In June 1933 they attempted their first launch of a test rocket at nearby Wolmirstedt, but it did not even leave the 30ft (10m) launch tower. The only successful flight was from Lindwerder Island in one of the numerous lakes that surround Berlin. It is reported to have reached 3,000ft (1,000m) before crashing to the ground only 300ft (100m) from the launch pad, which must have been a highly stimulating experience for the panicking launch crew. Some further tests were conducted from a boat moored in Lake Schwielow in August 1933, but the results were a disappointment with some of the rockets looping uncontrollably across the sky. Eventually, the whole Magdeburg Project was closed down and Nebel received just 3,200 Reichsmarks of the promised grant for his efforts.
The chief of the Army Ordnance Bureau (the Heereswaffenamt), Colonel Carl Becker, was an expert on ballistics. In 1926 he had drafted a short paragraph on military rockets for the Army Textbook of Ballistics and in 1929 he issued instructions to contact any amateur rocket societies whose enthusiasts might have useful insights into how rockets could perhaps be developed. Becker was aware that rockets had not been referred to in the Treaty of Versailles, and he knew that there could be no restriction on further research into this potentially important area of ballistics. In the following year, Captain (later Major-General) Walter Dörnberger joined Becker’s office to start work on a possible new solid-fuel rocket with a range of up to 5 miles (8km).
Bureaucracy was quick to play a part. It was decided that the proposals for solid-fuel rockets could best be advanced if there was an official development and testing facility, and the result was the establishment of the Army Ordnance Bureau’s Research and Development Department (the Heereswaffenamt-Prüfwesen, conveniently known for short as the Wa Prüf) at Versuchsstelle Kummersdorf-West. This would become a development laboratory and a testing site for missiles. The Heereswaffenamt-Prüfwesen had been established in 1919 as the Reichwaffenamt (RWA), and adopted the name Heereswaffenamt (HWA) in 1922. As the Nazi Party began to assert its position and Germany began to move to a warlike posture during the 1930s, the task of overseeing the rearmament was handed over to the Army Acceptance Organization (the Heeresabnahmestelle, abbreviated to the Abnahme), a subsidiary of the Army Ordnance Bureau. Whether those involved ever understood it all is far from clear.
For a while, Dörnberger covertly provided funds for the Society for Space Travel but this stopped when he encountered a conflict between his interests in military rocketry, and the enthusiasts’ focus solely on space flight. However his engineers were pragmatists, and research on the solid-fuel rockets quickly showed that their applications would always be limited. Dörnberger soon realized that they were heading nowhere. He knew that he had to speak again with the enthusiasts. Many of them had academic interests in the technology of liquid-fuel rocket development. He was also aware that building rockets is a costly affair and the Society for Space Travel was always short of funds. When in 1932 Von Braun was offered the chance to become a professional rocket developer, rather than amateur enthusiast, he was delighted to accept. His ambitions to develop bigger and better rockets were suddenly within reach, while Dörnberger knew that he was establishing a new facility that would lead him to military pre-eminence. At the time Von Braun joined there was little official enthusiasm for rocketry, but the increased military tensions allowed the Kummersdorf administration to claim a steadily expanding budget. By 1936 the total number of staff was 60, and by the outbreak of war it was almost 300. They were the cream of German rocket enthusiasts and were a new breed; so too were the weapons they were starting to develop.
Dörnberger and Von Braun had very different personal priorities. Dörnberger could envisage the crucial influence of missiles in the military arena, while Von Braun always wanted — more than anything else in the world — to build bigger and better rockets. When the Nazis swept to power in 1933, Dörnberger sensed that the ultimate quest was military supremacy, and he knew that the new generation of rocketry enthusiasts could offer untold benefits to the army of an expansionist state. These new weapons could lead Germany towards world domination. For Von Braun it was different. It was the majesty of the space rocket that lured him on. Dörnberger could see that his military career offered the chance of spectacular professional success, whereas Von Braun recognized that the growing might of the German military machine could be tapped for all the funding, all the technical support and all the security that his private passions demanded.
Under Dörnberger, the research institute at Kummersdorf had established itself as a major facility for the development and testing of a number of rocket-assisted take-off units for aircraft, using solid fuel. Von Braun found himself responsible for conducting the tests under Major Wolfram von Richthofen and Ernst Heinkel. Under Dörnberger’s leadership, the team designed and built their first liquid-fuel Aggregate-1 (A-1) rocket. It was powered by liquid oxygen and alcohol. The fuel and oxidant were forced into the combustion chamber by pressure from a liquid-nitrogen tank and the rocket could develop a thrust of about 660lb (300kg). A heavy gyroscope was installed in the nose cone to stabilize the rocket during flight. Tests showed that the design of the A-1 was flawed. The small liquid oxygen tank concealed within its alcohol fuel tank was prone to failure, with catastrophic consequences. Furthermore, the gyroscope was too far from the middle of the rocket to stabilize it effectively. As a result, the A-1 was abandoned.
The A-2, which soon followed, had alcohol and liquid oxygen tanks that were safely separated from each other, and the gyroscope was located near the middle of the rocket between the two fuel tanks. In December 1934 the first two A-2 rockets were ready. They were dubbed Max and Moritz after cartoon characters in German comics. The cartoons had first emerged in 1865 from the pen of the German caricaturist Wilhelm Busch, who is said to have had a profound influence on the then-new comic strip industry in the United States. The two rockets bearing the affectionate nicknames were launched from Borkum, an island off the Dutch coast in the Baltic Sea. Both reached about 6,500ft (2,000m) and the military authorities were pleased with the results. In 1935, Carl Becker (now a general) put together a proposal to Hitler in which he advocated the development of a large long-range rocket for the bombardment of enemy territory. It would, he impressed upon the Führer, offer a highly intimidating weapon against any future enemy of the Reich. Hitler considered the proposal, and rejected it out of hand. There was no future for large rockets in the German military, concluded the Führer. When they wanted to dominate a nation, they would use political power or military might to do so. Army missiles need not feature in his plans.
Nevertheless, Eugen Sänger, whose proposals for the ‘antipodal bomber’ we have already encountered, was thought of by the engineering fraternity as a leading figure in rocket development and was invited to join the research teams at the Air Force Research Centre at Trauen (between Berlin and Bremen) to investigate the improvement of rocket motor design. Eschewing highly volatile fuels, and determining to work with more prosaic ingredients, Sänger designed a liquid-fuel rocket motor that ran on ordinary diesel oil and liquid oxygen. He soon had engines running on a static bench for half an hour, at the time an incredible feat. Other specialists were assigned to develop specific areas — telemetry (control systems), fuel combinations and so on — so that the rocket designers had an increasingly detailed knowledge base on which to rely. The majority of these research workers had no idea that they were jointly working on mechanisms that might eventually be used in giant rockets; they were brought in for a specific research project, and secrecy over its eventual purpose was strictly maintained. To the military strategists, and even (at the time) to the German High Command, rockets remained a curiosity and were still seen as being more useful for delivering small payloads, or for assisting the take-off of planes from aircraft carriers. The engineers were aware that they needed to keep the research moving ahead, even if their Führer could not see the point; and so plans for monster rockets were soon to emerge.