Concurrent with his order in June 1943 to rush the A-4 into mass production—Hitler wanted thirty thousand built, at nearly one thousand per month—he also decreed that missile attacks on London would begin that October. It did not happen. Von Braun and Walter Dornberger knew it would not happen. Developmentally, the weapon was immature. In test shots that autumn six of every ten missiles broke apart in the final phase of flight or otherwise failed.1 Months of work on technical improvements to debug the weapon ensued.
Hitler had laid down another requirement. “He wanted Peenemünde to test and train for the firing of three V-2s all at once at England, Dornberger once told me,” veteran U.S. aerospace engineer-manager David L. Christensen said. “He said they tried but never could get it to work.” And so Hitler’s vision of waves of three-missile salvos bombarding London was not to be.2
The time for operational use of the missile arrived almost a year late by Hitler’s timetable. Three months after the Allies’ D-Day invasion at Normandy and two months after the German senior officers’ failed assassination of Hitler, the first missiles were fired at enemy targets. A mobile V-2 battery in western Germany, which on September 6 had seen two attempted launchings against Paris fizzle on firing platforms, succeeded two days later in firing one missile at Paris; it struck the target area and did modest damage. Later the same day, German troops at a field site just northeast of The Hague in Holland successfully fired two rounds at London’s East End.3
The day marked one of von Braun’s blackest times of the war, he later related. “We wanted our rockets to travel to the Moon and Mars, but not to hit our own planet.”4 Well, yes and no. The fact that Paris was the first target may have darkened von Braun’s mood, but he certainly experienced other feelings on that day too. Great Britain’s Manchester Guardian years later quoted him recalling that he felt little remorse when the missile attack on England began: “I felt satisfaction. I visited London twice [between world wars], and I love the place. But I loved Berlin, and the British were bombing [the] hell out of it.”5
Von Braun had stronger personal and family connections with London and England than almost anyone realized. As he later wrote to contacts there, “My mother was brought up in England, my father worked for quite a while in the London City Administration, and I myself spent some of the most unforgettable days of my life in Old England.”6
Within ten days of the firing of the first rounds, twenty-six more A-4s struck London and vicinity. The revolutionary missile weapons were by then in full production at Mittelwerk, the brutal, underground armaments factory that used thousands of forced laborers from concentration camps along with its staff of skilled, paid workers. Von Braun checked on technical reliability issues—and occasional labor matters—at the plant during brief, fly-in visits from his Peenemünde home base, some 250 miles to the northeast.
When the A-4 attacks began, Goebbels wasted little time in informing the German people that the Third Reich’s second “wonder weapon”—the first being the Luftwaffe’s winged V-1 “buzz-bomb”—was now bombarding the enemy. He announced this new secret weapon had been renamed the V-2 (for Vergeltungswaffe Zwei, meaning Vengeance—or Retaliation—Weapon Two). The revenge was for the Allies’ saturation bombing of the major cities of the Fatherland, including Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Nuremburg, Dresden, Darmstadt, Bremen, Hannover, Bonn, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Munich, and Berlin. Von Braun said he learned of the new name for his rocket from a Goebbels radio broadcast.7
The missile developer acknowledged after the war that he and his team did indeed have mixed feelings when V-2s began raining down on London. “The Allies had bombed us several times at Peenemünde [including three U.S. raids after the first RAF strike], but we felt a genuine regret that our missile, born of idealism, like the airplane, had joined in the business of killing.”8 He acknowledged, however, that he would have been less than human had he not felt “glad to be getting back at them [the British].” These comments years later by a fellow Peenemünde team member reveal just how glad. “Don’t kid yourself: Although von Braun might have had space dust in his eyes since childhood, most of us were pretty sore about the heavy Allied bombing of Germany—the loss of German civilians, mothers, fathers, [other] relatives. When the first V-2 hit London, we had champagne. Why not? Let’s be honest about it. We were at war, and although we weren’t Nazis, we still had a Fatherland to fight for.”9
An Englishman’s memories of the first V-2 to hit London were evoked almost thirty years later in a letter to von Braun. A. V. “Val” Cleaver, who became a postwar friend, was one of the leading rocket engineers in Britain from the 1950s on. He told von Braun that in England in advance of the missile bombardment he had “tried to help convince our authorities that the intelligence reports about your V-2 from Peenemünde might be true.” Cleaver told von Braun what happened next.
