around von Opel, and his partner, the famous Austrian rocket pioneer Max Valier, and had even been allowed to take turns sitting in the driving seat of the five-metre-long monster car, the RAK-2. All four of them, including the two schoolboys, were members of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel. That was the dream, you see, even then. Rockets were the means, rather than the end. Not that he said that to the Gestapo.
He contemplated the ceiling and wondered what had happened to von Opel. He had heard a rumour he had fled to the United States when war broke out. Valier had been killed a couple of years after the speed record when a liquid-fuel rocket motor had blown up and a piece of shrapnel had severed his aorta.
As to when he had first become properly acquainted with von Braun, that would really have been the following year, and again he could be exact, because it was the premiere of Fritz Lang’s movie Frau im Mond – Woman in the Moon – at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo cinema in Berlin on 15 October 1929. The Society for Space Travel had been hired by the studio to produce a working rocket for the occasion, which they had failed to do. But von Braun, whose family were rich and well connected, had managed to wangle Graf a ticket. He lent him a dinner jacket, so they could mingle with the VIPs. He even marched up and introduced them both to Lang. Graf would never forget how the great director had squinted at him through his monocle, as if this awkward schoolboy were himself a creature from the moon.
After that, they saw a lot of one another. Graf was an only child, the son of two teachers – one of English literature, the other of music – wonderful, kindly, somewhat elderly parents, neither of whom had the slightest interest in space travel or engineering, although they taught him English so that he could read the science fiction of H. G. Wells. Von Braun became his confidant. He would catch a tram and visit the von Brauns’ mansion on the edge of the Tiergarten, where lemonade would be served by a butler. They wrote science fiction stories of their own about interplanetary travel and orbiting space stations. They raised money for the Society for Space Travel at a stall in the Wertheim department store. (‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ declared von Braun, ‘the man is already alive who will one day walk on the moon!’) They both enrolled at the Institute of Technology in Charlottenburg and studied theoretical physics, and they both did a six-month ‘dirty hands’ stint on the factory floor, von Braun at the Borsig locomotive works, and Graf at the Daimler-Benz factory in Marienfelde.
It was around this time that the society – an impecunious collection of amateurs and dreamers, plus one or two serious engineers, like Karl Riedel and Heini Grünow, both mechanics – persuaded the Berlin city authorities to let them use a stretch of waste ground out in the north of the city near Tegel, where there were a few big disused munitions bunkers left over from the Great War. They made a clubroom in the old guardhouse, brought in camp beds and a Primus stove so they could stay for days at a time, put up the publicity logo from Frau im Mond of a glamorous woman sitting on a crescent moon, and called their derelict swampy paradise the Raketenflugplatz, the ‘Rocket Aerodrome’.
And in due course, thanks largely to Riedel, they did indeed build a rocket. They called her ‘the Repulsor’, after the spacecraft in one of the society’s favourite science fiction novels, Two Planets. She was an ugly device, nothing like the shapely aerodynamic beauties they would eventually produce – ‘Repulsive’ would have been a better name. Her fuselage was a thin metal tube, three metres long and only ten centimetres wide, with the engine in an egg-shaped container in the nose and with a canister at the bottom containing a flare and a parachute. The innovation lay in the fuel configuration they came up with, which was the same as they eventually used in the V2: alcohol and liquid oxygen in separate tanks, one on top of the other, forced into the firing chamber by compressed nitrogen. It was a wonder they didn’t blow themselves up. They would set the fuel running and start counting the seconds backwards from ten – a dramatic touch