On the evening of Tuesday, October 15, 1929, just nine days before the ruinous stock market crash on Wall Street, the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, the large cinema owned by Universum Film AG and located a stone’s throw from Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten in the Western part of Charlottenburg, was brightly lit, as it always was for a premiere. Nearly two thousand people, more than the large hall could hold, waited in the cold to be admitted to see the projection of Fritz Lang’s latest silent film, Woman in the Moon. Dressed in a black coat, long white scarf, and bow tie, the director, now a star of German cinema thanks to such masterpieces as Dr. Mabuse the Gambler and Metropolis, was there with his wife, the beautiful and sophisticated Thea von Harbou, his muse and the author of the novel from which the film was adapted.

The plot consisted of the usual intertwining of love, loyalty, greed, and cowardice, set against the backdrop of a journey to the Moon to get at the rich gold mines that a visionary scientist had hypothesized might be hidden in the bowels of Earth’s satellite. A saccharine adventure far removed from the heights of creativity already touched by Lang. But even before its release, the movie had aroused a certain curiosity for the novelty it contained. In order to tell the story of the voyage to the unusual sidereal Klondike aboard the Friede rocket, the namesake of the film’s heroine, without the naiveté and errors that had characterized the classic novels of Verne and Wells, the almighty Lang, an avid science fiction fan, had demanded a rigorously scientific approach. To this end, he had sought the technical advice of a German-speaking engineer with a Romanian passport, who had gained fame and respect with two monographs on rockets and their future use. More than the plot of Lang’s movie, it is the story of Hermann Julius Oberth that interests us. Indeed, if Wernher von Braun is to be recognized as the father of the enterprise that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon, Oberth, a man “tall, thin, straight, with thick dark hair, broad chin, black mustache, and those lively eyes that are the prerogative of an alert mind”, was certainly its grandfather.

When he was born on June 25, 1894, his hometown, Hermannstadt, was located within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in that vast plateau surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains that the Romans called Dacia and that in the Middle Ages took the name Transylvania, meaning “land beyond the woods”. A country of lakes, greenery and castles perched on impassable mountain ridges—including that of Count Dracula—that was systematically colonized from the twelfth century onwards by German-speaking peoples, the Saxons of Transylvania. In 1920, however, as a result of the Treaty of Trianon, which redrew Hungary’s borders after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, more than half of the region was given to the Kingdom of Romania. The city of Hermannstadt was renamed Sibiu, and the 26-year-old Hermann became a Romanian citizen. In reality, however, he was and remained primarily German, by family, education and, after the Second World War, by choice.

His father, a wealthy physician-surgeon and director of the local hospital, was in love with his profession and, as is often the case with successful men, hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps. Not wanting to disappoint his father, or, more likely, not having the strength to rebel against him, Hermann enrolled in the Medical Faculty of the University of Munich in 1912. However, his true passion was something else, since, at the age of eleven, he had read during a long convalescence in Italy two novels by Verne, procured from his father, which talked about voyages to the Moon. Three years later, still in high school, he had even designed a model of a rocket for interplanetary travel, coming up with a multi-stage solution using liquid propellant to progressively achieve the necessary speed. By some simple calculations, he had realized that the bullet-ship envisioned by the French writer could not work, because the monstrous impulse exerted by the cannon at the moment of firing would prove fatal to the human crew, who would be crushed like a walnut by the unbearable pressure. For the moment, nothing more than a teenage passion, fueled by reading as much as possible and daydreaming. The kind that often evaporates with growth, with first loves, and with the first harsh confrontations with the reality of life. But the reflections of this young man with an intense and deep gaze showed an extra gear than usual.

The leap from forest town to imperial metropolis, a rich and joyful melting pot of art and culture, was significant. In Munich, the carefree and concrete nature of the Bavarians was mixed with Prussian austerity, creating a pleasant and stimulating mixture in the pervasive and constant smell of good beer, which drives away bad thoughts. The Academy was thus a veritable Athens of the sciences, both theoretical and applied. Imprisoned by the promise he had made to his father, Hermann attended medical lectures, but also those of mathematics and physics at the prestigious Technische Universität. If the war hadn’t upset the delicate balance, his passion for space travel might have remained at the level of a hobby to be cultivated in the little free time left to a good and conscientious doctor.

At the outbreak of the conflict, he was twenty years old, the right age to wield a musket. He was immediately drafted into the German infantry and sent to the Eastern Front to fight the Russians, where he was wounded. Transferred to the military hospital at Schässburg, not far from home, probably thanks to his father’s good offices, he remained there as a medic, realizing firsthand that this was not the kind of life he wanted for himself. In his spare time, he thought about his dream of going to the Moon. There were two main problems to solve. Building a spacecraft capable of making the journey and testing the crew’s ability to withstand the accelerations and lack of gravity. He went on to design liquid-fueled rockets, breaking them down into chains of tanks that could be detached as they were emptied to gradually reduce weight. Exactly the multi-stage solution that would later carry Sputnik, Gagarin's Vostok, and Apollo 11 into the deep sky. He even managed to show his detailed rocket project to the Prussian Minister of War, Hermann von Stein, who, as a former artilleryman, had a fine enough palate to appreciate it. The medical environment then stimulated him to perform experiments on himself to analyze the effects of weightlessness on the human body. Before the armistice, in the summer of 1918, he took a wife, with whom he had four children. Two of them died violently during the Second World War. Tragedies shared by many fathers of a country sent to slaughter by a bloodthirsty madman.

