Word: kummersdorf
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...shrewdness with which this tall, fair young student with the broad, massive chin went to work, and by his astonishing theoretical knowledge." Result: in October 1932, Wernher von Braun, at 20, became the top civilian specialist for the German army's new (and only) rocket station at Kummersdorf, hidden in a pine forest south of Berlin...
...president of Bell Aircraft in Buffalo, "was to reach infinite space." But if Wernher von Braun had any notions about the German army's spending millions to achieve his dream of space exploration, they were quickly dispelled. Germany wanted weapons, period. The Budget Bureau would not even permit Kummersdorf to buy office equipment, and Von Braun learned early in the game the techniques of flimflamming the bureaucrats, e.g., it was a rare budget official who realized that Kummersdorf's request for funds to buy an "appliance for milling wooden dowels up to 10 millimeters in diameter" meant that...
Despite its difficulties, by 1935 the Kummersdorf group had successfully fired two liquid-fuel rockets, christened Max and Moritz (the German cartoon equivalents of the Katzenjammer Kids), and had outgrown the Kummersdorf facilities, moved on to a new range at desolate, marshy Peenemünde, on the Baltic Coast...
Watching a weapons demonstration at Kummersdorf one day in 1933. Chancellor Adolf Hitler exclaimed with delight: "That's what I need! That's what I want to have!" The man who was giving him what he wanted was a stocky Pomeranian lieutenant colonel named Heinz Guderian, showing off his new Panzers and motorized troops. He had developed them in the face of opposition from most of the Wehrmacht generals and he had brought them a long way from the days when schoolboys used to slit his canvas dummy tanks for a look inside. He and his tanks were...
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