One evening in 1944, a double bang [sonic boom] over London (with no prior air-raid warning) told me I had been right—and incidentally did no good at all to the Chrysler works in the western suburbs. For some weeks, this news was still “secret,” so when I visited New York soon afterwards, dear old Willy Ley assured me he still disbelieved it. I felt unable to put him right, but did gently suggest he might be wrong. He then said that, if the rumors were true, “a young man called von Braun” might be responsible.10
Despite von Braun’s doctorate in physics, the consensus was that when it came to rocket building, he was much more engineer than scientist—and he did not disagree. After all, he held two degrees in engineering. But just how much technical directing had Pennemuende-East’s technical director been involved in with the V-2 development? Postwar detractors questioned how much direct, hands-on input von Braun had had, suggesting he personally invented or discovered little or nothing. Some also contended that von Braun and his team effectively pilfered American Robert H. Goddard’s rocket patents from 1914 through the 1930s in creating “their” V-2 terror weapon. (See appendix A for a letter von Braun later wrote elaborating on this issue.)
Major General Dornberger, himself an engineer, weighed in on the first point in an essay written in the early 1960s. He asserted that von Braun was individually or jointly responsible for an estimated twenty patentable innovations in rocket technology in the 1940s. But, because the V-2 development was a secret wartime project, the documentation was locked away and papers never filed for patents.11 After the war, however, von Braun filed for several patents for his wartime inventions. An example was improving the mass fraction of a rocket through increasing propellant volume by shortening the propulsion system—motor assembly and nozzle—within the same exterior dimensions. Figure 1 of his U.S. patent application, filed in December 1959 and granted to him in January 1961 as patent number 2,967,393, consisted of cutaway drawings of a rocket in the shape of a V-2. Documented accounts abounded in the 1950s and ’60s of von Braun personally stepping in with the solutions to myriad aerospace engineering problems of the moment.12
As to the assertions about appropriating Goddard’s work, von Braun contended nothing could be further from the truth. He wrote that at age eighteen, through the efforts of his mentor, Hermann Oberth, who had written to Goddard he read a translated copy of the American rocket pioneer’s trailblazing booklet, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.” The 1919 paper, based on Goddard’s experiments, postulated that rockets carrying their own oxygen supply could function quite well beyond Earth’s atmosphere and could serve even as vehicles for flights to the Moon; he did not specify that he was experimenting largely with liquid-propelled rockets. Von Braun added that later on he did see various Goddard rocket concept illustrations and statements in aviation journals. “However,” insisted von Braun, “at no time in Germany did I or any of my associates ever see a Goddard patent.”13 Independent accounts support his contention.14
In the autumn of 1944, the combination of V-2 deployment and the threat of advancing Allied forces overtaking launch sites in the low countries led to the start of a top secret project calling for sea launches of the missiles. Code-named Prüfstand (Test Stand) XII, the project was pursued by a special engineering group assigned from von Braun’s Peenemünde team. The concept envisioned one or more U-boats towing as many as five missiles each in individual watertight containers to positions, among other locations, off the eastern coast of the United States. There, the submarines would surface, the canisters would be flooded to upright positions, and the missiles fueled, aimed, and fired at New York and other major U.S. cities.
The idea originated with team member Klaus Riedel. His inspiration was the large, enclosed, submerged “barges” towed behind U-boats in transporting food, ammunition, and fuel supplies to German bases primarily in Norway. The team of Riedel (killed in an auto accident in late 1944), Hans Hueter, Bernhard Tessmann, Georg von Tiesenhausen, and Hermann Hufen performed engineering studies, executed a canister design, and contracted with a shipyard in Stettin for fabrication of a test version of the container. Assisting were architects Hannes Luehrsen and Heinz Hilten. Von Braun took no direct role in the project.
