On March 10 Schneider drafted a letter to Röhm explaining the Army’s reasons for rejecting Nebel. The document, which was routed through the Army High Command and the Defense Ministry, had a pleading tone that reflected the tension between the Army and the Nazi movement. It noted that on September 21, 1933, Hitler, Göring, and Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick had seen a demonstration of rocketry during their tour of Kummersdorf and that on February 8, 1934, the same tour had been given to Deputy Führer Hess and “a number of higher SA leaders.” The Army wished to overcome the “mistrust that is obviously present” by giving an SA representative full insight into the much more systematic work going on at Kummersdorf under military auspices. Under separate cover an explanation of the Army’s dealings with Nebel was to be sent as well.55
That expedient seems to have worked temporarily, but Nebel did not give up. In May Seldte wrote to the Reich Post Ministry asking that it support Nebel for the civilian purpose of developing mail rockets. The ballistics and munitions section was able to frustrate that initiative as well. But it had so far been unable to move the Gestapo to arrest Nebel, a matter about which von Horstig—Becker’s successor as section head—had inquired in March. Nebel probably avoided arrest because of his connection with Seldte.56
At the beginning of June an opportunity finally presented itself. Nebel had arranged for the printing of a booklet entitled “Rocket Torpedo” in which he discussed the possibilities of rocketry for anti-aircraft defense, ballistic missiles, and gas attacks. Schneider and von Horstig immediately requested that Nebel be arrested for violating secrecy. Nothing happened right away. Nebel sent his brochure to the SA leadership, and on June 21 it intervened again on his behalf. Exactly one week later a representative of the Stahlhelm leadership called Ordnance and mysteriously requested an immediate confidential meeting regarding Nebel. Schneider and von Horstig were able to convince him that the Army’s position was justified.57
Nebel’s timing could not have been worse. The tension between the Army and the SA had reached a crisis point, and the generals were pressing Hitler for action. Hermann Göring and the chief of the still small SS, Heinrich Himmler, exploited the situation for their own ends by feeding Hitler false rumors of a planned coup by the SA. Beginning on June 30, 1934, the “Night of the Long Knives,” SS execution squads shot much of the SA leadership in Munich and elsewhere, including Röhm and von Krausser. Army units provided logistic and backup support. In Berlin, Nebel was arrested and imprisoned at SS/Gestapo headquarters downtown. By his own account he was saved from a potentially worse fate when he was recognized by a police official who had been a frequent visitor at Raketenflugplatz. It was typical of Nebel that in short order he got better treatment and then was let out of jail. He returned to the old rocket site to find his materials and car confiscated on orders from Army Ordnance. Under the terms of the lease, he was told to vacate once and for all. Presumably he had not been evicted earlier because of his connection with Seldte.58
Nebel, astoundingly, did not give up. Already in the fall of 1934 he tried to make some kind of arrangement with the large engineering firm Rheinmetall-Borsig. He would come back to haunt the rocket program a few more times, and the people in Ordnance would just as determinedly frustrate him at every turn. He was not alone in trying. Rolf Engel, another bitter opponent of the Army, led a student group that built a test stand for amateur experiments at Siemensstadt in northern Berlin around the end of 1934. But that group disappeared within a few months.59
Since the SA purge had effectively given the Army a rocket monopoly, Ordnance now had the power to eliminate even minor irritants. When a young spaceflight enthusiast named Werner Brügel wanted to give a radio talk on rockets for stratospheric exploration, Section 1 moved to stop all radio discussions of the topic and gave the naïve Brügel a tongue-lashing in their offices. Reflecting the prevailing anti-Semitism, Schneider’s record of the August 1934 meeting states that Brügel had “an unpleasantly Jewish way of speaking.” The Gestapo showed up at Brügel’s residence in Frankfurt shortly thereafter, arrested him temporarily, and confiscated his material.60
A different side of the Army’s drive for a rocket monopoly was experienced by Arthur Rudolph, who had worked on the Valier–Heylandt engines in 1930–31. He had lost his job in mid-1932 because of the Depression, and then met his old boss, Alfons Pietsch, in the unemployment office. They wanted to start in rocketry again, so they tried going to the local SA leader in Berlin for help. Rudolph had joined the National Socialist party and the SA Reserve in mid-1931, supposedly for anti-Communist reasons, and would become the longest-serving Nazi of all the prominent engineers at Peenemünde. The SA turned Rudolph and Pietsch down in 1932, but in May 1933 they obtained a small contract from Army Ordnance to work in secret on their engine. Pietsch disappeared with much of the money, and Rudolph had to finish the job himself. When he showed up to demonstrate the engine at Kummersdorf in August 1934, Dornberger told him: “You either work for us, or you don’t work at all.” As part of the conditions for his hiring, Rudolph had to leave the SA, but not the Party.61
At least one other obscure group in Hannover survived the Army’s campaign, only to be eliminated in 1936, and a minor plague of rocket “inventors” appeared between 1934 and 1937 to waste the time of the officers and engineers in Ordnance. Most turned out to be fraudulent or incompetent. One of the more credible was Hermann Oberth, who resurfaced in the summer of 1934 with a missile proposal sent in from Rumania. Because of his foreign citizenship and difficult personality, he was excluded from any participation in the program until 1941. The suppression of the rocket groups and the exclusion of unwanted personalities both contributed to Ordnance’s single-minded aim in 1933–34: to use the mechanisms of the Army and the Nazi police state to concentrate development in its own team at Kummersdorf and to eliminate all possible threats to secrecy. But while all this activity was going on, under von Braun’s leadership important strides were being made toward the establishment of liquid-fuel rocketry as a viable technology.62
FROM A-1 TO A-2
When von Braun began working on his dissertation at Kummersdorf in late 1932, even the modest program of mid-1934 would have seemed luxurious. The resources he had to work with were minimaclass="underline"
One-half of a concrete pit with a sliding roof was at my disposal, the other half being occupied with powder rockets. Also, one mechanic was assigned to me. 1 was instructed to give my work orders to an artillery workshop, which turned out to be loaded to capacity with other tasks, mostly of a higher priority than mine. The mechanics as to how my purchase orders were processed through the cumbersome administrative machinery remained for a long time an opaque mystery to me. It was a tough start.63
The “one mechanic” was an old hand from Raketenflugplatz, the skilled metalworker Heinrich Grünow. He was a help, but von Braun lacked the extensive engineering knowledge that might have made the practical job of constructing rocket engines easier.