Page 19 of V2

I have spent the last ten years of my life by the side of the sea, he thought, always with the smell of pine in my nostrils and the taste of salt in my mouth, listening to the seagulls and straining my eyes at a wide sky.

They had set off in a convoy of trucks and cars from Kummersdorf just before dawn. That had been the first time: December 1934. So, yes – ten years, more or less exactly. He remembered he had sat in the cab of the lead truck, sandwiched between the driver and von Braun. Stowed in crates behind them were a pair of small rockets, just 160 centimetres long, officially known as Aggregate-2, but named Max and Moritz by the team, after the two naughty little boys in the stories they had all read as children. They were too powerful to be given their first test flights anywhere near a town, so they had to be taken to the seaside. What a lark! Even in the middle of winter, the whole expedition had had a holiday feel.

This was six months after Graf had joined the team at Kummersdorf, and he was lucky to still be alive. In July, Kurt Wahmke, a young physicist whose doctoral thesis had been on the outflow of gases through cylindrical nozzles, had decided to test his theory that they could dispense with mixing alcohol and liquid oxygen and could fuel the rocket much more simply instead with a ninety per cent concentration of hydrogen peroxide. On the day of the test, Wahmke had telephoned the mess to warn them there might be an explosion, in which case would they send help? Then he and Graf had smoked a cigarette in the company of two technicians. The pale blue hydrogen peroxide was suspended in a tank above the rocket motor, linked to it by a single pipe. They had stubbed out their cigarettes, opened the fuel line, and Wahmke had held a burning tin of kerosene to the nozzle. What had they been thinking? The flame had shot straight up the pipe and blown up the tank. Graf had been the only one who had reacted quickly enough, flinging himself headlong behind the concrete wall. The charred corpses of the other three had stayed in his mind for weeks, the smell of roasted flesh seeming to clog his nostrils, although von Braun had viewed the remains with equanimity. His main concern had been that the test stand was destroyed. He was always able to take other people’s tragedies in his stride. That was the mark of a leader, Graf supposed.

But poor Wahmke was already in the past, dead and buried – what was left of him – never to be mentioned again, certainly not during the long day’s drive from Berlin to Emden carrying Max and Moritz. They spent the night in the port and the next day took a boat to the North Sea island of Borkum, about thirty kilometres offshore. It had been a horrible crossing in a high wind, and Graf had spent much of it crouched below decks, throwing up. Von Braun, needless to say, the Aryan Superman, was not only a proficient horse rider, pilot, concert-standard cellist, et cetera, but also an accomplished sailor. He spent the voyage on the bridge. Apart from a couple of dozen soldiers, there were five engineers in the Party as Graf remembered it: himself and von Braun; Walter Riedel (not to be confused with Klaus Riedel), whom they all called ‘Papa’ on account of his sedate manner; Heini Grünow, the mechanic from the Rocket Aerodrome; and Arthur Rudolph, an expert in jet propulsion from the Heylandt works, who had been with the racing driver Max Valier on the evening he was killed by an exploding motor. Rudolph was the only one of them who was a Nazi.

They installed themselves in a hotel on the beach and sat on uncomfortable cane furniture in a chilly, brine-streaked glass-enclosed veranda looking out at just such a view as this. They listened to the gale whistling around the gabled roof and waited for it to die away. And waited, and waited. That was Graf’s first experience of winter on the northern European coast, when you might see seven hours of daylight if you were lucky. They stuck mostly indoors and scanned the monotonous grey vista for any signs that the weather might break. They played chess and bridge. They discussed space flight. They listened to von Braun’s ideas for a two-stage rocket – the first stage to carry its captain beyond the earth’s atmosphere and into orbit, the second stage with a booster to propel him to the moon or Mars: ‘The vacuum of space will mean that only a relatively small amount of power will be required.’ He showed them his calculations. When he claimed that the first man to walk on the moon had already been born, it was obvious he meant himself. Finally, over dinner on 18 December 1934, after a week of waiting and with Christmas approaching, he announced that they would launch Max the next day, whatever the weather; if it failed, they always had Moritz as a backup.

The morning of the 19th dawned clear and blustery: cloud base 1,200 metres, wind from the east, gusts up to 80 kph. For the sake of secrecy, the local people, mostly fishermen and their families, were ordered to stay indoors and keep their curtains closed. Soldiers were posted to make sure they obeyed. The engineers carried Max to the dunes and erected the launch mast, connected the electrical cables to the measuring equipment, checked the gyroscopes and filled the fuel tanks with alcohol, liquid oxygen and compressed nitrogen. Graf took charge of the movie camera. He had to keep wiping sand from the lens. They waited for a lull in the wind, then von Braun lit the tin of kerosene at the end of the broom handle and applied it to the nozzle. There was a crack of thunder as the jet ignited, and Max shot upwards – up and up and up: they had to tilt their heads right back to follow him, until his exhaust flame had shrunk to a tiny red dot. He reached an altitude, they later calculated, of 1,700 metres – the greatest height ever achieved by such a rocket – before his fuel burned out and they watched him plunge silently into the sand about a kilometre away.

They whooped and hollered, pounded one another on the back and danced around the beach like wild men, even Papa Riedel. That night when they stood on the covered veranda looking out to sea, von Braun proposed a toast: ‘Is it my imagination, gentlemen, or does the moon look closer tonight than she did this morning?’ He turned to Graf and clinked his glass. ‘To the moon!’