Static firings of V-2s inside a canister were conducted at a Peenemünde test stand. But events near war’s end in Europe led to abandonment of the effort, and the V-2 never went to sea with U-boats. “The job was not finished,” recalled von Tiesenhausen, the last surviving engineer member of the project team, who designed the canister interior. “It was too late.”15
Precisely what were the wartime roles and responsibilities of von Braun and his team in regard to the V-2 rocket, beyond its development and testing? Large and small distinctions surfaced in various postwar—and posthumous—investigations and studies. In addition to its R & D work, the rocket team at Peenemünde performed in-house, low-volume pilot production of the rockets, as well as training of field troops to handle and fire them. The preponderant evidence shows that the team—essentially an R & D organization that had now lost out politically to the SS for control of most of its own Peenemünde operations—did not substantially participate in the volume production at Nordhausen or the deployment and operational use of the lethal, if inaccurate, missiles. There were two major exceptions, however.
First, Arthur Rudolph, von Braun’s chief prototype production engineer at Peenemünde, was detached, along with several assistants, and reassigned by the SS as operations director for V-2 production at the huge underground Mittelwerk factory. Berlin put Albin Sawatski in charge as the overall director of the plant. All this was in the fall of 1943, almost a year before the first operational firing of the missile. This subterranean plant was hidden inside Kohnstein Mountain at Niedersachswerfen, near Nordhausen, in the southern Harz Mountains of central Germany. Technically a private, but in fact a government-owned, company, Mittelwerk GmbH, operated the notorious factory. In actuality, the SS ran the show.
In addition to a substantial staff of paid skilled civilian personnel that included female office help, Mittelwerk’s primary workforce in labor-starved Germany consisted of thousands of forced laborers provided by SS Gen. Hans Kammler. An estimated sixty thousand enslaved workers passed through Mittelwerk, the main Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp nearby, and Dora’s satellite labor camps in 1943–45. Some of the detainees were even rented out by the SS for work elsewhere. The forced laborers included political prisoners, POWs, criminals, Communists, and a small number of Jews, Gypsies, and others from several European countries as well as from Germany itself.
Multiple published accounts show they worked in grim conditions and died at a tragic rate. About one-half of the estimated twenty thousand deaths occurred in the tunnel blasting and digging to enlarge the already massive old gypsum mining complex to prepare for weapons production. The work to extend the two main tunnels and dig smaller connecting, cross tunnels was brutal, taking a horrific toll in human lives. Suspected sabotage led to several summary hangings inside one tunnel and at the Dora camp as warnings. The many other Mittelwerk deaths resulted from beatings, disease, starvation, and freezing, either from sleeping overnight in the frigid tunnels or at the Dora camp and at the Ellrich and Harzungen sub-camps.
Rudolph’s responsibilities included assigning, scheduling, and monitoring the available V-2 workers. He was not responsible for procuring labor, establishing working or living conditions, or meting out punishment, according to records and his and others’ assertions.16 However, historian Michael Neufeld, who refers to Rudolph as being “on the second level of Mittelwerk management as [A-4] production director,” notes several instances where he had a measure of involvement with slave labor issues. These include his proposing premium wage incentives to harder-working prisoners and a general reduction of work shifts from twelve to eight hours—both initiatives rejected by higher management. Rudolph also attended, along with Dornberger and von Braun, a May 6, 1944, meeting where the then-new Mittelwerk general director Georg Rickhey discussed the need to bring in eighteen hundred more forced laborers—skilled French workers—to replace prisoners lost in the preceding severe winter. Minutes of the meeting indicate that neither Rudolph nor the other two men participated in that discussion, Neufeld acknowledges.17
The second exception was that von Braun made some fifteen to twenty business visits—ranging from several hours to two days in duration—to Mittelwerk from late 1943 until early 1945, as he later testified and flight logs showed. He was checking on the end product of the full-scale production of the V-2—his “baby,” as he called it. He went primarily in his role as head of a “final acceptance” subcommittee to monitor “quality control” issues in manufacture and as-sembly,18 he and others contended. These included implementing the debugging design changes he and his team at Peenemünde were constantly devising to enhance the unreliable missile’s performance. In a broadened context, his role also included occasional screenings of new prisoners to determine levels of technical competence and to identify skilled forced laborers who could enhance the quality of the finished product. These and other such prisoner contacts constituted his involvement with slave labor. There is no evidence that von Braun ever visited the Mittelbau-Dora or Ellrich slave-labor camps that serviced Mittelwerk, or any of the Nazis’ monstrous extermination or “death camps. However, he observed the slave laborers’ primitive living conditions inside the factory tunnels before the Dora camp was built in 1944, and he did visit the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, parent camp to Dora, to seek out imprisoned engineers and scientists on the advice of Mittelwerk’s Albin Sawatski.19
