German youths — including the young Wernher von Braun — were avid readers of books like Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums — der Raketen-Motor (The Problem of Space Travel — the Rocket Motor) and Die Rakete (The Rocket), a magazine published by the Society for Space Travel (VereinfürRaumschiffahrt), and German engineers experimented with rockets and other propulsion systems.
Alongside the pioneering rocket work of Wernher von Braun and others, the Order of the Black Sun worked to develop the theories of the Thule Society and the Vril Society to create another kind of craft entirely: disk-shaped, with speed and acceleration that defied conventional physics, and powered by motors whose revolutionary design blended science and mysticism according to Black Sun principles. While von Braun’s rockets laid the foundations of both US and Soviet space flight, it was the saucers that became the vital component of the Bifrost Protocol — and of the Walhalla moonbase itself.
Born Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun in Wirsitz, Prussia (now Wyrzysk, Poland), von Braun could trace his ancestry through both parents to European royalty. He developed a passion for astronomy after receiving a telescope as a gift, and he was arrested at the age of 12 for causing a disturbance after fitting rockets to a toy car and sending it hurtling down a public street.
Undeterred, von Braun studied physics and mathematics in order to pursue his interest in rocket engineering, and in 1932 he earned a Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Berlin’s Technical High School (Technische Hochschule).
Although space travel remained his primary interest, he became involved in military rocket development. By his own account, he was a reluctant Nazi, joining the Party in 1939 and the SS in 1940 only after it became clear that this was the only way to continue his work in rocket science.
He became the technical director of Germany’s rocket development facility at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea, helping develop rocket engines and rocket-assisted takeoff apparatus for aircraft as well as the Aggregat rocket series that led to the development of the V-2 ballistic missile.
Along with his brother Magnus, von Braun surrendered to American forces on May 2, 1945. He was taken to the United States and became a leading light in NASA’s rocket program, culminating in the Apollo Moon landings. Some doubt the sincerity of his claim that he worked for the Nazis reluctantly: it was routine for Operation Paperclip to “clean up” the records of imported German scientists to make them more acceptable.
The initial impetus for the Third Reich’s space program developed out of the Amerikabomber project.
Soon after the United States entered the war, the Reich Air Ministry issued a requirement for a long-range heavy bomber capable of striking the continental United States from bases in Europe, some 3,600 miles away, with the atomic weapons Germany was racing to develop.
Despite design submissions from every major aircraft manufacturer in Germany, the Amerikabomber project yielded little more than a handful of prototypes. Material shortages, Allied bombing of Germany’s heavy industry, and the rapid advance of Allied and Soviet troops into Germany rendered the project unfeasible, and almost all available resources went toward the defense of the Fatherland.
Co-designed by Austrian engineer Eugen Sänger and his wife, mathematician Irene Bredt, the Silbervogel (Silver Bird) was a rocket-powered bomber designed to fly at about 3,100mph, or a little over Mach 4. Launched from a rocket sled and lifted to a suborbital altitude of 90 miles (475,000 feet), the plane would skip off the denser upper layers of the stratosphere like a stone across a pond, delivering a payload of up to 8,800 pounds — about 10 percent smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — before descending across the Pacific Ocean to land in friendly Japanese territory.
In 1942, the Sängers’ design was considered too radical, and the Air Ministry focused on more conventional aircraft designs from established manufacturers including Messerschmitt, Heinkel, and Junkers.
Based at Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic coast, the Army Research Center (Heeresversuchsanstalt) had been developing ballistic missiles since the early 1930s under the leadership of Wernher von Braun.
Their Aggregat series included the A4, which developed into the dreaded V-2 rocket. As the Aggregat program continued, the Center explored features like recovery parachutes, wings, and hybrid rocket-ramjet designs. The A9/A10 Amerikarakete (America Rocket) was a two-stage missile intended to render the Amerikabomber program unnecessary, and the A12 was a four-stage orbital rocket designed to take payloads of up to 22,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.
After Kammler assumed control of all secret weapons production, he found himself increasingly in conflict with von Braun, who fought his efforts to absorb the Peenemünde rocket group into Kammler’s own SS E-IV. Braun resisted fiercely, though his reasons for doing so are still debated. According to the statement von Braun gave to officers of Operation Paperclip after his surrender, he was a reluctant Nazi who only joined the SS when it became clear he would be replaced if he did not, and who objected deeply to Kammler’s use of concentration camp prisoners as slave labor.
Documents captured from SS E-IV, on the other hand, paint von Braun as snobbish, abrasive, and highly territorial, hinting that the blue-blooded Prussian von Braun regarded the ardent Nazi Kammler as an upstart political appointee rather than a fellow scientist. Kammler’s background was in construction and civil engineering, whereas von Braun had been studying rocketry since his youth; he was happy for Kammler to attend to the day-to-day problems of manufacturing weapons based on von Braun’s designs, but he deeply resented Kammler’s interference with the research and development process.
Von Braun was also dismissive of the Amerikabomber project and the various saucer initiatives, maintaining that long-range ballistic missiles offered a cheaper and more practical means of bombarding enemy cities and a firmer foundation for space travel. He regarded Kammler’s other projects as a waste of resources — or, worse, a theft of resources from his rocket group — and was not afraid to say so.