felixdorf. You took me aside, and sitting near the edge of a half-demolished bridge with our legs dangling in the air, we discussed what should happen from there on.”16
Up until the late 1930s von Braun could freely share his ideas on space travel with his fellow missile developers. Years later rocketeer Richard Lehnert reminded von Braun of “how you explained to us what it would take to put a man on the Moon and return him to the Earth. For comparison you pointed out that the launch vehicle for a lunar spacecraft would be several times the size of the huge lighthouse on the small island Oie [near the city of Greifswald] in the Baltic Sea.”17 The men could hardly imagine a Moon rocket that was so much larger than the familiar lighthouse, which was close to where A-5 and A-4 rockets were readied for test flights. Von Braun could.
Another time, rocket team member Klaus Scheufelen and von Braun were sailing a small boat one summer evening toward Oie where they planned to have dinner at an inn. The usual breeze did not favor them, and so the going was slow. But with a full Moon, at least they could easily spot the marker buoys.
Suddenly von Braun said, “This is where we have to go!”
Scheufelen replied that the wind might not be strong enough to get them there.
“No, no,” said von Braun, looking up, “not to Oie—to the Moon, and beyond. This is just a matter of cost and time.”18
But while von Braun, Dornberger (apparently), and many of the professionals on their rocket team privately nurtured dreams of space exploration and travel, most of the time they were fully occupied with the realities of their work for the army—developing destructive, lethal weapons of war. Despite its best efforts, the team suffered from leaky lines, malfunctioning pumps and valves, and an equipment failure when “countless hungry little field mice” ate the rubber insulation from the wiring on “early and crude electronic equipment” at the Oie test launch site, colleague Fritz Mueller later recalled.19
And then there was the problem of the slipping “corset.” The A-4’s developers invented an ingenious device that encircled the missile and suspended the main body upright. It featured a joint system that allowed pitch, yaw, and roll motions during static firing tests. The inventors called it a corset because, like a woman’s girdle, it kept a firm yet flexible grip. Ideally, it would allow the missile body to expand and contract amid changing temperatures.
It didn’t always work, however, and one morning rocketeer Bernhard R. Tessmann had to report to von Braun that the night before, a formerly upraised A-4 had somehow slipped through the corset and fallen roughly on its tail. “Well,” said von Braun to the young engineer, “just be glad it didn’t happen to your girlfriend!”20
Tessmann, chief designer of the device, recalled that various reviews and kangaroo-court sessions were held after the mishap. “Everyone wanted to nail me to the cross,” he remembered. Only von Braun, he said, “had the right feeling for ‘tolerances,’ and that is exactly what it was.” It turned out that a test engineer had mistakenly left super-cold liquid oxygen overnight “in the belly of our girl, and this caused her to shrink.” The corset design was fine, the damaged tail was soon repaired, and with von Braun’s support, Tessmann gained a promotion and a pay raise.21
As the months rolled on, the A-4 development team, including the top staff, continued to work long hours. Sometimes they toiled into the night—the technical director’s favorite time of day. Kersten recalled that once, when facing a deadline on a certain task, he asked if she would like to accompany him to the shops and see if the workers could stay the night. “Their eyes were shining as he came and talked to them personally,” she recalled. “He touched their shoulders. He made everyone feel so important. They stayed and worked all through the night.”22
Her boss was brimming with charm and thoughtfulness, remembered the wartime secretary, who was just twenty, blond, blue-eyed, beautiful, and single in 1941 when she took the job. Late in the war she married one of the rocket experts, Rudolf Schlidt. But of von Braun she recalled: “All the girls were attracted to him. He was young. He looked to the girls like a Greek god, the way he walked, the way he carried himself. He was a genius, and yet he was playful, sportive.” Occasionally, when she and von Braun faced an especially long workday, he would suggest they take a break and go for a relaxing bicycle ride or a brief sail aboard a borrowed boat.23
Otherwise, it was strictly business between the two, his former secretary emphasized. Not that von Braun couldn’t switch on the charm at will. After hiring the comely Kersten to supplement the work of a matronly gatekeeper who had been with him awhile, as well as another attractive young secretary, he told her with a large grin, “I always have two secretaries—a pretty one and a prettier one.” Still, Kersten maintained, “I was committed 100 percent to the job, as was he.” As a single woman she was allowed to live on the base only because she frequently worked late for night owl von Braun, who often dictated correspondence well into the evening. “But it was not so hard to do,” she remembered, “because he was so committed—and he had such charisma. He was a kind boss. He never criticized.”24
At the time, von Braun had a girlfriend, whom he visited on weekends in Berlin, usually getting there by piloting the speedy, sporty plane with which the army provided him. A frequent passenger was his brother Magnus, a chemist and chemical engineer, who in 1943–44 worked as Wernher’s executive assistant. Kersten recalled that her boss “came back to work in a happy mood on Monday mornings, and everyone on the staff was happy for him.”25
At Peenemünde, the plane he had at his disposal was a blue Messerschmitt Typhoon, a four-seater civilian adaptation of the Me-109 fighter. During the war he made frequent use of his Me-108 Taifun for business trips to universities, industries, and other military sites, as well as for his own personal pleasure. He also used it in a few aeronautical engineering experiments of his own.
