With that engine, Nebel and his associates attempted a number of times in June to launch a subscale unmanned version at Magdeburg. The result was a series of embarrassing failures, ending with a poor launch that smashed the rocket, but the group received some favorable newspaper and newsreel coverage anyway, which must have galled Ordnance. Afterward the remaining enthusiasts at the Raketenflugplatz gathered up the engine and pieces and reconfigured them into a “four-stick Repulsor,” which was launched a few times over the summer of 1933 at lakes around Berlin. The last launch ever made by the group was on September 19.46
Meanwhile, Nebel had unleashed another round of his endless appeals for funds. In letters to the adjutant of the Reich Air Minister, Hermann Göring, Nebel argued the military potential of the rocket and played up all of his attempts to contact Nazi leaders since 1930. He clearly hoped to get around the hostility of the Army by going to the new Air Ministry, which served as a cover organization for the creation of an air force banned under the Versailles Treaty. Nebel’s maneuver did not work, because the letters were routed to Army Ordnance, which did everything in its power to prevent him from receiving any government support.47
The game shortly became even more serious. Nebel wrote to England mentioning something about his previous contacts with the Defense Ministry. When Schneider was alerted to this in mid-October, he called the Gestapo, which replied that Nebel had already been ordered into its office and warned never to speak or write about those contacts again. He must already have been under mail surveillance. The incident probably caused a Gestapo raid on the Raketenflugplatz witnessed by Willy Ley. The Gestapo had also contacted the Air Ministry press spokesman about Nebel. Schneider phoned the ministry and told the spokesman that it “would be ideal if these things were not written about in the press at all,” but at the very least all discussion of military applications and new technical advances had to be suppressed. It is the first recorded mention of Ordnance’s desire to take rocketry into total secrecy.48
At the same time Nebel was in further trouble with his own colleagues and with the state. In late September Ley and retired Major Hans-Wolf von Dickhuth-Harrach, the president of the VfR since 1930, denounced Nebel to the state prosecutor for fraud and expelled him from the society. The VfR and the Raketenflugplatz had existed in an uncomfortable symbiosis; even though Nebel had been the VfR’s Secretary, the society had formally kept its distance from some of his dubious projects, such as the Magdeburg rocket. The prosecutor found no legal grounds to charge him, which Ley attributed to Nebel’s Nazi connections, but the report shows that he had stayed just inside the law or that the bookkeeping was too ambiguous to allow any conclusions. It did not hurt that Klaus Riedel continued to defend Nebel’s actions. This nasty conflict basically reflected the collapse of the VfR and the Raketenflugplatz due to monetary problems and Nebel’s personality.49
As a countermove, Nebel attempted to register the Raketenflugplatz as a society in its own right. But the group had numerous other problems as well. Its three-year lease on the land expired in July 1933, and access to the old ammunition dump became more difficult. Herbert Raabe, a VfR member and occasional visitor to the Raketenflugplatz, remembers being turned away by a soldier guarding the site when he came to visit in the late summer or early fall. After the lease was up, Army administrators also presented Nebel with a water bill for 497 marks that had accumulated, so it was later claimed, because of dripping taps in the buildings. Ordnance refused to take responsibility for the bill and intervened in December to deny Nebel’s petition for the recognition of the Raketenflugplatz as a society.50
Meanwhile, Rolf Engel had returned to Berlin and had begun an effort to coordinate the remaining amateur rocket societies in the hope of salvaging something. By Engel’s account, Nebel agreed to cooperate with him, even though Engel had quit the Raketenflugplatz two years earlier because he felt that Nebel had embezzeled its funds. They approached Wernher von Braun, then saw Karl Becker, who had been promoted to Brigadier General and appointed chief of the Ordnance Testing Division early in 1933. The meeting turned into a shouting match, Engel recalls, after Becker refused to offer them anything but secret work under Ordnance’s control. Klaus Riedel had already contacted von Braun a number of times to arrange a rapprochement between Ordnance and Nebel. Von Braun told the Gestapo in July 1934, during an interrogation about his contacts with Nebel, that he had refused to talk to Riedel on the phone. Instead he had met his old friend about five times and warned him that “if Nebel continued his campaign against Army Ordnance, serious consequences could follow”—that is, arrest.51
In early 1934 the VfR folded. Its remaining members were taken into an obscure “Registered Society for Progressive Transportation Technology,” which carried a few spaceflight articles in its journal from 1934 to 1937. Later in the 1930s another spaceflight society was founded, and it too published a journal, but the discussion was sustained only among a small band of enthusiasts. From the standpoint of the public, rocketry disappeared in 1934 because of the imposition of censorship. Even before the formal press controls were in place, the Army had arranged for the suppression of publications about the topic. Schneider stated in a letter drafted at the end of 1933: “Testing Division was recently forced to intervene a number of times against undesirable propaganda and press statements by Nebel.” After a delay that annoyed Ordnance, Josef Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry finally issued a decree on April 6, 1934, banning all discussions of rocketry that mentioned either military uses or technical details.52
Rudolf Nebel was a survivor of truly amazing proficiency; all the harassments and problems failed to stop him. He set about working his connections with Labor Minister and Stahlhelm leader Seldte. In mid-1933 the Stahlhelm had been “coordinated” as a Nazi veteran’s organization under the supervision of the SA, or Brownshirts, the Nazi paramilitary wing that had provided the thugs for street battles and the seizure of power. Although there was tension between the leaders of the SA and the Stahlhelm as a result of this enforced amalgamation, Nebel had a chance to use his connections to exploit the growing hostility between the SA and the Army. Under the leadership of Ernst Röhm, the SA was laying claim to being the mass army that would supplant the old military. It also made rumblings about the need for a “second revolution” because Hitler had made too many compromises with the capitalists and was not in favor of the immediate plundering of the Jews.
A full picture of Nebel’s contacts with the SA will never be known; he conveniently omitted them altogether from his memoirs. Seldte may or may not have put him in touch with Röhm, but the Nazi Gauleiter (regional party boss) for Hamburg did arrange a meeting between the Nebel and the SA leadership through the intercession of an admirer who accepted Nebel’s self-description as a poor inventor abused by the Army. Röhm was not present, but Nebel’s cause was taken up by Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) von Krausser, who promised to talk to Röhm. According to Rolf Engel, who joined the SA in October 1933 and later became a Nazi student leader and SS officer, he also met von Krausser and, on another occasion, Röhm himself.53
In the meantime, Nebel had received an innocent inquiry from a scientific institute in Warsaw about the possibility of building a stratospheric rocket. He immediately wrote to Hitler, Goebbels, the Foreign Minister, and other authorities in an attempt to exploit hatred of Poland to gain support for his activities. After a call from the Reich Chancellery on February 23, 1934, Schneider wrote a memo indicating that he had stopped this Nebel initiative. The memo also reveals that the SA leadership had intervened with the Army on behalf of Nebel not long before.54