With the peace, he returned to Munich, this time to study exclusively mathematics and physics with great masters. The defeat had humiliated, exhausted, and impoverished the Germans, but it had not affected the formidable educational structure of the Prussians, nor had it damaged the urban infrastructure, as would happen during the Second World War. Germany was still standing and poised for rebirth, though still gripped by hunger and shaken by an internal conflict between authoritarian nationalism and Marxism. In three years, on the same benches where Oberth now sat listening to the wonderful lessons of Arnold Sommerfeld, sublime geniuses of the level of Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli would have taken their place.

Then Hermann moved to Göttingen, in the historic university of Friedrich Gauss where David Hilbert was now teaching, to finally arrive in Heidelberg, a center of democratic thought and also a den of conservatives and Nazis. There he hoped to obtain a doctorate in physics by defending a thesis on space flight. But the degree was denied. The committee found the thesis lacking in concreteness: a futuristic essay instead of the traditional solid physics and mathematics dissertation. It discussed, for example, the strategy for exploring the hidden face of the Moon and refueling spacecraft by storing cryogenic propellant tanks in Earth orbit to be docked and used for interplanetary travel or parked around the celestial body to be visited.

Although the Weimar Republic was in complete ideological chaos, shaken by galloping inflation and the violence of ever-growing disaffected factions, the German academy preserved the rigorous and rigid approach forged in the years of the Empire and symbolized by the Pickelhaube, the spike helmet. The motto was “facts and not dreams”, even if they were plausible. Oberth knew it. “Our educational system is like an automobile”, he later wrote, “which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward things are barely discernible”.

To react to the rejection, he did two things. He returned home, to Romania, where the following year, without changing anything in his work, he finally managed to obtain the diploma from the ancient University of Cluj. At the same time, he published the original dissertation at his own expense—apparently he could afford it—in a hundred-page pamphlet in German entitled The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, and rushed to send a copy to Goddard. It was not just a beau geste to reciprocate the kindness of the American who, at his request, had reluctantly sent him a copy of the 1920 essay on A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. It was also a ploy to firmly stake his claim. In the acknowledgments, after starting with a sort of excusatio non petita (unsolicited excuse): “Goddard’s work was received just as this was going to press”, he declared with a certain brazenness: “My theoretical approach is supplemented by his practical work”. That is, the brawn and the brain. Not bad for a beginner!

Faced with this unfortunate statement, perhaps inspired by Hermann’s frustration over his academic failures, Robert, already suspicious by nature, was convinced that “that German Oberth” had plundered his work and became even more cautious and closed. A real disaster for the United States, which, with the reluctance of the Worcester genius, missed the opportunity to take off far before anyone else on the rocket front. It was also a disaster for the rest of the world, which did not benefit from the valuable experience that the brilliant American had gained in this field. Science and technology, in fact, behave like multi-stage rockets. Each successive element inherits the thrust of all the previous ones. Partly because of the arrogance of a rising young man, Goddard refused to act as the first stage and closed the communication channels.

On the other hand, Oberth’s booklet had the positive effect of awakening interest in space travel in the German-speaking world. With a scientific approach, the author painted a future consisting of permanent stations in Earth orbit. Large rotating rings to simulate gravity by centrifugal force, to be supplied by a constant flow of small shuttles. Authentic celestial ports with a service function for interplanetary spacecraft but also platforms for telecommunications and meteorological monitoring. Enough to arouse the curiosity of young minds in years of great political confusion and serious social upheaval. Unfortunately, the consequences of this proselytism would have become another drama for Germany and the world. Not for nothing is it said that sometimes the best is the enemy of the good!

In fact, Oberth’s seed germinated in the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR—Society for Space Travel), an association of people interested in rocketry and interplanetary flight founded in June 1927 by 30-year-old Johannes Winkler. He had long been involved in the design of rocket engines for use in space, a hobby that would lead him two years later to a position with Hugo Junkers’ aviation company in Dessau, Germany, to develop jet engines to assist in the takeoff of jet aircraft.

Within twelve months, the association had gathered more than five hundred members. A sign of the relevance of the proposed theme, but also of the scarcity of other values in a society still in disarray and in search of a renewed identity. For seven years it also published a magazine, Die Rakete (The Rocket), and it was the nest from which Wernher von Braun took flight, one of the two champions of the carousel for the conquest of the Moon. About the other champion, the Russian Sergei Korolev, we will speak later.

Oberth, who had inspired it, played the role of noble father and advisor to VfR, mostly from afar. Rejected by the German academy, he had rejected Germany for the time being and—he who dreamed of heaven—had settled for teaching mathematics and physics at a high school in Mediaș, a spa town about fifty kilometers from Sibiu. Whenever he could, however, he visited old friends in Munich and new ones from VfR Berlin.

Sometimes he would agree to be consulted about the world of rockets, as in 1928 when, together with another member of the VfR, the popularizer of science Willy Ley (1906–1969), stayed in Potsdam, in the Babelsberg district, in the studios of Universum Film AG, to assist Fritz Lang during the shooting of Woman in the Moon. It was a way to scrape together some money and, above all, a golden opportunity to popularize his vision of the future.

For a while, Oberth even hoped to promote the film by using the funds provided by Lang to build a real rocket that could be launched up to 10 km high over the Baltic Sea. He had only four months to build a two-meter-high model fueled by gasoline and liquid oxygen, similar to the one flown by Goddard in 1926. Technological and managerial inexperience quickly doomed the project. Hermann then opted for a confused hybrid solution of a giant powered by experimental fuel. The program died before it was born. A second flop that convinced him to return home, but not before ensuring that the launch of the rocket model used in the movie was sufficiently convincing.

