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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...
Adolf's Attention. At Peenemünde with its 250-mile rocket range, Germany's missiles went higher and higher, building steps into space. That was fine for Von Braun-but it was not yet the sort of military hardware that Germany wanted. World War II put on the pressure: Peenemünde must either produce a devastating military weapon or get out of business. Peenemünde's answer was the A-4 (standing for Aggregate-4, but later named V2, for Vengeance Weapon Two, by Hitler's gang). Its first test was a dismal...
...Braun to the point of resigning. Nazidom's power-grabbers began fighting for control of the weapon Hitler had approved, and in February 1944, Wernher von Braun was jailed by Heinrich Himmler's black-shirted SS because he declined to connive in putting the Peenemünde project under SS control instead of army control. Only after Dornberger convinced Hitler himself that the V-2 program would collapse immediately without Von Braun was Von Braun released. By that time he had begun to like his jail. "I had plenty of time to think," says...
...Attention. Von Braun returned to Peenemünde to rain V-2 ruin on London (when the first V-2 smashed London, Spaceman von Braun remarked to a friend that the rocket had worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet). But the war was already lost for Nazi Germany. Caught between the advancing Russian and U.S. armies, Von Braun and most of his tried, tested rocket team decided to go with the West. They fueled trucks with rocket alcohol and headed south. Von Braun had printed official-looking stickers with the mysterious letters VZBV-standing for some fictional...
...municipal dump; one day a black sedan stopped. Three German army officers stepped out, offered Von Braun military facilities to carry on his rocket work. At 20 he was chief of the entire German rocket program; at 32, working in the Nazi rocket center at Peenemünde, he built Germany's V2, which rained ruin on Britain. Caught between the advancing U.S. and Russian armies, Von Braun and his team unanimously voted to give themselves up to the West, also turned over some 2,000 tons of rocket equipment. The U.S. Army, keenly aware of the value...