How a Nazi “vengeance weapon” kick-started the US rocket program
By: Oxford Academic
Tags: Moon Landing, Space, Moon, Nazis, Rockets

In the first of three excerpts taken from The Apollo Chronicles: Engineering America’s First Moon Missions, author Brandon R. Brown details how, shortly after the end of the Second World War, a combined team of US and former Nazi rocket scientists and engineers began testing V-2 rockets in the New Mexico desert, starting a chain of events that would culminate in Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, a little more than 20 years later.

After surrendering to American forces in May of 1945, the lead scientist of Nazi Germany’s rocketry program prepared to embark for the United States. Wernher von Braun cooperated with his captors. He alternately charmed and shocked them with his cheerful good will and confident self-importance. (In truth, he watched his plan coming together. As he’d confided to a few fellow Germans late in the war, he had hoped to end up in the United States.) He asked if he could bring hundreds of his engineers and workers with him to America. He amazed his interrogators as he rattled off the strengths, skills, and weaknesses of each man. Washington eventually approved 118, who came to America in two waves.

The initially secret Project Overcast hauled ten thousand tons of military and industrial equipment, about seventy-five rockets (many of them in piles of parts), and six hundred former enemies from Germany to the United States, largely whitewashing their political affiliations and wartime work.

In von Braun’s case, the cleansing covered, for many years to come, his advanced rank within the Nazi war machine. He later claimed a tin ear for politics, calling himself “downright naïve” in his early political views, blind to the meaning of the changes around him. He said he was simply “too wrapped up in rockets.” When the Nazis took control of Germany, he was barely twenty-one. He joined the Nazi party and eventually became an officer in the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel, or “protection squad”). Heinrich Himmler’s brutal wing ran the concentration camps and, for von Braun, they eventually supplied slave labor — thousands of prisoners of war and other enemies of the state toiling to build von Braun’s massive rocket weapons.

According to the story he relayed in America, his Nazi masters had tilted his career away from his visions of space travel in favour of earthly and more nefarious trajectories. He said he always would have preferred to perch spaceships, rather than bombs, atop his rockets. But before he could build new rockets, the Americans wanted to see his most famous work up close: He and his fellow Germans trudged from El Paso into New Mexico’s nearby white sands, with loads of their rocket parts. He was to revive his chief accomplishment for Adolf Hitler, a weapon of incredible size and speed.

From von Braun’s perspective, he could help the United States develop long-range missiles, yes, but with the victors’ resources he might return to his visions of space travel. With enough time and money, he was certain he could build a rocket powerful enough to refuse Earth’s gravity and glide calmly through the cosmos. So he made a new home willingly and joined his second army within one year. “It all made sense,” he said later. “The V-2 was something we had and you didn’t have.”

The Vergeltungswaffe-2 was the second of Nazi Germany’s “vengeance weapons.” The desperate Reich had hoped the V-2 would reverse the late course of the war.

When preparing for launch, it stood forty-five feet tall, tethered like some sort of laboratory monster. Oozing vapors, it was part science fiction and part Gothic horror. If the rocket would launch with flame, why did tendrils of super-cold mists hang from its supply lines?

As with most combustible materials, the liquid fuel in the V-2 required oxygen to light and burn, but the air around us only offers so much. And at the heights von Braun craved, oxygen was incredibly scarce. Von Braun had his rockets carry their own oxygen supply: five tons compressed and liquefied at a chilly –300˚ Fahrenheit. The use of liquid oxygen predated von Braun. As a student, he had absorbed the speculative idea while reading The Rocket into Interplanetary Space by his eventual mentor, Hermann Oberth. In the early 1920s, Oberth had exchanged letters with the American physicist and rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. And, largely unknown to those tinkering dreamers, the Russian schoolteacher and visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had already proposed using liquefied oxygen many years before. As with so many technologies, when civilization was ready to make a leap, an idea bubbled forth in many places and from many minds.

Rendering all previous work quaint by comparison, von Braun’s engines pumped oxygen to meet ethanol in a fiery brew. “The whole sky seemed to vibrate,” said one team member of their first successful V-2 test. “This kind of unearthly roaring was something human ears had never heard.”

Germany’s rocket weapons, launched by the hundreds against Belgium and southern England, alarmed the Allies, but their sonic boom proved worse than their bite. Frequently inaccurate, they had little effect on the course of the war.



However, once peace was restored, it became clear that these inventions and their creators had sparked a new era. As their rockets sped from our thin atmosphere and first grazed what lay beyond, humanity’s journey into space had begun.