According to Ernst Stuhlinger and Fred Ordway in their book titled Crusader for Space (published in 1994), “some of his closest associates who still remember his words [including Gerhard Reisig]” later recalled that von Braun—against Mittelwerk standing orders not to discuss such things—said he was appalled by what he called the “hellish” working conditions he observed in the tunnels and the forced laborers’ presumed desperate living conditions at the camps.20 Von Braun told them:
My spontaneous reaction was to talk to one of the SS guards [at Mittelwerk], only to be told . . . that I should mind my own business. . . . I would never have believed that human beings can sink that low; but I realized that any attempt [at] reasoning on humane grounds would be utterly futile. . . . These individuals had drifted so far away from even the most basic principles of human [morality] that this scene of gigantic suffering left them entirely untouched.21
The decision to use forced laborers at Mittelwerk for V-2 production was that of the SS. Nominal SS officer von Braun, with what historians generally say amounted to an honorary commission, and the few other SS-connected workers at the Peenemünde base were too low-level with the Nazi military arm to have a voice in the matter. The decision was made at the Himmler-to-Hitler level. Neufeld writes that von Braun, after receiving an August 25, 1943, telephone call from Dornberger in Berlin, chaired a meeting later that day at Peenemünde in his commander’s absence in which the relocation of its V-2 production operations, prisoner-laborers, and some German workers to several underground factory sites in western Germany were first discussed. The historian interprets that meeting as “the first time that von Braun was involved in decision-making about the SS prisoners.” No account is given of any decisions made or any actions taken as a result of the called meeting. Previously, matters relating to the Peenemünde prisoners had been handled solely on “the production side”—as opposed to the R & D side—through Arthur Rudolph to Godomar Schubert, army civilian head of the center’s V-2 production plant, to Dornberger, according to Neufeld.22
“Himmler managed to obtain Hitler’s approval for the employment of concentration camp prisoners in the Mittelwerk productions,” Reisig wrote years later. To postwar critics of von Braun’s moral failure to object, Reisig asked, “How could W.v.Braun act directly against Himmler in the matter of forced labor?”23 Of a related situation involving the proposed importation of more slave laborers at Mittelwerk, about which von Braun said nothing, Neufeld writes, “Objecting would have been risky, of course, . . .” especially in view of his own recent imprisonment by the SS.24
Von Braun did complain, however, at one or more points about the use of forced workers—on grounds that the unskilled, disloyal, abused, and sickly laborers’ inferior work was resulting in high failure rates.25 His feelings on the moral issue of using slave labor could not later be known with certainty. Close associates from that time have insisted they did know, beyond doubt, from his shared confidences and his nature, that he was aghast at the situation but felt powerless to act.26
Von Braun’s role did involve occasional screenings of new workers to determine levels of technical competence and thus to enhance the quality of the finished product. Through correspondence, visits, and interviews he sought the transfer of certain foreign scientists and engineers he learned were among “detainees” at the Buchenwald concentration camp. In an August 15, 1944, letter to Albin Sawatski, director of Mittelwerk, von Braun noted that on his last visit to the underground factory Sawatski “suggested utilizing the skilled background of various prisoners both in Mittelwerk and Buchenwald in order to accomplish additional development work [in Mischgeraatkontrolle, or quality control] as well as to construct a model. . . . I immediately looked into your proposal by going to Buchenwald . . . to seek out more qualified detainees. I have arranged their transfer to the Mittelwerk . . . as per your suggestion.”27
Von Braun noted that he had worked with both the Buchenwald camp commandant and SS labor supply officer in effecting the transfer. Neufeld later wrote that von Braun’s August 1944 letter to Sawatski may “implicate him directly in crimes against humanity.”28 The historian does not explain why arranging specific transfers from the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp to Mittelwerk necessarily constitutes a heinous offense, except for the “direct involvement” with forced labor; selected detainees were assigned living quarters within Mittelwerk—an unhealthy environment but preferable to the horrific Dora labor camp.
