Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

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

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