Page 52 of V2

‘Did they find anyone?’

‘No. Arseholes!’

Out in the street were maybe twenty SS men – standing in the middle of the road with machine guns, going in and coming out of the hotels. Some had dogs. A searchlight was mounted on the back of a lorry. Its beam moved methodically up and down the buildings. Graf set off round the corner. From the boarding house that served as the other-ranks’ brothel, the women were being led out, shivering in their flimsy dresses, carrying their suitcases. One by one, occasionally prodded by a rifle barrel, they climbed up into the back of a lorry.

‘Oh God,’ muttered Graf. ‘Oh God, oh God …’

He turned around and headed in the direction of the seafront. SS men had sealed off the Hotel Schmitt. He had to show his pass to get through. In the officers’ mess, Huber stood at the windows with Seidel and Klein and a couple of others, looking down into the street.

Graf said, ‘Are they searching here as well?’

‘They’re searching everywhere,’ said Huber. ‘On Kammler’s orders, given to Drexler on the phone. They even searched my room! As if I’d be hiding a spy under my bed!’

‘They’ve gone crazy,’ said Seidel. He was still watching out of the window. ‘Look at Party Comrade Biwack over there, directing operations. Anyone would think he was flushing out reds on the Eastern Front!’

Graf said, ‘They’re taking away all the girls from the brothel. What’s going to happen to them?’

For a moment nobody spoke.

Huber shook his head. ‘It’s a bad business.’

Graf turned to Seidel, ‘Do you have your car outside?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I borrow it?’

Seidel stared at him. ‘Don’t even think of it!’

‘Please.’ He held out his hand.

The lieutenant’s expression was incredulous. He sighed. Reluctantly he put his hand in his pocket and took out the keys.

The SS had first started seriously sniffing around Peenemünde as soon as it became apparent that the rocket was going to work. Two months after the successful test flight, in December 1942, the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, had made the trek up to the Baltic to watch a launch. Graf had been present. It had been a fiasco – the rocket had crashed after four seconds – but that didn’t deter Himmler. ‘Once the Führer has decided to give your project his support,’ he told General Dornberger, ‘your work ceases to be the concern of the Army Weapons Department, or indeed of the army at all, and becomes the concern of the German people. I am here to protect you against sabotage and treason.’

‘I am extremely interested in your work,’ he added, just as he was getting into his aeroplane to fly back to Berlin. ‘I may be able to help you. I will come again alone and spend the night here, and we can have a private talk with your colleagues. I will telephone you.’

Such, at least, was what Dornberger told von Braun he had said, and such was the gist of the conversation that von Braun relayed to Graf the next day. ‘It was all very polite, according to Dornberger. But I can’t help feeling it sounds like a visit from a gangster, offering protection.’

‘So the SS are going to be involved in production?’

‘There’s no way of stopping them. They’re into everything these days.’

And Graf, to be honest, had not voiced any objections to receiving SS help. He had been as keen as the rest of them to get the test facilities and the missile factories built. Nevertheless, it had been quite a shock to him the following May when a camp of barrack huts had suddenly sprung up in the woods, encircled by an electrified barbed-wire fence; and an even bigger one a few days later to see a column of five hundred prisoners in their heavy striped pyjamas and caps being marched along the road by SS guards with machine guns. Slaves in the middle of the twentieth century? What are we becoming? That had been his instinctive response in the morning. But by the end of the afternoon, God forgive him, such was his obsession with fixing the faults in the rocket’s design, he barely noticed the slaves, just as he barely registered the number of black uniforms that started to spread like spoors across the island in the weeks that followed – manning checkpoints, patrolling perimeters, guarding the building sites – as hundreds more prisoners, mostly French and Russians, were shipped in.

In June, Himmler came again – entirely alone, as promised – driving himself in his heavily armoured but modest car. Dornberger gave a dinner for him in the officers’ club to meet some of the senior engineers, and Graf was invited. Did he object now, at last? Did he refuse to go? He did not. He was not even shocked when von Braun put on his SS uniform for the occasion. It was a hot evening, not long after the summer solstice, and the Baltic daylight extended for hours. Himmler sweated profusely – slender, damp, pink in his thick black tunic, like a mollusc in its shell. He talked quietly, listened a lot, and when they moved from the dining room to the hearth room for drinks after dinner, he relaxed back in his armchair, refused all alcohol, pressed his fingertips together and gave them a tour d’horizon of the post-war world after a German victory.

‘The Führer thinks and acts for the benefit of Europe. He regards himself as the last champion of the Western world and its culture …’

On and on he went: the need for Germany to lead western Europe, the threat posed by the Soviet Union if she ever switched from armaments to the production of consumer goods, the fact that Germany could only support sixty per cent of her population on her own soil and hence the need to transfer the remaining forty per cent to the Ukraine. ‘Obviously a fall in the birth rate over there will have to be brought about in some way. We have enough settlers. We shall arrange for the young German peasants to marry Ukrainian girls of good farming stock, and found a healthy new generation adapted to conditions out there. The Führer calculates the population of Germany will be a hundred million in ten years. We must bear in mind the greatness of our mission and simply force people to accept their good fortune. European industry must work for the great cause. The whole wealth of labour we now control must be enlisted in the life-and-death struggle …’

All this was delivered in a tone of calm reasonableness. It was four o’clock in the morning by the time he finished, and still not entirely dark. As they walked back to their apartment block, von Braun took off his tunic and slung it over his shoulder. ‘Was I dreaming, or was that insane?’

‘Not merely insane, surely? Monstrous.’

‘Yes, I suppose it was.’

The first launch they laid on for Himmler the next morning was yet another disaster. The rocket failed to tilt properly and flew at a height of two hundred metres westwards right across the island to the airfield, where it blew up on impact, destroying three planes. The second, in the afternoon, launched perfectly. Himmler promoted von Braun to Sturmbannführer.