Von Braun visited a French physicist, Charles Sadron, who had been caught as a participant in the French Resistance, in his work area near his quarters in a barrack inside one of the tunnels at Mittelwerk.29 Sadron wrote in his 1947 memoir:
I must, however, in order to be truthful, point out one man who took an almost generous attitude towards me. That is Professor von Braun. . . . He came to see me in the shop. He is a young man, of very Germanic appearance, who speaks perfect French. He expresses to me, in measured and courteous terms, his regret at seeing a French professor in such a state of misery, then proposes that I come work in his laboratory. To be sure, there is no question of accepting. I refuse him bluntly. Von Braun excused himself, smiling as he left. I will learn later that, despite my refusal, he tried several times to better my lot, but to no avail.30
Von Braun’s scheme, according to Stuhlinger, had been to have the French physicist (as well as several scientists at Buchenwald, whom he had transferred to Mittelwerk) eventually relocated to Peenemünde, claiming that the Mittelwerk site was unsuitable for productive work by these detainees. There, they would be assigned technical work, “[be] given decent housing, and eat the same food that we ate,” Stuhlinger related. But von Braun said the French physicist felt any such transfer would make him a traitor, and he refused to be treated better than other inmates.
Von Braun’s disappointment was mixed with respect for the scientist, recalled Stuhlinger.31 Future accusers cited the case of the French professor as further evidence of von Braun’s complicity in the exploitation of slave labor. Yet, Neufeld terms Sadron’s account “by far the most exculpatory evidence [in von Braun’s favor] that has yet been found.”32
Surprisingly, the percentage of forced workers within the V-2 production force fell steadily at Mittelwerk during the final months of the war, as detainee deaths cut into those ranks and the proportion of regular civilian workers increased in order to meet production goals. The V-2 slave-labor force there went from about 5,000 in July 1944 (of 8,400 total V-2 workers) to 3,500 in October (of 7,500 total) to 2,000 in March 1945 (of 6,900 total).33 In mid-1943, when Hitler had informed Speer that “Himmler suggested the use of concentration camp inmates for forthcoming A-4 production to assure secrecy,” Speer objected—to no avail. Hitler also ordered that “only Germans”—including political prisoners and other Germans from concentration camps, as well as skilled, paid non-forced workers—be employed for A-4 work, though this was later ignored.34 Von Braun, who was accustomed to the presence at Peenemünde of forced labor—mostly Russian POWs—working on A-4 low-volume manufacture, had expressed concern that the immature, unreliable missile was being rushed into mass production too soon. According to Stuhlinger, it was later, when he saw the “inhuman treatment” of slave laborers at Mittelwerk, that he complained of the poor work quality and said, “no better products could be expected” under such conditions. Official objection on purely moral grounds would have been at best futile.35
It should be noted that Von Braun’s brother Magnus was assigned to work at Mittelwerk in 1944–45 to help with quality assurance of gyroscopic components.36 Supportive commentators including Ordway and several Peenemünde veterans told me that Magnus bore a strong family resemblance to Wernher and wore an identification badge that said “von Braun”; they suggested that perhaps at least some of the Mittelwerk sightings of Wernher, claimed by surviving prisoner-laborers, were of Magnus.