He reappeared in Berlin to attend the premiere. The feature film was a success and served to draw further attention to rockets and space. Its realism, so different from the mocking parody of Verne’s novel that another great, Georges Méliès, had packaged in the 1902 short Le Voyage dans la Lune (A trip to the Moon), could not go unnoticed. Many still doubted, but some began to truly believe that the new frontier of mankind was right up there, beyond the clouds, where the air ends and empty space begins. Even the first V2 successfully launched from Peenemünde would have a reference to the popular movie imprinted on its base, demonstrating how deep the mark it had left was.

In the same year, 1929, Oberth published an extensive essay entitled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (Ways to Space Travel) with the prestigious R. Oldenbourg publishing house in Munich. It was nothing more than a completely revised and significantly enriched re-edition of the dissertation that had appeared six years earlier. It contained formulas, tables, graphs, and projects that finally made quantitative a discipline born on the wave of a dream. Despite the computational difficulties that are now overcome by the use of powerful digital computers, Hermann had managed to get to the heart of the problems and to identify the critical parameters of the various situations.

A way of being and doing happily summarized in a memory dictated by Wernher von Braun, who knew him very well:

Hermann Oberth was the first, who when thinking about the possibility of spaceships grabbed a slide rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs […] I, myself, owe to him not only the guiding-star of my life but also my first contact with the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry and space travel. A place of honor should be reserved in the history of science and technology for his ground-breaking contributions in the field of astronautics.

The knots to untie concerned four aspects of the problem of human space flight not yet verified and therefore the subject of bitter controversies. Is thrust in the vacuum possible?Footnote 1 If so, how to reach speeds that can escape the gravitational pull of the Earth? Will astronauts be able to withstand the strong accelerations and adverse conditions of interplanetary space? What is the point of all this? Oberth had an answer for each of these questions. Mathematically and physically founded for the first two, more optimistic than scientific for the third, and simply speculative for the fourth.

His boundless imagination led him to envision a future in which fleets of small “ferryboats” swarmed around truly floating citadels in orbit. They would house the new pioneers and allow them to conduct scientific experiments and monitor the planet. Outposts of a new East India Company for commercial and mining activities extending into the Solar System or fortresses for military control of old Earth. All of this, he wrote, would stimulate the development of new technologies in many different fields that would benefit the quality of life for all of humanity.

This argument, the latter, is still used today to justify the astronomical costs of space exploration, but it continues to divide public opinion. Why expend vast resources to go up there, to the middle of nowhere, when there is still so much to do down here to free people from hunger, misery, and disease? In 1970, after the successes of the Apollo lunar program, Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun surrounded by starving children in her poor mission in Kabwe, Zambia, asked this question again to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger (1913–2008), the powerful associate director of science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and responsible for expanding the Apollo project to include human exploration of Mars.

The former Nazi scientist, who had already been a faithful servant of the Führer in Peenemünde and was therefore presumably equipped with sufficient stomach for it, did not want to dismiss the provocation and responded with a long open letter in which he dissected the problem. His main argument remained, in an extreme synthesis, an evaluation of the cost–benefit ratio. An investment is successful if the future return is greater than the present commitment. And to make his point, he used an anecdote.

In seventeenth-century Germany, a kind-hearted Count helped his poor people to survive and to cure themselves of disease. One day he met a strange individual who seemed to be playing with glass lentils. He became curious and decided to finance his activity. “The townspeople, however, became angry when they realized that the Count was wasting his money, as they thought, on a stunt without purpose”. It was instead an investigation into the causes of diseases with a microscope. “By retaining some of his spending money for research and discovery”, concluded Stuhlinger, the Count “contributed far more to the relief of human suffering than he could have contributed by giving all he could possibly spare to his plague-ridden community”. No one knows how Sister Mary Jucunda reacted to this answer, wise and cruel. Perhaps she read it while lulling one of her black children with big eyes hollowed out by hunger and fever.

The VfR was an amateur society not different in structure, organization, and purpose from similar associations that had flourished especially in Russia and the United States since the twenties. But it was the one that had the most important consequences for the history of rocketry. Its members dealt with everything, from pure entertainment to real studies and rocket projects. In 1926, for example, Oberth and the South Tyrolean Max Valier, an imaginative and talented writer with scientific training and interests, practiced redesigning Verne’s Moon gun to make it functional, if not feasible, and essentially usable. Two years later, the same Valier—who would soon die in a rocket explosion, the first victim of the long journey to the Moon—collaborated with Fritz von Opel in the realization of the experimental car, the Opel Rak.2, which broke the speed record in Berlin on May 23, 1928, reaching 230 km/h thanks to the thrust of 24 rockets. It was driven by the same Opel who wanted to promote his automobile company with this risky sporting venture.

The mixture of dream and business displeased Valier and especially the purists of the VfR and contributed to sowing discord within the association. It was necessary to give the activities a new direction, to make them more professional and concrete, building and testing rockets. Resources and a headquarters were needed.

The latter were identified in Reinickendorf, on the northern outskirts of Berlin, in an area of 122 hectares that had already been used as an ammunition dump during the First World War. Between old concrete buildings, now ruined, an open space was carved out, marked by a pompous sign that read, in gothic letters, Raketenflugplatz Berlin (Berlin Rocket Airfield). Here, with the approval of the city hall, the first experiments began. The failures were numerous. But the few successes made it possible to reach a record altitude of 1000 m in 1932. In this poor environment, amidst debris and crumbling buildings, the dream of reaching the Moon really took off, only to become a reality within forty years.

