V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,34

1,700 metres – the greatest height ever achieved by such a rocket – before his fuel burned out and they watched him plunge silently into the sand about a kilometre away.

They whooped and hollered, pounded one another on the back and danced around the beach like wild men, even Papa Riedel. That night when they stood on the covered veranda looking out to sea, von Braun proposed a toast: ‘Is it my imagination, gentlemen, or does the moon look closer tonight than she did this morning?’ He turned to Graf and clinked his glass. ‘To the moon!’

‘To the moon!’

They were twenty-two years old.

When they got back to Kummersdorf in the new year of 1935, Graf spliced together the footage of the Borkum test and von Braun started hawking it around Berlin. He might have been made for the age in which they now lived. Aristocratic yet not at all snobbish, charming yet with an infallible command of technical detail, here was the embodiment of the New German spirit! Here was a prophet of the future! It was their great good fortune to have flown a rocket to a height of almost two kilometres just at the very moment that the resources of the German economy, on the Führer’s orders, were being diverted to the military on an unprecedented scale. The army kicked in half a million marks immediately, enough for them to build two new test stands. The Luftwaffe offered him five million even before he had finished his presentation. When the commander-in-chief of the army came out to Kummersdorf to watch a firing, he turned to von Braun and simply asked him, ‘How much do you want?’

How much did he want? What a question! He wanted enough to build a rocket city, exactly like the one in Fritz Lang’s movie. He wanted something like Borkum, only bigger – a place on the coast, far from prying eyes, where a dedicated group of scientists and dreamers, drawing on unlimited resources, could safely fire their rockets undisturbed over ranges of hundreds of kilometres. That was what he wanted.

One of the Gestapo men who had interrogated Graf seemed much angrier than his partner. It was more than just a good cop/bad cop routine: Graf had the feeling that if it had been left up to this other man, the sessions would have involved fists and truncheons. Perhaps he had lost someone on the Eastern Front – frozen to death in the winter of 1941–2, or captured due to a lack of adequate equipment – because at one point he jumped up and pounded on the table.

You’re all just a bunch of traitors! This ‘army research centre’ at Peenemünde is the biggest swindle in German history!

Graf replied that he had nothing to do with the decision to build the facility at Peenemünde. It was a matter far above his head.

The other Gestapo man consulted his thick file. And yet according to Professor von Braun, you accompanied him on his original visit to the site?

I went with him, certainly. Nothing more than that.

When was this exactly?

Graf pretended to think. They must have it all in the file. The whole thing was a charade.

I believe it was just after Christmas 1935.

In truth he remembered it very clearly. They had spent much of the previous year designing and building a new motor that produced over 3,000 pounds of thrust for a much bigger rocket – seven metres long, the Aggregate-3 – and he had been invited to spend part of the holiday on the von Braun estate in Silesia to continue working. The baron had lost his position as Minister of Agriculture as soon as Hitler came to power and had retreated to this ugly grey barrack-like building, simultaneously appalled at the vulgarity and violence of the Nazis and privately impressed by their results. His brilliant son’s continuing obsession with rockets bewildered him. It did not seem an entirely appropriate occupation for a gentleman. He treated Graf with cool politeness – not the kind of person with whom he was used to associating; another symptom of the modern age to which he was too old to adjust.

One evening after supper, sitting in front of the fire, Wernher mentioned that he was looking for somewhere quiet and out-of-the-way on the coast to erect his rocket city. He had found the perfect spot on the Baltic island of Rügen. Unfortunately, the Strength Through Joy organisation had beaten him to it and were building a holiday resort for the