During the postwar era and continuing after his death, Wernher von Braun came under allegations of “complicity in” and “responsibility for” the abuse and deaths of slave laborers at Mittelwerk. He gave a detailed, eight-page response to editors of Paris Match magazine in April 1966—as background information, but not for publication—at a time when a French group of Dora-Mittelwerk survivors and their families made what he labeled “false accusations.” In seeking a response from von Braun—by then a world-famous figure and the most tempting target of accusers—the magazine’s editors had advised their New York bureau chief that the accusations “do not appear to be based on any precise proof.”
In the Paris Match statement, von Braun cited his having been thoroughly investigated by U.S. and British authorities and cleared of “[having] been in any way involved with any atrocities”; he noted that this included review of the Dora-related and other “open records” of the World War II War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. “At no time did I have any authority whatever in the Mittelwerk management, in the affairs of Camp Dora, or in the setting of production goals,” he stated. That had been his testimony also in a legal deposition given in 1947 in New Orleans. He added that the findings of “many scholars” absolving him of any atrocious conduct at Mittelwerk were “also based on the simple fact that there are still thousands of people around (and not all of them my friends) who are intimately familiar with my own duties, the limits of my authority, the anguish to which I myself was subjected, and . . . the kind of man I really am.”37
He concluded his Paris Match statement: “In general, I readily agree that the entire environment at Mittelwerk was repulsive, and that the treatment of prisoners was humiliating. I felt ashamed that things like this were possible in Germany, even under a war situation where national survival was at stake.” Von Braun was urged by his closest associates to issue vigorous and explicit public denials of allegations made against him by Mittelwerk/Dora survivors and their families. He responded that beyond his not wanting to drag his present employer, the U.S. government, into controversy, these people had suffered enough without his direct challenges adding to their misery.38
Although “not in the decision-making process” regarding the use of slave labor to assemble V-2s, von Braun nevertheless bore a “moral responsibility” for the twenty thousand deaths at Dora-Mittelwerk, according to Neufeld in his 1995 book The Rocket and the Reich. (Similar views are held by others, including authors Linda Hunt and Dennis Piszkiewicz, but Neufeld is the most prominent and active of this group.) “Clearly, there wasn’t a lot he could have done to change it,” Neufeld acknowledged in a 1998 University of Alabama in Huntsville lecture, but as “fundamentally a good human being,” von Braun should at least have tried, Neufeld contended.39 (Several members of the Peenemünde team in the audience remarked that it was easy—and naive—for Neufeld to make these judgments.) “He was a lesser war criminal,” Neufeld alleged in another Huntsville-area college lecture two years later.40
Rocket-team veteran Reisig responded to the slave-labor assertions against von Braun by stating, in part, that as Peenemünde’s technical director, he “had no authority of deciding on the employment of forced labor” 250 miles away. “The only activity required of W.v.Braun at the Mittelwerk was the inspection of the quality of the end product, the complete A-4 Rocket (propaganda boss Goebbels coined the reference ‘V-2’).” The staff he had for this inspection work was borrowed from Peenemünde and they were “independent of the permanent technical staff of the Mittelwerk.” Added Reisig:
Hypothetically . . . W.v.Braun could have requested manufacturing of the A-4 . . . be done by skilled German workers . . . in order to procure top-quality rockets. However, to no avail! There were no such German skilled workers available. Hitler had drafted this most valuable work force [into the military] only to have it slaughtered in the hopeless fighting conditions at the Russian front, as I witnessed from my own deployment in Russia in 1943.41
The whole “brief, sad tragedy of the enforced mass production of a still-incomplete [missile] system” was caused by “the ‘leadership’ and the orders of a few . . . all-powerful maniacs,” Stuhlinger and other, unidentified, German- and American-born von Braun supporters wrote in a joint memo issued in protest of Neufeld’s scheduled 1998 university appearance. “Those prisoners died because of the horrible conditions in the concentration camps, and . . . where the tunnels of the underground factory were extended [to enlarge the factory], and quite generally because of the frantic and crazy effort of the Nazi government to produce weapons at all costs to win the war.” The memo stressed that all should abhor “what Himmler, Speer, Kammler, Sauckel, and others did with their concentration camps, which will remain a dark streak in Germany’s history for all times.” The statement concluded that “to lay those atrocities at the feet of von Braun and his Peenemünde co-workers is simply not in agreement with history.”42
If the von Braun team of engineers and scientists held Hitler, Himmler, and company fully culpable for the atrociously high death rates among the thousands of enslaved workers at the SS-run underground Mittelwerk V-2 factory from late 1943 till early 1945, what moral responsibility did the Peenemünders feel for the deaths their missiles caused among the civilian populations of wartime London and other cities? Von Braun later gave this answer: “[W]hen your country is at war, when friends are dying, when your family is in constant danger, when the bombs are bursting around you and you lose your own home, the concept of a just war becomes very vague and remote and you strive to inflict on the enemy as much or more than you and your relatives and friends have suffered.” (The preceding comments are from an early 1970s letter von Braun wrote addressing the question of his moral responsibility for V-2 casualties and the suffering inflicted on the Jews by Hitler’s Germany. See Appendix B for the complete letter.)
