It is a depressingly frank statement of an attitude common among inventors, engineers, and scientists in the modern era.
The upshot of the debates was that only von Braun would go over to the Army immediately. For the officers in Ordnance, his class background and parentage counterbalanced his youthfulness, but it was his intellectual ability that really won them over. Dornberger was “struck… by the energy and shrewdness with which this tall, fair, young student with the broad massive chin went to work, and by his astonishing theoretical knowledge.” After completing only the first half of his mechanical engineering program at the Technical University of Berlin, von Braun was made a doctoral candidate in applied physics under Schumann’s supervision at the University of Berlin. At the same time—on or about December 1, 1932—he began work at Kummersdorf, with liquid-fuel rocketry as his dissertation topic.39
He was not yet a regular civil servant; his position fitted into a pattern already established by Becker and Schumann. As a subdivision of Section 1, Schumann’s “Center for Army Physics and Army Chemistry” worked on chemical weapons and other secret advanced research. With monies already limited in the 1920s and with further stringency coming from the desperate budget situation of the Depression years, the research was largely done by graduate students. As a doctoral candidate, von Braun did not receive a direct salary from the Army. Instead he was provided with a monthly stipend of 300 marks under a contract to continue “experimental series B (research on the liquid-fuel rocket).” Whatever his official status, when von Braun began to work at Kummersdorf, Ordnance’s own liquid-fuel rocket program can fairly be said to have begun. Less than five years later he would be technical director of hundreds of people at Peenemünde.40
THE SUPPRESSION OF THE ROCKET GROUPS
Only two months after von Braun began work at Kummersdorf, Hitler came to power. On January 30, 1933, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was appointed Chancellor in a coalition cabinet dominated by members of the old elites—Prussian landowners, Army officers, bankers, and representatives of heavy industry. Von Braun’s father was out of a job with the organization of the new government, although he would have been willing, by his own account, to serve in a Hitler cabinet if asked. It was not that he was enthusiastic for the Nazis—he was not—but he shared the catastrophic illusion of his colleagues that they had no choice but to try to use the Nazis’ mass base to install a right-wing authoritarian regime. Within months, Hitler’s minions ruthlessly eliminated other parties and considerably reduced the power of the old elites in the Nazi system. But the Army still retained some autonomy from political interference, and the coalition or “polycratic” (multiple power center) character of the National Socialist regime continued. Although the Third Reich successfully projected to the world the image of a monolithic totalitarian state, it was closer to a collection of warring bureaucratic empires. The resulting political battles would play a crucial role in the history of the rocket program and Peenemünde.41
The consolidation of a fascist government committed to the rearmament of Germany and to the elimination of internal dissent presented Army Ordnance with an opportunity to suppress the amateur groups. Even before 1933 Becker and his associates had attempted to keep rocketry secret in order to preserve the element of surprise against foreign powers. The Weimar constitution made it impossible, however, to place any controls over the amateur groups or even to punish Nebel for letting slip his contacts with the Defense Ministry. Of course it is also true that, until mid-1932, the officers in Ordnance hoped that liquid-fuel rocket development would make progress under the aegis of the groups or industrial firms, since they had little money for anything except solid-fuel rockets. But after the establishment of an in-house program and the Nazi seizure of power, they moved quickly to eliminate public discussion and experimentation.42
The early phases of Ordnance’s campaign are shrouded in obscurity. The first victim may have been Rolf Engel, a rocket enthusiast the same age as von Braun. Engel had lived at the Raketenflugplatz and in 1932 had been Johannes Winkler’s chief assistant in a project to build a larger rocket. Toward the end of that year, with the rocket a dismal failure and the money exhausted, Engel organized a government-financed relief project in Dessau for unemployed engineers, many of them from Winkler’s former employer, Junkers Aircraft. After the Nazi seizure of power, the new rocket group even received offices in the famous Bauhaus school of architecture and design, whose occupants had fled the country. But Engel’s project came to a sudden end on April 4, 1933, when the political police arrested him and a colleague. They were charged with “negligent high treason” for corresponding with prominent space pioneers in other countries. Before the charges were dropped, Engel spent six weeks in prison in the difficult conditions created by the mass arrests of the Nazi takeover. He contracted a case of jaundice and was ill for some time afterward.43
According to Engel, Becker and von Horstig had instigated the arrest and had wanted to do likewise against Rudolf Nebel and against Reinhard Tiling, a solid-fuel rocket experimenter on the North Sea coast. But Tiling had friends in the Navy, and Nebel had a high-level political connection in the person of Franz Seldte, leader of the Stahlhelm veterans organization, and Labor Minister in the Hitler coalition cabinet. (Winkler was protected because he had returned to Junkers in 1933, where he worked in secret.) It is certainly true that Nebel was supported by Seldte, but no documents have survived to verify Engel’s claim that Army Ordnance ruthlessly tried to suppress all the amateur rocket groups in the spring of 1933, as opposed to a year later. Almost all of Engel’s assertions are based on statements allegedly made to him by Nazi leaders in the mid-1930s and by Dornberger in the mid-1950s. Still, his story has an inherent plausibility, especially regarding his own arrest. The secret police came to confiscate all the Dessau group’s technical materials after he was in jail, even though those documents had nothing to do with the nominal reason for his arrest. Ordnance must have wanted to put his group out of action.44
It is also possible that Becker would have wanted to suppress Nebel’s work at the Raketenflugplatz that spring. Until late 1932 Nebel had found it difficult to raise money, but he generated a new wave of publicity in June 1933 with his latest and most bizarre project, the “Magdeburg Pilot Rocket.” In August 1932 Franz Mengering, an engineer from the north German city of Magdeburg, had showed up at Raketenflugplatz espousing a crackpot theory (dreamed up by someone else) that the apparent form of the universe was an illusion and the surface of the earth was on the inside of a sphere! By developing a large rocket one could prove this thesis. Typically, Nebel did not send him packing, even though he, Riedel, and von Braun all emphatically rejected the theory. Instead, Nebel saw this idea as a new opportunity for raising money. With Mengering, he succeeded in borrowing 35,000 marks from city officials and local businesses for the launch of the first manned rocket during the Pentecost holidays in 1933. In a crazy stunt, a volunteer was to ascend in a large nose-drive rocket with a 750-kg-thrust engine and then jump out with a parachute. Nebel probably knew from the outset that an engine that large could never be built on time. In any case, the Raketenflugplatz had to settle for a 200-kg-thrust engine, which even so was the most powerful the group ever made.45