The winds of change were blowing. Germany was gradually re-emerging as an economic and political power. In 1926, it was admitted to the League of Nations thanks to a reconciliation with France that would earn the two negotiators, Chancellor Gustav Stresemann and Prime Minister Aristide Briand, the Nobel Peace Prize. Three years later, a plan led by an American industrialist, founder of the RCA record company, had initiated a drastic reduction of the war reparations imposed on the Germans. A pragmatic move that recognized the exorbitance of the punitive measure demanded by the French, still in shock after seeing the Prussians knock on the doors of Paris twice in less than half a century, and also sought to exorcise an act of rebellion in a starving nation and thus save at least part of the credits.

Even the rising tide of Nazi partisans seemed to be under control. In the 1930 elections, the followers of the “Bohemian Corporal”—as Adolf Hitler was scornfully referred to by the aristocratic President Paul von Hindenburg, a true relic of the defeated Reich—had won 18% of the seats. But with a mere 26%, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD—Social-Democratic Party of Germany) remained the largest force in the Reichstag. A fragile barrier that would not last long. Meanwhile, America, guarantor of victory, had further retreated into its own shell to lick the wounds left by Black Thursday on Wall Street. A rampant leprosy of the economic system ready to offer an unexpected assist to the Nazis.

Taking advantage of the diminished attention of the U.S., which was preoccupied with the problems of the recent Wall Street meltdown—a fact that would soon give the Nazis an unhoped-for advantage—the Germans cautiously sought to rearm, circumventing and in some cases violating the prohibitions imposed on them by the Treaty of Versailles. The clauses contained in Section III of the text drafted by the victors: “The armed forces of Germany must not include any military or naval air force”, had literally amputated military aviation, humiliating the now deceased aces like the Red Baron or the surviving and angry ones like Hermann Göring.

Even solid-fuel rockets were banned because they were associated with artillery shells like Krupp’s Big Bertha or Kaiser Wilhelm’s Gun, which had even managed to bomb Paris. But nothing was written about liquid-fueled rockets because they did not yet exist. An understandable oversight that became a delicious loophole for legal “technological” rearmament and made the activities of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt quite attractive. At least that’s what its leaders hoped, perennially hunting for sponsors.

In the early months of 1931, VfR president Johannes Winkler, armed with his experience at Junkers and with the help of private sponsors, built his own liquid-fuel engine. His rocket attempted to fly twice, crashing miserably to the ground each time. However, it was a first in Europe. The unilateral initiative displeased the other members of the association, who felt cut off from an enterprise that was part of the VfR’s mission. Almost an insult from the person who had founded and led the club. There was some turbulence, physiological in associations of enthusiastic and visionary volunteers. Then optimism prevailed. If it could be done—everyone agreed—it had to be done well, and all together. The most active members were Rudolf Nebel, the oldest of the group, a pilot in the Luftwaffe during the First World War, an enthusiastic empiricist and a skilled fundraiser; Klaus Riedel, a mechanical engineer who worked for an automobile equipment company; and a young man not yet twenty, handsome, polite, and taciturn. He was said to be a gentleman with powerful connections. His name was Wernher von Braun, and he had already worked as an apprentice under Oberth on an innovative engine for the rocket (called Kegeldüse, cone nozzle, because of its conical combustion chamber) whose launch was to accompany the premiere of Lang’s film. An idea in the manner of Oberth, grandiose, formally correct, but impracticable.

The three from VfR had decided to reduce their demands and to concentrate on a minimum rocket, the MiRAK, which had the potential to really fly. With the total lack of money, they could not have done more, given the numerous knots to untie. The first and most serious problem was the cooling of the combustion chamber, whose resistance was severely tested by the enormous heat. Goddard had solved this problem brilliantly by directly using the cooling effect of liquid oxygen. Inspired by car engines, von Braun and his colleagues opted instead for a water circuit.

After all kinds of tests and resolving some misunderstandings within the group, MiRAK III flew on March 14, 1931. A sort of arrow, 3.5 m long and 10 cm wide, with a full load weight of 20 kilos, half of which was fuel. To prevent the heat of the exhaust gases from exploding the fuel tanks, they had been moved to the rear, as in Goddard’s original project. First the liquid oxygen and then the alcohol.

Willy Ley, who served as the group’s spokesperson and later, after escaping Nazi Germany in 1935, became a famous science writer in America, described the event this way:

The rocket took off with a wild roar, hit the roof of the building, and raced upward at an angle of about 70 degrees. After about 2 seconds, it started to loop, climbed some more, dumped all the water out of the cooling jacket, and came down in a power dive. While it was diving, the wall of the combustion chamber – no longer cooled – gave way at one point, and with two jets spinning it around, the thing went completely crazy. It did not crash because it ran out of fuel just as it was coming out of a power dive near the ground. In fact, it almost made a landing.

A partial fiasco. Its successor, the Repulsor II, fared a little better. It did not rise any higher than its predecessor, but it traveled over half a kilometer horizontally and was recovered intact thanks to a parachute. The expedient allowed it to be reused for dozens of launches, which created a lot of excitement in the VfR. It was time to let the world know. Ley took care of it again with an article in the press and by communicating with other rocket fans. The intention was to attract a wealthy backer. Instead, it attracted the attention of the military, and so Captain Walter Dornberger (1895–1980) came on the scene.