The German army launched the last wartime V-2, at England, on March 17, 1945. Over the nearly seven months immediately preceding, some 3,255 of the missiles had been fired, of the approximately 6,400 produced at Mittelwerk. (Of the 3,255 firings, an estimated 365 did not go far enough to cause an “incident” in the target areas.43) The numbers had fallen far short of Hitler’s call for 30,000 missiles. The targets included London, southeastern England, Paris, and Antwerp. Not all the warheads reached their targets. However, more than 1,100 did so in England alone.44
In addition to property destruction and the disruptive terror wrought, in 1944–45 in England the missiles resulted in the death of 2,742 men, women, and children, and seriously injured 6,467, the great majority of them civilians, according to official British figures.45 When the victims from continental Europe are added, the total V-2 death toll rises to about 5,000, not to mention the many more thousands of casualties with serious injuries.46 In addition, at the beginning of the war, after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Luftwaffe conducted a ruthless aerial blitz of London and its environs, intended to break the will of the British people. To put such grisly matters in some perspective, however, the total V-2 casualties were a small fraction of the civilian toll inflicted by any one major bombing raid by Allied forces, out of the thousands conducted against aggressor Germany. Including RAF raids beginning early in the war, Allied bombing from 1939 until 1945 killed 593,000 Germans, mostly in night raids targeting cities of 100,000 population and above.47
By all objective accounts, the revolutionary V-2 was a failure as a strategic or tactical weapon, and even as a significant instrument of terror. Also, as fate would mercifully have it, the missile found no use as a delivery vehicle for a German atomic bomb that never came about. Ironically, a number of U.S. and Allied military experts, including Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, came to the conclusion that because Berlin spent millions of reichsmarks and precious labor and matériel on Dornberger and von Braun’s rocketry efforts, instead of building more warplanes and tanks, thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives were probably saved.
Von Braun never apologized for his starring role in the creation and use of the ballistic missile in warfare, although he did confess to “misgivings about building rockets for the Nazis.”48 But his eyes were wide open at the start of his deal with the German army, as he conceded in these postwar comments: “Any moral conflict caused by the thought the rockets could be used as weapons in a war was opposed by the desire for finance for our space plans. We always considered the development of rockets for military purposes as a roundabout way to get into space.”49
The closest he would ever come to a mea culpa was expressing a “feeling of guilt” over the civilian deaths, in remarks at a crowded news conference in Munich at the 1960 world premiere of his film biography. “I have very deep and sincere regrets for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides,” said von Braun. “A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help win that war.” In some press accounts he had added, “whether or not I had sympathy for the government, which I did not.”50
With retreating German troops still deploying operational V-2s as an offensive weapon, the von Braun team stayed busy at Peenemünde in the closing months of the war. One of their projects in those days was to work on the A-9 concept, a winged version of the V-2, with double its range. A variant of that design showed landing gear and a pressurized cockpit for a pilot—an astronaut, in other words.51 The team also continued to work on the Wasserfall antiaircraft guided missile, an effort that began in 1943 at Peenemünde and had more than forty successful test launches. Another project that was still conceptual was an A-10 booster with 440,000 pounds of thrust. Yet another vision on paper was the A-11 multistage rocket with a monster first stage generating 3.5 million pounds of thrust.
