Page 11 of V2

Your parents were communists, is that correct?

No, they were members of the Social Democratic Party.

One of the Gestapo men had rolled his eyes. Socialists, communists, pacifists – they were all the same to him.

The debate at the Rocket Aerodrome over what they should do turned nasty. Hard words were spoken. The upshot was that no one went to Kummersdorf apart from von Braun, who was now bound by the rules of military secrecy. That was the last time Graf spoke to him for the best part of two years.

A lot happened in those two years. Graf was in the centre of Berlin on the night when the Nazis’ torchlit parade passed through the Brandenburg Gate to the Reich Chancellery to celebrate Hitler’s arrival in power. The following month he saw the glow in the sky as the Reichstag burned down. When the regime made use of the ensuing panic to start harassing its opponents, his parents both lost their jobs. In the autumn, the Gestapo raided the Rocket Aerodrome, took everyone’s fingerprints and made the members of the society sign an undertaking not to talk about their work to ‘foreign powers’ – a worthless promise as their experiments had dried up in any case for lack of money. By this time, Graf had left the Institute of Technology and was studying for his doctorate at the University of Berlin. Occasionally he would glimpse the tall figure of von Braun in a corridor or in the street nearby, and once when he was walking in the park near Alexanderplatz, he thought he might have seen him on horseback, but the rider was too far away for him to be sure, and besides, he was wearing SS uniform, so he dismissed the idea as impossible.

At any rate, it was not until the summer of 1934 that they met again – unfortunately this time he could not provide the gentlemen from the Gestapo with the exact date, though he remembered it was towards the end of the afternoon. He was sitting writing his doctoral thesis (Some Practical Problems of the Liquid-Fuel Rocket) in his grim one-room apartment in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin when he heard a car horn sounding in the road outside. The noise was so loud and went on so long that eventually he got up to see what was happening, and there was von Braun standing on the pavement, with his hand on the horn, staring up at the windows of the apartment block. There was nothing for it but to go down and tell him to shut up.

He was not in the least put out. ‘Rudi! They said this was your building, but I didn’t have your apartment number. Get in. I want to show you something.’

‘Go away. I’m working.’

‘Come on. You won’t regret it.’ The irresistible smile. The hand on his arm.

‘No, it’s impossible.’

Naturally, he went.

Von Braun in those days drove a tiny battered old two-seater Hanomag he had bought for a hundred marks and which looked like a motorised pram: open-topped and in several places open-bottomed as well. Graf could see the road skimming past between his feet as they hurtled south out of the city and into the countryside. It was too noisy to talk. He guessed where they were going. After half an hour, they swung off the road. Von Braun showed his pass to a guard, and they drove past the red-brick office block of the Kummersdorf army testing facility and across the flat heathland of the proving grounds to a collection of concrete buildings and wooden huts.

‘Wernher—’

‘Just hear me out.’

It was nothing much to look at from the outside. But inside, von Braun conducted him through what was to Graf a paradise: a dedicated design shop, workrooms, a darkroom, a control room full of measuring equipment, and last and best of all a concrete bunker, open to the sky, in the centre of which stood an A-frame three metres high built of heavy metal girders. From it hung a rocket motor on fixed brackets. Fuel pipes and electrical cables ran from its sides. A nozzle protruded from its base. Von Braun guided him to take shelter behind a low wall, then turned and gave the thumbs-up. A man in overalls – it was Heini Grünow, Graf realised, the mechanic from the Rocket Aerodrome – turned a pair of large wheels. A diaphanous white cloud appeared beneath the motor. Another man wearing goggles approached with a burning tin can of gasoline attached to the end of a long pole. Keeping his head averted, he extended it into the cloud.

A bluish-red pillar of fire – pure, defined, sublime – exploded from the base of the rocket motor. Lying in his darkened room in Scheveningen, Graf could still relive every one of the ten seconds during which it burned. The solid roar of the plume in that enclosed space; the vibrations as the motor struggled to free itself from its restraints; the heat on his face; the overwhelming sweet smell of burning fuel; the exhilarating sense of power, as if they had briefly tapped into the sun. When it was over, the bunker seemed plunged into night and the silence rang in his ears. He stayed immobile for half a minute, staring at the spent motor, until von Braun turned to him. No smile for once, but an utter and intense seriousness.

‘Listen to me, Rudi,’ he said. ‘This is the absolute truth. The road to the moon runs through Kummersdorf.’

Graf signed a contract with the army that very afternoon: ‘to assist, under the direction of Wa Prw 1/I, on the conception of, and conduct of experiments on, a liquid-fuel reaction-motor test stand at Main Battery West, Kummersdorf’. In return, he would be paid fourteen marks a day. Money he could give to his parents.

When they got back to Berlin, they went out for a drink to celebrate.

‘Tell me, did I see you in SS uniform not so long ago, riding a horse?’ He couldn’t resist asking.

‘Oh, that?’ Von Braun waved his cocktail dismissively. ‘I only joined the SS riding school at Halensee – not the SS itself. I’ve resigned now. It doesn’t hurt to get to know these people. Besides, I like riding.’

He was to use exactly the same tone in 1937, when Graf had noticed a swastika badge in his lapel for the first time. ‘You’ve joined the Party?’

‘Technically. I’m number five million and something. Now, now, Rudi – don’t give me that look! You won’t get much support these days if you aren’t prepared to show some commitment. I don’t have to go to meetings or anything like that.’

And again in 1940, when they had entertained some bigwigs from the SS at Peenemünde, and he had turned up in the black uniform of an SS Untersturmführer – blond-haired, broad-shouldered, chin jutting, looking like an illustration from Das Schwarze Korps. ‘It’s purely an honorary rank. Himmler insisted. Don’t worry – as soon as these fellows have left, it’s going right back in the closet.’

A knock at the door of the hotel room. The voice of Sergeant Schenk: ‘Dr Graf? It’s after midnight.’

He had not realised it was so late. At some point he must have fallen asleep. He sat up in bed and stared with regret at his burned-out cigarette. It would be the last he would be able to enjoy for some hours.

‘Thanks. I’m coming.’

He picked up his torch from the nightstand, switched it on and shone it around the bedroom. Its thin light showed the sort of modest seaside accommodation he remembered from childhood holidays: an armchair, a chest of drawers, a tiny washbasin in the corner with a mirror above it, a wardrobe. Beside the wardrobe was a small roll-top desk and an old office chair that he had managed to scrounge soon after his arrival and where he sometimes sat and worked. He flicked the beam back to the wardrobe and let it travel up the centre of the doors to the suitcase lying on top. He hadn’t looked at it for weeks.

He got off the bed and turned on the overhead light. He closed the curtains, dragged the chair next to the wardrobe, stepped up and took down the case. It was old, made of good-quality scuffed brown leather. Von Braun had given it to him just before he left Peenemünde. ‘Do me a favour and look after this, will you?’

‘What is it?’