Page 54 of V2

‘Manpower.’ Kammler clapped his hands and laughed at their dumbfounded expressions. ‘Come now, gentlemen! If the pharaohs could build their pyramids two and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ, I can assure you the SS is capable of constructing a factory in the middle of the twentieth century and having it fully operational within four months.’

‘How much manpower are you contemplating?’

‘For the construction of the factory and the eventual production?’ Kammler’s hand circled the air. ‘Twenty thousand men. Thirty thousand.’ He shrugged. ‘However many it takes. The reservoir is inexhaustible.’

As they walked back towards the tunnel mouth, Graf asked him if he had ever built anything else of similar size under such pressure of time. ‘Oh yes. In the East. The reception centres for the Jews.’

That had been his first encounter with Kammler.

His second came six weeks later, towards the middle of October. He had not wanted to go back to Nordhausen. ‘Must I?’ he complained to von Braun. ‘There is so much to be done here.’ After the death of Dr Thiel, he had taken over most of his responsibilities in the propulsion department, where they were still trying to solve the problems with the turbo pump steam generator system that had driven the excitable Thiel to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

‘You have to come,’ von Braun told him. ‘We have to get the rocket ready for mass production.’

Once again von Braun flew the plane himself, and this time as they descended towards the airfield he took them directly over the Kohnstein hill. Amid the dark green forests of pine, the abandoned gypsum quarries stood out like vivid white scar tissue. In the flat area to the south-west of the hill a big prison camp was under construction. Graf stared down at it uneasily. None of the barrack blocks had roofs, he noticed. If Kammler had brought in all these thousands of foreign labourers, where were they housed?

The answer was obvious as soon as they drove into Tunnel B. They lived underground, along the walls of the cross-tunnels, in tiers of rickety wooden bunk beds stacked four high like rabbit hutches. Half-barrels with wooden planks laid across the rim served as latrines. In some of the hutches men lay prone, skeletal; one with his eyes wide open was plainly dead. The stench of it. And the noise of it – the rumble of cement mixers, the ring of pickaxes, the muffled boom of explosions as further tunnels were excavated, the roar of the generators, the clank of railway trucks moving up and down the line, the barking of the guard dogs, the shouts of the SS overseers. And the sight of it, wherever one looked in the eerie dim yellow light: the moving sea of striped uniforms, an undifferentiated mass unless one made an effort to fix one’s eyes on one of the pale, emaciated figures that were hurrying everywhere – always hurrying, never moving at a normal pace. And amid it all, the immaculate figure of Kammler, attended by his black-capped officers, striding along the middle of the newly completed Tunnel A, pointing out this or that achievement. In a month and a half, it had to be granted, he had worked a dark miracle. The lineaments of a giant production line were already beginning to appear: cranes, workshops, assembly areas, test stands, repair shops. He conducted the engineers right the way through the mountain and out the other side into the clear autumn afternoon light.

‘Well, gentlemen, what do you think?’

Graf lit a cigarette.

Arthur Rudolph, the only one of them who had been a Nazi right from the start – even from before Hitler came to power – said immediately, ‘It’s fantastic.’

Klaus Riedel, the liberal utopian who had learned to keep his political opinions to himself, stared at the ground and muttered something about being overwhelmed.

Von Braun said, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it possible.’

‘Dr Graf?’ Kammler looked at him expectantly.

‘I’m speechless.’

‘I shall take that as a compliment! Now, let us go to my office in Nordhausen and have some refreshments, and we can discuss the production plans in more detail.’

As they walked towards the waiting cars, Graf fell into step beside von Braun. ‘I should go back to Peenemünde. I’ll be of more use there.’

‘No. We have come a long way to reach this point. None of us is turning back now.’

He strode ahead. Graf stopped and looked back at the mouth of the tunnel, then up at the sky. He felt himself to be like one of the rockets – a human machine, launched on a fixed trajectory, impossible to recall, hurtling to a point that was preordained. He finished his cigarette and flicked it away, and walked on to join the others.

The night was clear. There was no traffic. Low above the black mass of trees, seemingly far out over the North Sea, a bright crescent moon lit the road ahead. Now that he was out of Scheveningen, Graf put his foot down. The moon seemed to keep pace with him. Frau im Mond. They had kept the movie company’s cheerfully erotic symbol painted on the fuselage of the rockets all the way through the tests at Peenemünde. Only when the missiles went into mass production did such whimsy become impossible.

He reached the outskirts of Wassenaar and slowed down, looking out for the turning. He spotted it, braked and swung left. He was stopped at once by the barrier. The inevitable SS guards emerged from their hut.

He showed his identity card and pass. ‘I need to get through to the launch site.’

‘No one is allowed beyond this point.’

‘This is an emergency.’

One of the SS men laughed. ‘I’m sure it is! If you’re trying to get to the brothel, forget it.’

The other said, more sympathetically, ‘Leave it, Doctor. There’s nothing you can do.’

From somewhere in the woods came a long burst of machine-gun fire – fifteen or twenty seconds. The SS men turned to look. For half a minute there was silence. Then came another, shorter burst, followed by half a dozen single shots.

Graf rested his forehead on the rim of the steering wheel. The guards went back to their hut. He stayed like that for a while, feeling the ticking-over of the engine vibrating through his skull, before wearily reversing onto the main road and returning the way he had come.

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