Only in the case of these auxiliary devices did corporations play an important role in propulsion design and development. Otherwise the civil service engineers at Kummersdorf and Peenemünde dominated the process. After the war began, Army Ordnance began to draw the universities into rocket research as a third force. Although dissertation work had been important in propulsion before 1937, it took the war to force the partial lifting of the secrecy restrictions. The catalyzing event was the Army Commander-in-Chief’s acceleration of the A-4 project immediately after the outbreak of the war. In order to solve the missile’s perplexing technical problems in time for its projected military deployment in September 1941, Army Ordnance decided to bring academic research institutions into the program on a large scale. General Becker, chief of Ordnance since March 1938, probably suggested and certainly approved this action.14
In addition to accelerating the A-4 schedule, Becker had a second motivation for bringing Peenemünde and the universities together: securing the Army’s place in wartime academic research. In the intervening years he had become one of the leading science policymakers of the Third Reich. As Dean of the Faculty of Military Technology at the Technical University of Berlin, Becker had played an important role in the increasing militarization and state domination of German scientific institutions. Although his faculty never came into effective operation, and Becker delegated most of his duties to the Associate Dean, his academic position helped to further his national prominence and his relations with the Nazi elite. In 1937 Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust named him President of a newly created Reich Research Council. Like so many leaders in the National Socialist regime, Becker acquired at least the illusion of power by accumulating many different hats. The Research Council turned out, however, to be stillborn. Rivalry among the various ministries and armed services made a coherent science policy impossible to achieve, especially because Rust was a nonentity in the ruthless behind-the-scenes struggle that was the Third Reich.15
When a general war rather unexpectedly erupted in 1939, chaos reigned in German education and science policy. No plan for the mobilization of science and engineering existed, and massive callups drained the research institutes of students and younger scholars. There was even talk of closing the universities for the duration of the war. For both patriotic and selfish reasons, leaders of academic institutions eagerly sought military projects that would provide funding and draft exemptions. Self-interest also compelled the armed services to grab what institutes they could: Not only did they need more research capacity because of the demands of war, but they also wished to prevent other services or bodies from taking over institutes they wanted. By its very nature, the Third Reich was a collection of competing bureaucratic empires. Hitler had further exacerbated interservice rivalry in the late 1930s by failing to provide effective tri-service coordination or clear priorities for rearmament. In September 1939 Becker thus had to move quickly to secure the Army’s role in academia, which could scarcely be accomplished through the Reich Research Council. The fact that the Ordnance chief himself had little use for that body, although he headed it, is shown by Ordnance’s seizure of the nuclear project from the council in that same month. Erich Schumann’s research division was given supervision over this small effort to investigate the feasibility of atomic bombs and reactors, which had arisen from the discovery of uranium fission by German physicists at the end of 1938.16
With the encouragement of Becker, Dornberger’s rocket section (Wa Prüf 11) immediately began to establish direct contacts with academic institutes, mostly at the technical (engineering) universities. The first known meeting took place on September 14 at the Technical University of Dresden. Precisely two weeks later, Dornberger, Thiel, and Walter Riedel headed a conference at Kummersdorf on propulsion research attended by representatives of four universities. Around that time or shortly thereafter, three dozen professors visited Peenemünde. That occasion soon acquired the ironic nickname “The Day of Wisdom”—the day on which so many great minds were at the center. It went into Peenemünde mythology as the day on which the connection between the rocket program and the universities was born, but the academics would never have been admitted to the ultrasecret center unless they had already agreed to cooperate. Only the details as to which institutes would take which projects remained to be settled.17
In forging the alliance with academia, Dornberger followed Becker’s lead and ignored the Research Council completely. Even the Education Ministry was treated dismissively. On September 19 the chief of Wa Prüf 11 merely asked Schumann, as the liaison person, to notify Rust’s Ministry that certain institutes would be working for the Army and more were expected to do so. The leader of the rocket section gave this revealing excuse for violating channels: “The accelerated execution of agreements was necessary because, insofar as the relevant persons had not already been drafted, they were going to be [contractually] obligated to the RLM [Air Ministry].”18 Notwithstanding the close Luftwaffe connections that still prevailed in some aspects of Army rocket development, interservice relations continued to erode. That situation did not bode well for the German war effort. Nor, for that matter, was the commitment of so many resources to the militarily dubious A-4 project a particularly good sign.
If the integration of university institutes into the rocket program was doubtful for the country, it was certainly beneficial to Wa Prüf 11’s technology development, including Thiel’s efforts in propulsion. While the fundamental design of the 25-ton motor was not changed by academic research, Professor Wewerka of the Technical University of Stuttgart made significant suggestions for overcoming turbopump design problems. In the realm of theory, Wewerka verified Thiel’s findings regarding the best angle of opening for expansion nozzles. To choose only one other important example, Professor Beck of the Technical University of Dresden (later Berlin) was instrumental in proposing and testing alternative designs for the A-4 injection system. A new design was certainly needed. The eighteen-pot motor could be made to work, but it was a “monstrosity and a plumber’s nightmare,” to use the words of Thiel’s later replacement, Martin Schilling. The eighteen small injection chambers required eighteen separate liquid oxygen lines. The piping for fuel flow to the cooling jacket and film cooling outlets was equally complex. After the propulsion group withdrew completely to Peenemünde in August 1940, one of the test stands at Kummersdorf was handed over to Beck’s institute full time for experiments. The alternate injection systems, called “mixing nozzles,” used a series of concentric ring slots, or a plate covered with injection holes. But the hoped-for quick success never materialized.19
The energetic and imaginative Thiel also pursued alternatives to the basic 25-ton engine. Since 1937 he had experimented with higher chamber pressures, which promoted more efficient burning. He put some effort into developing a 25-atmosphere, 725-kg-thrust engine for the He 176 rocket plane. The existing technology did not, however, seem to allow much success in this area. Ultimately he had to settle for raising the A-4 motor’s pressure to thirteen atmospheres, which could be done without major changes to the design. He also looked anew at alternative propellants in 1941, because super-cold liquid oxygen was extremely inconvenient to use and in potentially short supply. Thus, when Thiel declared the basic eighteen-pot A-4 motor officially finished on September 15, 1941, it was far from clear that it was satisfactory for mass production.20 Nonetheless, in the five years since he had joined Dornberger’s rocket section, he and his assistants had created a revolution in rocketry. It was now possible to lift a missile with a takeoff weight of more than 12 tons and hurl it a couple of hundred kilometers. It was truly a remarkable accomplishment.