The V2 Rocket, 1950

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Werner von Braun was only twenty years old when he joined the Third Reich’s rocket development program. He was a proud and devoted Nazi, and had worked tirelessly on his invention: the V2 rocket. The weapon could travel extremely long distances – a cutting-edge bomb that the Nazis believed would win them the war. Werner von Braun knew all its secrets; indeed, only he fully understood the 14 tonnes of documentation needed for its development and production. Spy networks had taken root within the Third Reich, and infiltrators were desperate to get their hands on the technology. Furtively they searched among the long stacks of archives, of plans and sketches, and so Werner von Braun was summoned to Heinrich Himmler’s command centre in eastern Prussia in late 1944. The goal was to confound the spies and resolve the rocket’s final technical issues in secret. Von Braun was confident, and was not intimidated by Himmler. He knew the V2 rocket by heart, and in the field of aerospace engineering nothing was beyond his capability. 

But victory appeared to be slipping from the Reich’s grasp, and Von Braun was no longer convinced of Germany’s dominance. He was a defeatist, and Himmler had grown suspicious of him. The Gestapo were told to keep an eye on von Braun. The engineer was suffocating, feeling threatened and oppressed. His creative spirit was restless, and he began to dream of sending rockets into space to conquer the very stars themselves. His future, he now perceived, no longer lay with Germany. He attempted to flee to London, but was intercepted and arrested by the Gestapo. He was accused of treason, and imprisoned at Stettin. Yet still he was the only man who could complete the work on the V2 rocket, and the only one who could grant Hitler’s wish to wipe London off the map. Before long, London was put to the sword. The first V2 rocket that hit the English capital was greeted with awe and horror; people thought a building had exploded due to a gas leak. Soon, the sky was darkened by a myriad of rockets that would destroy entire neighbourhoods in a fiery hell storm. Von Braun was the engineer behind this cutting-edge weapon, which not only destroyed everything it hit, but also caused the deaths of thousands of deportees who worked in the Nazi armaments factories.

When the Soviet army had advanced to within 160 km of Peenemunde in early 1945, von Braun gathered his engineers and together they debated which side they should join. Von Braun and his staff decided to give themselves up to the Americans. This was their only lifeline, he knew, but the engineer was smart enough not to approach the enemy empty-handed. In every negotiation there was some quid pro quo. Out of fear that the 14 tonnes of documents would be destroyed by the Gestapo, von Braun ordered them to be hidden in an abandoned mine in the Harz Mountains, knowing that the Americans would not refuse such a gift. “We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else.  We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured,” declared von Braun as he gave himself up to the Americans.

Werner von Braun became a political refugee under American protection. He continued to work as a leading engineer, no longer in the service of death but of innovation. In years to come, the V2 rocket would become the basis for the prototype Saturn V rocket, which would send Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Von Braun will ever remain a key figure in America’s conquest of space.

Alan Alfredo Geday