Von Braun the aviator indulged a penchant for calculated risk taking, to the dismay of his white-knuckled passengers. He especially liked to fly in and through bad weather. His longtime chief deputy technical director, Eberhard Rees, later spoke of having flown—often reluctantly—with von Braun during those years in Germany. As another colleague revealed years later, “Eberhard said he didn’t like to fly with him because if there was a cloud in the sky, he would head right for that, because it was more of a ‘challenge’ in flying.”26
In rocket development as in inclement weather conditions for flying, von Braun believed there was no substitute for firsthand observation. A colleague at Peenemünde discovered that truth the painful way. Occupied with the task of calculating the flight trajectories for the A-4s soon to be test launched, computations expert Helmut Hoelzer mentioned his heavy workload to von Braun one day and said he did not fully understand the program objectives. The technical director immediately took Hoelzer to one of the A-4 static-test-firing locations. The two men approached a high wooden fence surrounding the site, and von Braun found a knothole in one of the boards.
“You look through here,” he told Hoelzer, “and in a minute you will see exactly what we are doing.” Hoelzer pressed his face against the board and saw an A-4 on the test stand. The engine suddenly ignited with a roar. The sound waves ripped loose the board in front of Hoelzer and it struck him full in the face, knocking him to the ground. “I picked myself up, bleeding at the nose,” he recalled. “It was an indelible introduction to the practical aspects of the program.”27
The first two attempts to test-fly the A-4 from Peenemünde were dismal failures. After the worst of the misfires, a spectacular launch-pad explosion, the only thing the usually unflappable von Braun said was, “Well, boys, back to the drawing board.” Was he remembering the lesson in persistence he learned from filing the cube in the locomotive factory? In any event, he became directly involved in the troubleshooting to find and fix the causes of the failure.28
On the third try—October 3,1942—the “Cucumber,” as some called the missile, roared smoothly from its pad to a height of more than fifty miles, approaching the region of airless space. The men of Peenemünde danced and wept in their happiness. Von Braun later said he couldn’t recall whether he wept, but he did remember celebrating that evening with a few drinks at a party. “I don’t know about my getting wet outside,” he joked, “but I got very wet inside.”29
That day Colonel Dornberger made his oft-quoted comment: “Do you realize what we accomplished today? This afternoon the spaceship has been born!” He continued, however, with a less well-known remark: “But I warn you that our headaches are by no means over—they are just beginning!” He went on to stress that for now, the team must focus on perfecting the rocket as a weapon.30 Space travel and exploration would have to wait. Still, the A-4 successes continued to fire the imaginations of space-minded members of the team. As test engineer Karl Heimburg remembered: “When the V-2s [A-4s] worked, we knew there was no limit to what could be done. We knew then what von Braun meant when he talked about ‘reaching for the stars.’”31
But by 1942–43 Nazi Germany was locked in an all-out struggle for survival, and free talk about space travel was no longer safe. The Peenemünde-East accelerometer development laboratory where Stuhlinger worked received a visit one day in 1943 from von Braun, who was checking on how its work was going. As the technical director was leaving, a member of the lab asked him if he truly believed that someday rockets would put artificial moons in Earth orbit, as Oberth and others had predicted.
“Absolutely,” von Braun assured him. He elaborated on how the Peenemünde team, assuming it remained intact after the war, might have the opportunity in peacetime to send up space satellites, then rocket humans to the Moon, and later to Mars. But then he abruptly cut short talk in that vein, warning it was “dangerous” and “not permitted.”32 He quickly left the lab.33
A-4 test shoots at Peenemünde often brought excited workers up to the rooftops of their buildings as the countdowns got under way so they would have a better view. This was not always prudent, considering the unpredictable flight paths of the missiles. Von Braun himself had a few close calls. During one such shoot he and engineer Walter Jacobi were positioned in a nearby observation trench, discussing the chances of the rocket hitting the target area. The countdown proceeded smoothly, as did the liftoff and the initial ascent.
“Then all of a sudden,” Jacobi recalled, there was “an explosion at very low altitude. We watched the missile disintegrate, but not [until] the tail-ring with the rudder-motors hit the ground between us and the Officers Mess did we realize the danger we were in.” Observed von Braun, “I’d have been safer in the target area!” Then, thinking positively, he said, “Now all we need to do is shift this impact point 180 kilometers farther north, and our problems will be solved!”34
Von Braun and Dornberger did, in fact, once station themselves at dead center of the target impact area in an A-4 flight test with a live warhead. The idea was to gain a good vantage point for checking on technical problems occurring at the very end of the missile’s trajectory. The way the test shots had been going lately, Dornberger said, with tongue at least partly in cheek, it “would certainly be the safest spot.” Von Braun was standing in an open field when he spied the incoming missile’s thin contrail. Then he saw, to “my horror,” that the deadly rocket was headed toward him! “There was barely time to fall on the ground before I was hurled high into the air by a thunderous explosion, to land unhurt in a neighbouring ditch. The impact had taken place a scant 300 feet away and it was a miracle that the exploding warhead did not grind me to powder.”35
Markedly better—and worse—days lay ahead for von Braun, Dornberger, and the team at Peenemünde. Over the five years from 1937 to 1942, from peacetime to wartime, and with inconsistent support, they had carried out orders to bring the A-4 ballistic missile into being. Now they had to make it reliable and move it into mass production. There were enemies against whom it must be used in surprise, bloody attacks.