As early as 1930, this artillery officer had been assigned by the Reichswehr Armaments OfficeFootnote 2 to a secret project to develop liquid-fueled rockets capable of competing with conventional weapons. Dornberger was the right man in the right place at the right time. A lieutenant in World War I, he had been captured and spent two long years in a French prison camp, almost all of it in isolation because of his repeated attempts to escape. When he finally returned to his homeland, he completed his university studies, graduating in 1930 with a degree in mechanical engineering from the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (followed by an honorary doctorate in 1935). A brave and stubborn soldier and a skilled technician.

For his new assignment, he had settled in Kummersdorf, an isolated area about 25 km south of the capital, where he began to study the problem. Determined not to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily, he went to Reinickendorf in the spring of 1932, together with his commander, Captain Ritter von Horstig, and the head of the Ballistics and Munitions Office, Colonel Karl Becker, to watch a launch by the “boys” of the VfR. Three experts to test the enthusiastic statements of Ley. At that time, Dornberger later recalled, the world of rockets “was a sphere of activity beset with humbugs, charlatans, and scientific cranks” and hardly populated by really capable people.

The demonstration was a fiasco. Despite the discouraging results of the inspection, Dornberger offered the VfR a small contract for another demonstration launch, which took place at the Kummelsdorf military range and went much better than the first. The rocket flew 1 km high and three times horizontally. However, Becker had no intention of spending the scarce public funds to entertain the members of the VfR. After some back and forth, his proposal took the form of a close collaboration, aimed at and bound by military secrecy. Dornberger later wrote in his memoirs that they intended to put an end once and for all to theories, unsubstantiated claims, and vain fantasies, and to come to conclusions based on sound science.

Newcomer Wernher wanted to accept the contract and even signed it personally. But the majority of the VfR’s elders refused. Among other things—they argued—as the rockets reached higher and higher altitudes, it became risky to operate from a base so close to the city. The municipality of Berlin could have terminated the lease at any time, leaving VfR without a roof over its head. The ensuing discussions contributed to the death of the association, which was finally closed in early 1934 with the approval of Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels.

For one year, the music in Germany had radically changed. The Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeitpartei (NSDAP—National Socialist Party) had won the elections of 1932, albeit by a small margin, and in January 1933 the old Hindenburg, now with one foot in the grave, had to give way and hand over the chancellery to the “Bohemian Corporal”, who quickly managed to gain full powers. A year later, on August 2, 1934, after clever maneuvering and cynical violence against friends and enemies, Hitler assumed the position of Führer and Chancellor. The Third Reich was born, a totalitarian regime animated by intentions of revenge and supremacy über Alles. All the best Aryan minds had to work together to achieve the goal: even the rising star von Braun.

He had now made his choice and moved to Kummersdorf, leaving the university classrooms where he was completing his doctoral thesis. He was welcomed with open arms, for he had already shown himself to be a champion. The officers with whom he had interacted had the intelligence, the preparation, and the open-mindedness to fully understand it. He also belonged to a very prominent family in Berlin, which certainly played into his hands.

Wernher Magnus Maximilian von Braun was born on March 23, 1912 in Wirsitz, in eastern Germany. In 1920, when the city became part of the territories returned to Polish sovereignty under the Treaty of Versailles, most German-speaking families were forced to emigrate to Prussia. Among them were the aristocratic von Brauns, who moved to Berlin, where Wernher, the second of three brothers, grew up and studied.

The father, Magnus, was a remarkable man in his own right. A Junker with ancient roots, he had served as a spokesman for Kaiser Wilhelm II. After the war, he held the same position in the SPD. In 1932 he was appointed Weimar Germany’s Minister of Food and Agriculture. But soon after, disliking the new chancellor,Footnote 3 he withdrew from the political scene. Wernher’s mother, Emmy Melitta von Quistorp, was an elegant woman, refined and cultured, with direct connections to a number of European royal families. An authoritarian aristocrat and a lover of music and astronomy, she had given her son the novels of Verne and Wells, as well as a telescope to look at the Moon. But what the boy liked best was speed.

“When I was 12 years of age”, von Braun will recall in 1963, “I had become fascinated by the incredible speed records established by Max Valier and Fritz von Opel. So I tried my first practical rocket experiment”. He attached a handful of firecrackers to a toy cart and set them on fire. It resembled “the attempt made by a Chinese named Wan Hoo in 1500”. The object flew away at a high speed, causing panic and a minor disaster, so much so that he was taken into custody by the local police. He was released only upon the arrival of his father, who had rushed to the gendarmerie. A youthful prank that ended well, or perhaps just a cleverly crafted anecdote to humanize the first life of a character who “lived twice”. The first part lasted until 1945 and was stained with the blood of many thousands of innocents.

Despite his many interests and a very Prussian attitude toward his student duties, Wernher did not do well in school. Especially in scientific subjects. He loved music (he was a piano student of the composer Paul Hindemith for a while) and dreamed of adventure. Then he was struck by his encounter with Oberth’s book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket to the Planetary Spaces), fascinating but full of incomprehensible formulas, and fell off his horse on the road to Damascus. He had understood that his karma commanded him to reach the Moon and that this required a careful and deep study of mathematics and physics.