Paper studies were done on a long-range rocket using the winged A-9 mounted atop an A-10 booster. Conceived more as a space transportation vehicle than as the first intercontinental ballistic missile—or so insisted the Peenemünde team later—it would have had a range sufficient to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Hitler liked that. “We called it the ‘Amerika rocket,’” Ludwig Roth, a senior member of the von Braun team, noted after his relocation to the United States. “We did not fly this rocket—but it got us here anyway!”52
By early 1945, as Soviet troops neared Peenemünde, U.S. and British troops advanced in the western and southern sectors. The United States was much on the minds of von Braun and his inner circle. Conditions were fast deteriorating within the Third Reich: the bombings intensified, supply trains and trucks could not get through (even to the concentration camps), communications were disrupted. The thirty-two-year-old father of the V-2 stared at contradictory orders from the German army, the SS, and local Peenemünde militia and civil defense authorities. “I had ten orders on my desk,” von Braun later reported. “Five promised death by a firing squad if we moved, and five said I’d be shot if we didn’t move.”53
He and his key technical lieutenants wanted to keep their unique team together, for the future. But what to do? Where to go? To whom should they attempt to surrender? The Soviet Union seemed out of the question—it was another police state, and a hated enemy that had suffered deeply and directly at Nazi Germany’s hands. They could not expect good treatment there. A targeted, battered Britain would hardly welcome the V-2 team with affection, nor could it afford to finance the group’s space dreams. Neither could France, a detested, perennial enemy.
At the end of January, von Braun called a secret meeting of fewer than half a dozen of his most trusted associates. During that meeting, held in a farmhouse, away from Gestapo ears, von Braun announced: “Germany has lost the war.”54 He then put the issue to his people: The team should keep in mind its extraordinary accomplishments, its ultimate space goals, its desire to stay intact, and the fact that both Russia and the United States would now want its know-how. According to an account in an authorized biography published two decades later, he then asked to which country the team should turn.55
Another account has von Braun helping along the decision-making process more forcefully. A future colleague, Col. Edward D. Mohlere, U.S. Army, recalled that one of the Peenemünde team who was present at the secret meeting, Eberhard Rees, related his recollection of what the rocket leader actually said. Von Braun had concluded that there was just one country in the world with the necessary resources for the job, “and that’s the United States. Let’s go!”56
In any event, they took a vote. With a single dissenting voice—that of Helmut Gröttrup, who later opted to join the Russians57—the group chose to seek to surrender themselves and their rocket secrets to the Americans. That meant heading south, probably to Bavaria, where U.S. forces were advancing. In the end, the SS command unwittingly aided the plan by evacuating the rocket team southward, although not necessarily for surrender to the Allies. SS options included using the group as a valuable trading chip to gain the freedom of war criminals such as their General Kammler. But another option was, if all seemed lost, to deny this resource to the enemy by simply murdering von Braun, Dornberger, and the entire core group.
Von Braun later claimed there were other, loftier factors behind his wanting to seek out U.S. troops. “The reason I chose America in particular is that Americans had a reputation for having an especially intense devotion to individual freedom and human rights,” von Braun later claimed. He added that the American system of checks and balances in government “offered the highest guarantee that any knowledge we entrusted to them would not be used wantonly.”58 This was the high-principled-sounding version. The rocket leader had earlier put it rather more bluntly: “My country had lost two [world] wars in my rather young lifetime. The next time, I wanted to be on the winning side.”59
However principled or plainly pragmatic his motivations, Wernher von Braun’s circuitous journey to the shores of North America began with this decision—made by him and agreed upon by his inner circle. Perhaps the odds were not good, but he hoped that from the ashes of war his one-of-a-kind rocket team might one day rise reborn like a phoenix for flight in the New World.