‘To the moon!’

They were twenty-two years old.

When they got back to Kummersdorf in the new year of 1935, Graf spliced together the footage of the Borkum test and von Braun started hawking it around Berlin. He might have been made for the age in which they now lived. Aristocratic yet not at all snobbish, charming yet with an infallible command of technical detail, here was the embodiment of the New German spirit! Here was a prophet of the future! It was their great good fortune to have flown a rocket to a height of almost two kilometres just at the very moment that the resources of the German economy, on the Führer’s orders, were being diverted to the military on an unprecedented scale. The army kicked in half a million marks immediately, enough for them to build two new test stands. The Luftwaffe offered him five million even before he had finished his presentation. When the commander-in-chief of the army came out to Kummersdorf to watch a firing, he turned to von Braun and simply asked him, ‘How much do you want?’

How much did he want? What a question! He wanted enough to build a rocket city, exactly like the one in Fritz Lang’s movie. He wanted something like Borkum, only bigger – a place on the coast, far from prying eyes, where a dedicated group of scientists and dreamers, drawing on unlimited resources, could safely fire their rockets undisturbed over ranges of hundreds of kilometres. That was what he wanted.

One of the Gestapo men who had interrogated Graf seemed much angrier than his partner. It was more than just a good cop/bad cop routine: Graf had the feeling that if it had been left up to this other man, the sessions would have involved fists and truncheons. Perhaps he had lost someone on the Eastern Front – frozen to death in the winter of 1941–2, or captured due to a lack of adequate equipment – because at one point he jumped up and pounded on the table.

You’re all just a bunch of traitors! This ‘army research centre’ at Peenemünde is the biggest swindle in German history!

Graf replied that he had nothing to do with the decision to build the facility at Peenemünde. It was a matter far above his head.

The other Gestapo man consulted his thick file. And yet according to Professor von Braun, you accompanied him on his original visit to the site?

I went with him, certainly. Nothing more than that.

When was this exactly?

Graf pretended to think. They must have it all in the file. The whole thing was a charade.

I believe it was just after Christmas 1935.

In truth he remembered it very clearly. They had spent much of the previous year designing and building a new motor that produced over 3,000 pounds of thrust for a much bigger rocket – seven metres long, the Aggregate-3 – and he had been invited to spend part of the holiday on the von Braun estate in Silesia to continue working. The baron had lost his position as Minister of Agriculture as soon as Hitler came to power and had retreated to this ugly grey barrack-like building, simultaneously appalled at the vulgarity and violence of the Nazis and privately impressed by their results. His brilliant son’s continuing obsession with rockets bewildered him. It did not seem an entirely appropriate occupation for a gentleman. He treated Graf with cool politeness – not the kind of person with whom he was used to associating; another symptom of the modern age to which he was too old to adjust.

One evening after supper, sitting in front of the fire, Wernher mentioned that he was looking for somewhere quiet and out-of-the-way on the coast to erect his rocket city. He had found the perfect spot on the Baltic island of Rügen. Unfortunately, the Strength Through Joy organisation had beaten him to it and were building a holiday resort for the Labour Front. ‘But I know just the place,’ his mother announced suddenly, looking up from her tapestry. ‘It’s right next to Rügen. Your grandpapa used to go duck-hunting there every winter. What was it called, Magnus?’

The old baron removed his cigar and grunted. ‘Peenemünde.’

That was the first time Graf heard the name.

And so for the second time, he found himself heading north, this time just the two of them, in von Braun’s new car. They stopped off overnight at Carmzow, near Stettin, at the ancestral home of von Braun’s mother’s family, the von Quistorps – a far grander property – and continued the next day for about fifty kilometres through the flat Pomeranian countryside until they crossed a bridge that spanned the narrow straits to the island of Usedom. For ten minutes or so the road curved through woods and marshland and ran along a narrow spit, with water sparkling on either side, taking them past pretty little fishing villages painted pink and yellow and pale blue, until at last it dwindled into a forest track at the northern tip of the island. They parked the car and completed the journey on foot.

That morning remained imprinted on Graf’s mind as a visit to paradise before the Fall – ancient oaks and hundred-foot Scots pines, dunes and peat bogs, white sandy beaches with reed beds; silent, immemorial, not a human to be seen, only swans and ducks, warblers and cormorants, streams with otters, and immense Pomeranian deer crowned by dark antlers wandering among the heather, placid and unafraid. It took more than an hour to clamber along the coast to the point where the mouth of the river Peene opened out to the Oder Lagoon. Von Braun, the winter sun on his broad face and his blond hair blowing in the sea breeze, flung out his arms to embrace it all. ‘This is fantastic, no?’ He started gesturing to where everything could go, abolishing nature with a sweep of his hand. He saw test stands in the forest and launch pads on the foreshore; on the grasslands there would be workshops and laboratories, a factory to manufacture the rockets, chemical plants to make the methyl alcohol and liquid oxygen, a power station, an airfield where they could work on jet engines for the Luftwaffe, a railway station, a model town for the workforce.

‘But you would need to bring thousands of people up here,’ Graf objected. He couldn’t help laughing. It sounded so absurd, like one of their boyhood fantasies. ‘Who on earth would pay for such a place?’

‘Oh, they will pay for it.’

‘They?’

‘Our masters in uniform. Believe me, they have so much money for rearmament right now, they don’t know what to do with it. They’re falling over themselves to spend it.’

‘Come on! The costs would be unbelievable.’