V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,19

they borrowed from Frau im Mond – while one of them dashed out and touched a burning rag to the nozzle, then dived for cover. On a good day, 160 pounds of thrust would send the Repulsor shooting up to a height of a thousand metres and the parachute would bring her floating back to earth. There were plenty of bad days too, of course. The long metal broomstick often misfired, or headed off at tree height; one time they hit a police barracks.

Riedel might have been their senior engineer, and Rudolf Nebel, an ex-pilot, their nominal leader, but it was von Braun even then who was the dominant personality: always smiling – they called him ‘Sonny Boy’ after the Al Jolson hit – a quick learner, good with his hands as well as his brain, intensely ambitious to be the first man in space. In the summer of 1932, his father, an aristocratic landowner, was appointed Minister of Agriculture in the von Papen government. Von Braun senior must have had a word over dinner with someone important in the defence ministry, because soon afterwards the society were invited to demonstrate their creation at the military proving ground at Kummersdorf. The test was a fiasco. The jet flame burned through a weld and the rocket crashed a few seconds after take-off. But the army officers loved von Braun, saw the potential in the twenty-year-old right away – he was one of those polite and lively young men who were always good with their elders – and a couple of months later he burst into the clubhouse at the Rocket Aerodrome to announce he had negotiated a deal. The army would fund their research. There was only one condition: they would have to continue their work in secrecy, behind the walls of Kummersdorf.

None of the others wanted to go. Nebel was a Nazi sympathiser and didn’t like the conservative German army. Rolf Engel, another twenty-year-old, was a communist and wanted nothing to do with the military. Klaus Riedel was a utopian opposed to war. Graf’s father had been gassed in the Great War and was a strong supporter of the League of Nations. Von Braun told them they were crazy to let such an opportunity slip. ‘We haven’t even worked out how to measure our test results – fuel consumption, combustion pressure, thrust. How can we make any progress until we have the equipment to do that? And how can we get the equipment except through the army?’

Your parents were communists, is that correct?

No, they were members of the Social Democratic Party.

One of the Gestapo men had rolled his eyes. Socialists, communists, pacifists – they were all the same to him.

The debate at the Rocket Aerodrome over what they should do turned nasty. Hard words were spoken. The upshot was that no one went to Kummersdorf apart from von Braun, who was now bound by the rules of military secrecy. That was the last time Graf spoke to him for the best part of two years.

A lot happened in those two years. Graf was in the centre of Berlin on the night when the Nazis’ torchlit parade passed through the Brandenburg Gate to the Reich Chancellery to celebrate Hitler’s arrival in power. The following month he saw the glow in the sky as the Reichstag burned down. When the regime made use of the ensuing panic to start harassing its opponents, his parents both lost their jobs. In the autumn, the Gestapo raided the Rocket Aerodrome, took everyone’s fingerprints and made the members of the society sign an undertaking not to talk about their work to ‘foreign powers’ – a worthless promise as their experiments had dried up in any case for lack of money. By this time, Graf had left the Institute of Technology and was studying for his doctorate at the University of Berlin. Occasionally he would glimpse the tall figure of von Braun in a corridor or in the street nearby, and once when he was walking in the park near Alexanderplatz, he thought he might have seen him on horseback, but the rider was too far away for him to be sure, and besides, he was wearing SS uniform, so he dismissed the idea as impossible.

At any rate, it was not until the summer of 1934 that they met again – unfortunately this time he could not provide the gentlemen from the Gestapo with the exact date, though he remembered it was towards the end of the