Said and done, he became a model student. In 1930 he entered the Technische Hochshule in Charlottenburg. He was an intern in a locomotive factory when fate wanted him to meet his idol. Oberth kept this enthusiastic and helpful boy with him for a while. Then he directed him to the VfR, where Wernher received the first practical rudiments of rocket technology and the invitation to work for Dornberger in Kummersdorf. When he first arrived at the military space center as an army technician, but without a uniform, his disappointment was great. The facilities were even more miserable and bare than the amateur laboratories of the VfR at the rocket airfield. But the die had been cast. Wernher rolled up his sleeves and quickly built ever more powerful and efficient rocket engines, which were initially tested only on the bench. Taking risks like amateurs with nothing to lose would have been suicide in a win-at-all-costs environment. He feared not for himself, but for his dream. To save it, he was willing to do anything, even sell his soul to the devil, as he would later do. He reinvented many of the solutions already found by Goddard, including cooling the combustion chamber with liquid oxygen, and gave them the German brand of perfection that was missing from the lone American inventor’s achievements.

Finally, the time had come for flight. After the first test failed by a hair, von Braun was able to launch two Aggregat 2 rockets from the island of Borkum in the North Sea. The area had been chosen to provide a sort of firing range wide enough to minimize the dangers to people and human activities. It was a success, but was followed by a serious accident in which three people lost their lives. Experiments also began to install liquid-fueled rockets in aircraft. A project strongly supported by Ernst Heinkel, a powerful aircraft manufacturer and influential member of the Nazi Party.

Although the subsequent launches of the Aggregat did not go so well, Wernher was at the height of his happiness. He had at last received his doctorate with a thesis that had been declared a military secret, he was leading a top-notch research group, he had called in his best old friends from the VfR days, and he was sure that he would be able to learn from every mistake and achieve success. The army, however, had no intention of waiting. They demanded a working weapon and they wanted it now. For his part, Minister of Aviation Hermann Göring, always on the hunt for personal affirmation, was eager to get his hands on the toy.

In 1938, also at the urging of Wernher’s influential mother, the group received generous funding and moved to Peenemünde, on the far north side of the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, near the mouth of the Peene River: “It’s the perfect place for you and your friends; your grandfather used to go there to hunt ducks!”. She knew the area well, having been born in Anklam, a town in Western Pomerania. The base, which was quickly equipped with barracks, technical facilities, launch pads, and large workshops for the production of rockets, was codenamed Heimat Artillerie Park 11 Peenemünde (Home Artillery Park 11). It was a strategic choice that provided a large and secure testing ground and greater protection from prying eyes.

International espionage now targeted the activities of the Germans, whose massive rearmament was already feared. The British, French, and Russians hoped to steal the secrets of the new wonders Hitler was packaging for war. Rocket technology seemed to have a rosy future in an impending conflict, and the Führer, though without particular enthusiasm despite his passion for all kinds of new weaponry, demanded that it be formally incorporated into the activities of Germany’s new course. As director of the army’s rocket center, von Braun was urged to enter the Nazi Party. “My refusal to join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life. Therefore, I decided to join.”, he would later explain, adding that his membership did not involve any political activity on his part.

Shortly thereafter, on September 1, 1939, Hitler, emboldened by the inaction of the French and British governments, launched the invasion of Poland and war broke out again. It was a disaster for the world and for von Braun, who saw his funds and, most importantly, his personnel cut and diverted to the front. Thanks to the powerful friendships of Dornberger, now a major general, the situation was quickly reversed. Peenemünde even received an allocation of 3500 Wehrmacht soldiers. Wernher was thrilled. More brains were needed to create the desired flying bomb. So he assembled a team of specialists, the “Peenemünders”, from the country’s various university institutes. Whenever he had a problem, he went to see them one by one in a small plane that he piloted himself.Footnote 4 A fury, in the whirlwind of a blitzkrieg that seemed already won.

Only England, protected by the Channel, resisted. To overcome this last obstacle to the Third Reich’s total victory, it was necessary to destroy the Royal Air Force. Göring’s Luftwaffe was supposed to do it, but the heroism of the British pilots and the mistakes of the arrogant hierarch extinguished the Führer’s ambitions to quickly end the war on the Western Front. Hitler’s plan was to have free hands to denounce the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of non-aggression between Germany and the USSR and pour a torrent of fire on the Bolsheviks, whom he hated in his delusions as much as the Jews. The momentum of the first months was gone.

The slowdown in the military operations was a breath of fresh air for von Braun, as it gave him more time to prepare his flying bombs. To stay in the game, however, he had to agree to become an officer in the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi Party’s paramilitary organization, and don the black hat with the skull symbol, the sinister Totenkopf. It happened in the spring of 1940; a colonel walked into his office  with the message that Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler had asked him to join the SS. Wernher hesitated for a while, then called his military superior, Major General Dornberger, for advice. Dornberger told him that if he wanted to continue his work, he had no choice but to join. “After receiving two letters of exhortation [from the SS colonel], I finally wrote him my consent”. He was appointed second lieutenant and eventually promoted to major (Sturmbannführer). The von Braun of Peenemünde is often portrayed in the clips of knowledge in pills as a radiant Nibelung in the service of the Devil, a cold and ruthless genius with no other concerns than the creation of amazing machines. The picture is only partially true, however, because those who serve Satan must frequent Hell, where life is grim and uncertain for everyone, even for the “fallen angels”.

A man of dual personality, then, as dual was his judgment (in retrospect) of his Führer:

I met Hitler four times. When I saw him from a distance for the first time in 1934, he appeared to me as a fairly shabby fellow. Later when I met him in a smaller circle [in 1939 and 1941], I began to see the format of the man: his astounding intellectual capabilities, the actually hypnotic influence of his personality on his surroundings. It moved one somehow [...] My impression of him was, here is a new Napoleon, a new colossus, who has brought the world out of its equilibrium [...] In my last meeting with him [July 1943], Hitler suddenly appeared to me as an irreligious man, a man who did not have the feeling that of being responsible to a higher power, someone for whom there was no God […] He was completely unscrupulous.

