Collier’s readers were introduced to von Braun as the technical director of the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Guided Missile Development Group. “At forty, he is considered the foremost rocket engineer in the world today. He was brought to this country from Germany by the U.S. government in 1945.” Further details about his wartime work were carefully omitted. He was pictured at the head of a table next to his first tutor and mentor in rocket research, Willy Ley. Shortly after the Peenemünde team arrived in the United States, Ley had cautioned friends to be wary of von Braun’s seductive charisma. By the early 1950s, von Braun’s charm, as well as his considerable political savvy and innate talent to inspire, had worked magic on his former enemies.
This wasn’t the first meeting on American soil of the two former colleagues. It was on a December evening in 1946 that Ley and von Braun had looked each other in the face for the first time in more than a decade and a half. Their post-war experiences in their adopted country had differed dramatically. Ley was the son of a traveling salesman; von Braun had been born into privilege, an aristocrat whose father was a politician, jurist, and bank official. Von Braun grew up with a sense of entitlement, which, when combined with his innate charisma, effortlessly opened doors. Physically, he could have been mistaken for a matinee idol; Ley once described von Braun’s appearance as “a perfect example of the type labeled ‘Aryan Nordic’ by the Nazis.” In affect and appearance, Ley, on the other hand, personified the “absentminded professor” stereotype. He wore thick-lens eyeglasses and spoke with a heavy accent, which peppered a discussion about UFOs with references to “flyink zauzers.” Nevertheless, Ley was a talented communicator with an ability to convey his curiosity and fascination about scientific subjects to audiences, which found his passions infectious. Unfortunately, he was less successful when attempting to find rocketry-related work in the United States in spite of his expertise, while von Braun charmed his way into new opportunities.
Their reunion had occurred when von Braun made his first visit to New York City, to attend an American Rocket Society conference, accompanied by his entourage of military minders. The presence of von Braun’s escort didn’t prevent Ley from extending an invitation to dinner at his apartment in Queens. Over glasses of wine, the two men talked until nearly 3:00 A.M., catching up on fifteen years of history during a discussion Ley later described as both tense and informative. Von Braun revealed the history of the Nazi rocket program and how he had come to lead it. However, he was less forthcoming about some crucial details that became more widely known only decades later.
Von Braun disclosed the circumstances behind his abrupt disappearance from the Verein für Raumschiffahrt in the fall of 1932. A captain in the German Army’s weapons department, Walter Dornberger, had personally recruited von Braun to research the development of liquid-fuel rockets as ballistic weapons. Dornberger set up a small lab at Kummersdorf, a secluded estate south of Berlin, and gave von Braun a stipend, a stationary rocket-engine testing stand, and an assistant. They imposed total secrecy on von Braun’s work since all Army-funded research was classified. While at Kummersdorf, the young scientist—then age twenty—was allowed to pursue his doctoral studies in physics and engineering at the University of Berlin. It was while he was at work on his dissertation that the Nazis removed Jewish professors and academics with suspected leftist political leanings, and burned books at the public rallies. Von Braun admitted to Ley that he had focused exclusively on his studies and was oblivious to the political significance of what was happening around him. When von Braun’s dissertation was finished, the German Army demanded it be titled “About Combustion Tests,” in an attempt to disguise the fact that it included detailed information about his liquid-fuel-rocket research at Kummersdorf.
Von Braun explained to Ley how by 1937 the German Army had financed the development of the world’s most powerful rocket of that time, a towering twenty-one-foot liquid-fuel missile, which they secretly launched from a remote island on the Baltic Sea. During Germany’s period of rearmament, von Braun said, he also worked on developing rocket-assisted airplane takeoffs for the air force, the Luftwaffe. Not long after, a competition ensued between the different branches of the German armed forces, with the Luftwaffe offering von Braun five million marks to establish a new facility for rocket development, and the Army coming up with six million more. The Army’s additional one million marks ensured that Dornberger would continue as von Braun’s superior and would exert greater control over the combined eleven-million-mark Luftwaffe-Army project. Von Braun couldn’t believe his good fortune. “We hit the big time!” he said, and was then tasked with finding the perfect location for his new facility.
Von Braun continued his story as he told Ley how he had searched for a remote secure location near a large body of water. Sensing the coming war, he also thought it should be a site strategically situated for future rocket launches against the Allies. His mother suggested Peenemünde, a relatively uninhabited pine-covered island on the Baltic, where his father used to go duck hunting. The Luftwaffe funded the luxurious facilities, and by 1938 the island had a brand-new town, a chemical-manufacturing facility, a power plant, and its own railway. At full capacity it would house twelve thousand employees.
As their conversation continued into the night, von Braun went on to vividly describe the first test of the A-4 rocket in October 1942. Listening attentively, Willy Ley attempted to mentally record as much information as he could. He had published Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere only two years earlier and realized the history section of his book was now unacceptably obsolete. Von Braun said the A-4—the rocket that became better known by its propaganda name as the V-2—had been designed to carry a one-ton warhead two hundred miles. Von Braun revealed that the first A-4 had been decorated with a painted insignia that depicted a long-legged nude woman with a rocket sitting upon the crescent moon, a reference to Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond. The first test of the A-4 had gone far better than any of his team had expected. It reached an altitude of almost sixty miles. At a celebration after the launch, von Braun said Colonel Dornberger had looked around the room and remarked, “Do you realize that today the spaceship was born?”
After the A-4’s successful first flight, a number of guidance-system design problems remained unresolved and months of work lay ahead before the weapon could be deployed in the war. Some weeks later, von Braun and Dornberger were summoned to meet with Hitler to explain the production delays. They showed him a film of the first successful test. When the screening ended and the lights went up, Hitler displayed a sudden new enthusiasm for the A-4 program and talked of it as the superweapon he had been hoping for. Hitler immediately approved further research funding and conferred a professorship on von Braun—“the youngest professor in Germany”—and promoted Dornberger to major general.
The British had become aware of the activity at Peenemünde, however, and on the night of August 17–18, 1943, nearly six hundred RAF bombers dropped hundreds of tons of explosives on the facility. Almost seven hundred people were killed in the raid, most of them foreign prisoners who had been forced to work on the assembly of the early rockets. As a result of the raid, production for both the V-2 and the less complicated V-1 cruise missile was relocated to a distant underground facility. Development and testing of the V-2 missile continued at Peenemünde, but with a smaller workforce.
A crucial part of the story remained untold, however. The new hidden underground production facility was, in fact, built as part of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in the Harz Mountains, more than three hundred miles southwest of Peenemünde. During the final two years of the war, thousands of slave laborers from the Soviet Union, Poland, and France were worked to death at Dora-Mittelbau while building thousands of rockets. A few grim details about the rocket-making facility appeared in American newspapers around