Finally, in the fall of 1943, the long-awaited Aggregat 4 (A4) was ready for flight testing. A modern missile, similar to a bullet with four fins, 14 m high and weighing 13.5 tons, capable of carrying an explosive charge of one ton at the tip. After two failed launches, the third one took off in a cloud of smoke on October 3, 1942. When its thrust exceeded its weight, it took off from the launch pad and crashed into the sea at a distance of 200 km after a perfect flight in which it had surpassed an altitude of 80 km. In the latest versions, it would have reached an altitude of 360 km and a top speed of 5200 km/h, making it undetectable by anti-aircraft systems and fighters. This is how it worked. The jet engine pushed it to the preset altitude, into the stratosphere, then let it be governed by the Earth’s gravity so that the subsequent ballistic trajectory led it to intercept the target, a supersonic and silent angel of death.

Oberth, the noble father, also drank to the great technological triumph, called to Peenemünde by the student who had become the master. A star had been born, and “a new era in transportation, that of space travel”, had finally opened; but in the worst way, under the sign of devastation. Dornberger and von Braun celebrated, seemingly overjoyed at their victory, although both knew that the road was still going uphill. Their creature was not yet ready for mass production, as the military, dazzled by this first success and the need for new weapons, would surely demand. More time was needed to solve the thousand open and unknown problems, while keeping an eye on the competition. The Luftwaffe, in fact, was also working on a flying bomb.

Commander of the mythical Richthofen’s CircusFootnote 5 during the First World War, Hermann Göring did not accept to share the “Kingdom of Heaven” with anyone and he had assigned a brilliant designer to develop the program of the new weapon, taking him away from the study of the Messerschmitt 262, the jet plane that could have given to the Germans the superiority in the skies. Thus was born the Vergeltungswaffe or V1 (“retaliation weapon”, a name coined by the Mephistophelian Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels). A hybrid between a rocket and an unmanned airplane, the V1 threw a spanner in the works of von Braun. Among other things, there was a rumor that Hitler no longer believed in the V2 project.

Meanwhile, the tide of the war had changed. Operation Barbarossa to invade the Soviet Union, which Hitler had risked in the summer of 1941 to anticipate Stalin's moves, was turning into a disaster after an initial triumphant advance by the Wehrmacht. Backed into a corner, the Führer began to hope for the miracle of the Wunderwaffen. So he agreed to meet with von Braun and Dornberger at his Wolf’s Lair, the military headquarters in East Prussia from which he directed his armies on the Eastern Front. He was shown a movie of an A4 launch. The dictator was so enchanted that he changed his mind and ordered the weapon to be produced and deployed as soon as possible. In 1963, von Braun would recall it with these words:

I would like to correct an error which you find in a number of stories about the V2, namely that the V2 was Hitler’s devilish idea, designed to conquer the world. Up to 1943 Hitler had absolutely nothing to do with the rocket program […] He simply was not interested. We could not understand it, because he was very much interested in the technical details of all other weapon […] Not until July 1943, when we finally convinced him with facts, did he see any usefulness in our rockets, and then not as a weapon but as a war-preventive means. “Why didn’t I believe in the success of your work?” Hitler asked me. “If we had had this weapon in 1939, we never would have had this war. Now and in the future, Europe and the world are too small for a war. With such weapon available war will become unbearable for the human race”. Some hours later, he told me, “I have to apologize only to two people in my life. One is Field Marshal von Brauchitsch. I did not listen to him when he pointed out over and over again the importance of your development. And the second is you. I did not believe in any success for your work”.

In Peenemünde, everyone got to work. As if by magic, the endless difficulties disappeared, leaving room for the most effective cooperation. Workshops were set up for the production of the various parts of the rocket and the training of the future “artificers” began. Göring’s maneuvers to oust von Braun and leave the field open to his Luftwaffe were in vain. A4 and V1 continued their journey in parallel.

The frenetic activity of the laboratories on the Baltic island had aroused the curiosity of the Allies, alarmed by some photographs and the analysis of a rocket wreckage recovered by the Polish resistance and delivered to the British. A drastic cure was chosen, the same one used for other potentially dangerous Nazi scientific installations: a carpet bombing that took place on the night of August 17, 1943. After outmaneuvering German fighter planes with a feint, hundreds of British four-engine bombers unleashed their payload of explosives on the laboratories, but missed the target. They killed many workers, mostly prisoners of war, without causing serious damage to the facilities. For the moment, the program was safe.

An enraged Hitler immediately took countermeasures. He replaced Dornberger with a Himmler loyalist, SS General Hans Kammler, and ordered him to oversee a complete logistical restructuring of the project. An old fuel depot near Nordhausen in Thuringia, central Germany, was turned into a gigantic underground factory. Kammler, a brutal man who as a civil engineer had built several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, had the idea of using prisoners as slaves in the rocket program. The living conditions of these unfortunate people were terrible. There were many more deaths to build the missiles than victims of the missiles themselves. Obviously von Braun knew everything, but pretended not to notice. “On a small area near the ambulance shed, inmates tortured to death by slave labor and the terror of the overseers were piling up daily”, a witness will declare. “But, Prof. Wernher von Braun passed them so close that he was almost touching the corpses”.

Mass production of the A4 had not yet begun. The jewel needed more care. Determined to take over the project, Himmler had von Braun arrested on serious and false charges of sabotage, defeatism, and communism. The scientist was imprisoned and threatened with death. After two weeks, thanks to the good offices of the usual Dornberger and Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments, he was released with the consent of Hitler himself. The Führer, who was waiting for the winning weapon, had ordered that the head of his champion be spared.

In the meantime, however, Göring’s V1s, launched from mobile ramps, had begun to torment England. But the hit rate was low, and the English had quickly learned to shoot down the clumsy rockets before they entered the Island’s airspace. Nevertheless, the Aggregats continued to lose in the confrontation with the V1s, if only because they were still latent. To add insult to injury, Hitler survived an assassination attempt on July 20, 1944. The wolf was attacked in his own hideout by his own officers, and after his miraculous escape, he became convinced of his immortality. The tragedy took on the hues of a bestial farce. Now or never, von Braun thought, and on September 7, 1944, the first A4 took off for London. It was now called the V2. Several thousand would be launched during the war, almost half of them over England and a sixth in the capital London.

A brilliant success and a real slap in the face to the vain leader of the Luftwaffe. But von Braun seemed unhappy. He would have liked to study more, test longer, improve better, and instead he had developed kamikazes that, in order to destroy the enemy, destroyed themselves. Beautiful as the dart of Zeus, economically they were a losing investment. They cost as much as a large bomber and could only be used once. Unable to explain it, the Allies began to fear that they were the vanguard of a future rocket with a nuclear warhead and took countermeasures. Now the Moon seemed really far away.

In January 1945, the German resistance was dwindling. The Red Army knocked hard on the borders of Germany, advancing rapidly, paving its way with the terrible Katyusha rockets: a tactical weapon much simpler than the V2, but very efficient. The rumors of the cruel revenge of the Soviets frightened everyone. A wind of death was blowing in Peenemünde. The engineers and technicians looked askance at the SS and spied on their movements. They feared that Himmler had ordered them to eliminate the thinking heads to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.

On January 31, Kammler instead ordered the evacuation of everyone, weapons and baggage. The destination was Nordhausen, which still seemed to be a safe place. A counter-order followed, but von Braun and Dornberger ignored it. They loaded five hundred people, tons of papers, and countless parts of the V2 onto a couple of commandeered trains, which they carefully marked with SS symbols—a safe conduct that still worked very well in the Reich—and headed for the heart of Germany. By April, even the new refuge had become unsafe, and the Peenemünde caravan was ordered to move to Bavaria, close to the American-held front.

Kammler was determined to sell the treasure of Peenemünde to the Allies in order to save his own skin. A project of conditional surrender that von Braun also shared for himself and his people because, as he later explained, “the secret of rocketry should only get into the hands of people who read the Bible”. To keep on living was not enough for him. He wanted to be able to continue his studies. Two trucks full of documents and projects accumulated over 13 years of work were hidden in an abandoned iron mine. Then Kammler disappeared into thin air, one of the many Nazi leaders swallowed by oblivion and left unpunished.

In the general chaos, von Braun and Dornberger found themselves together in a small village in Tyrol. They were far from desperate. “[We lived] royally in the ski hotel on a mountain plateau […] Hitler was dead, the war was over, an armistice was signed—and the hotel service was excellent”. Then, with the help of Wernher’s younger brother who acted as an intermediary, they surrendered to the Americans.Footnote 6 They felt safe and, much worse, in the right. “We wouldn’t have treated your atomic scientists as war criminals and I didn’t expect to be treated as one. No, I wasn’t afraid. It all made sense. The V2 was something we had and you didn’t have. Naturally you wanted to know all about it”.

After the surrender, Americans daringly recovered V2 parts and projects scattered throughout Yankee-occupied territory, which had to be turned over to the Russians by Allied agreement. There was no reason for fair play, said the White House. So the human prey and materials from Peenemünde were shipped to the U.S. as part of the secret operation known as Paperclip, which was designed to recover as many German scientists as possible with the intention of reusing them at home and specially to take them away from the Russians. Von Braun was one of them. Courted by the English, who had pragmatically forgotten the V2 explosions on their heads, he had chosen the United States instead.Footnote 7 He was convinced that this great nation had the interests and resources to continue his dream.

“My country has lost two wars in my youth. This time I wanted to be on the side of the winners”, he explained. The Americans, in their puritanical souls, were divided on how to welcome him. Opportunism prevailed. In February 1947, he was even allowed to return to Germany to marry in the Lutheran rite his beautiful second cousin, the eighteen-year-old Maria von Quistorp, a “porcelain lady”, as the tabloids described her. Wernher’s second life had begun, far from the agonizing cries of the forced laborers, wretches condemned to a slow and cruel death to serve the dream of glory of Baron von Braun, the Junker of the “Gott mit uns” (God with us).

But who was he really? Surely an engineering genius, a visionary, and an exceptional manager; but also a cynical, selfish man willing to commit any atrocity to achieve his goals. An amoral Übermensch (Superior Human) in the sense Friedrich Nietzsche gave this term, and a criminal of fine intelligence? Hard to say. Even if thousands are shades of black, how should we judge those whose sublime minds, worthy of the Nobel Prize, gave birth to the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Certainly, the memory of Wernher von Braun is burdened by his association with the SS and his indifference to the inhuman atrocities of Nazi fascism, while the triumphs accumulated in the conquest of space shine forth. What a difference with his greatest opponent from behind the Iron Curtain, the “chief designer”: a short, stocky man with his head slumped on his shoulders, his eyes lively and sweet, and “a relentless determination—almost like a disease”, a skeptical and pessimistic womanizer, aggressive and paternal, who would have brought his beloved homeland, the Soviet Union, very close to the Moon.