But poor Wahmke was already in the past, dead and buried – what was left of him – never to be mentioned again, certainly not during the long day’s drive from Berlin to Emden carrying Max and Moritz. They spent the night in the port and the next day took a boat to the North Sea island of Borkum, about thirty kilometres offshore. It had been a horrible crossing in a high wind, and Graf had spent much of it crouched below decks, throwing up. Von Braun, needless to say, the Aryan Superman, was not only a proficient horse rider, pilot, concert-standard cellist, et cetera, but also an accomplished sailor. He spent the voyage on the bridge. Apart from a couple of dozen soldiers, there were five engineers in the Party as Graf remembered it: himself and von Braun; Walter Riedel (not to be confused with Klaus Riedel), whom they all called ‘Papa’ on account of his sedate manner; Heini Grünow, the mechanic from the Rocket Aerodrome; and Arthur Rudolph, an expert in jet propulsion from the Heylandt works, who had been with the racing driver Max Valier on the evening he was killed by an exploding motor. Rudolph was the only one of them who was a Nazi.
They installed themselves in a hotel on the beach and sat on uncomfortable cane furniture in a chilly, brine-streaked glass-enclosed veranda looking out at just such a view as this. They listened to the gale whistling around the gabled roof and waited for it to die away. And waited, and waited. That was Graf’s first experience of winter on the northern European coast, when you might see seven hours of daylight if you were lucky. They stuck mostly indoors and scanned the monotonous grey vista for any signs that the weather might break. They played chess and bridge. They discussed space flight. They listened to von Braun’s ideas for a two-stage rocket – the first stage to carry its captain beyond the earth’s atmosphere and into orbit, the second stage with a booster to propel him to the moon or Mars: ‘The vacuum of space will mean that only a relatively small amount of power will be required.’ He showed them his calculations. When he claimed that the first man to walk on the moon had already been born, it was obvious he meant himself. Finally, over dinner on 18 December 1934, after a week of waiting and with Christmas approaching, he announced that they would launch Max the next day, whatever the weather; if it failed, they always had Moritz as a backup.
The morning of the 19th dawned clear and blustery: cloud base 1,200 metres, wind from the east, gusts up to 80 kph. For the sake of secrecy, the local people, mostly fishermen and their families, were ordered to stay indoors and keep their curtains closed. Soldiers were posted to make sure they obeyed. The engineers carried Max to the dunes and erected the launch mast, connected the electrical cables to the measuring equipment, checked the gyroscopes and filled the fuel tanks with alcohol, liquid oxygen and compressed nitrogen. Graf took charge of the movie camera. He had to keep wiping sand from the lens. They waited for a lull in the wind, then von Braun lit the tin of kerosene at the end of the broom handle and applied it to the nozzle. There was a crack of thunder as the jet ignited, and Max shot upwards – up and up and up: they had to tilt their heads right back to follow him, until his exhaust flame had shrunk to a tiny red dot. He reached an altitude, they later calculated, of 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 Labour Front. ‘But I know just the place,’ his mother announced suddenly, looking up from her tapestry. ‘It’s right next to Rügen. Your grandpapa used to go duck-hunting there every winter. What was it called, Magnus?’
The old baron removed his cigar and grunted. ‘Peenemünde.’
That was the first time Graf heard the name.
And so for the second time, he found himself heading north, this time just the two of them, in von Braun’s new car. They stopped off overnight at Carmzow, near Stettin, at the ancestral home of von Braun’s mother’s family, the von Quistorps – a far grander property – and continued the next day for about fifty kilometres through the flat Pomeranian countryside un
til they crossed a bridge that spanned the narrow straits to the island of Usedom. For ten minutes or so the road curved through woods and marshland and ran along a narrow spit, with water sparkling on either side, taking them past pretty little fishing villages painted pink and yellow and pale blue, until at last it dwindled into a forest track at the northern tip of the island. They parked the car and completed the journey on foot.
That morning remained imprinted on Graf’s mind as a visit to paradise before the Fall – ancient oaks and hundred-foot Scots pines, dunes and peat bogs, white sandy beaches with reed beds; silent, immemorial, not a human to be seen, only swans and ducks, warblers and cormorants, streams with otters, and immense Pomeranian deer crowned by dark antlers wandering among the heather, placid and unafraid. It took more than an hour to clamber along the coast to the point where the mouth of the river Peene opened out to the Oder Lagoon. Von Braun, the winter sun on his broad face and his blond hair blowing in the sea breeze, flung out his arms to embrace it all. ‘This is fantastic, no?’ He started gesturing to where everything could go, abolishing nature with a sweep of his hand. He saw test stands in the forest and launch pads on the foreshore; on the grasslands there would be workshops and laboratories, a factory to manufacture the rockets, chemical plants to make the methyl alcohol and liquid oxygen, a power station, an airfield where they could work on jet engines for the Luftwaffe, a railway station, a model town for the workforce.
‘But you would need to bring thousands of people up here,’ Graf objected. He couldn’t help laughing. It sounded so absurd, like one of their boyhood fantasies. ‘Who on earth would pay for such a place?’
‘Oh, they will pay for it.’
‘They?’
‘Our masters in uniform. Believe me, they have so much money for rearmament right now, they don’t know what to do with it. They’re falling over themselves to spend it.’
‘Come on! The costs would be unbelievable.’
‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll see. I’ll promise them such a weapon they won’t be able to resist it.’
On their return to Kummersdorf, von Braun had sat down with Papa Riedel and the head of weapons development, Colonel Dornberger, to start sketching out the most advanced ballistic missile that might be technologically feasible based upon what they had achieved so far. Graf had always got on well with Dornberger. He was a congenial artillery veteran of about forty, clever enough and ambitious, whose obsession was the Paris gun that had shelled the French capital in the Great War. Von Braun played him as skilfully as he played his cello – flattering him, sometimes deferring to him, always allowing the older man to feel he was in control. Between them they came up with the specifications for a workable weapon: one that could be transported intact on a railway wagon to wherever it was required. The need for mobility limited its size to less than fifteen metres. Even so, it would be capable of carrying a one-ton warhead of either high explosive or poison gas over a distance of 275 kilometres. To accomplish this, Riedel calculated, would require a motor capable of developing twenty-five tons of thrust – seventeen times more powerful than anything they had achieved before. This would be Aggregate-4.
One morning at the beginning of April, Dornberger and von Braun were driven to the Air Ministry in Berlin to present their plans to General Kesselring of the Luftwaffe. Graf watched them go, sitting together in the back of the Mercedes with their briefcases on their laps like a couple of salesmen. He didn’t know what was said, but by lunchtime, a Luftwaffe staff officer was in a fast car to Usedom, and by nightfall, the Air Ministry had rung Dornberger to say the deal was done: the Peenemünde site had been bought from the local council for three quarters of a million marks and the Luftwaffe would pay half the costs of construction.
The whole thing had an element of madness from the start. Indeed, there were a couple of times during his interrogation in Stettin when Graf had been tempted to throw up his hands and simply confess what he believed: that von Braun hadn’t created Peenemünde in order to build a weapon so much as created a weapon in order to build Peenemünde. The audacity of it – the risks of it – was dizzying.
It wasn’t until the third day that they finally asked him the question they had been leading up to all along.
Did you or did you not, on the evening of Sunday 17 October 1943, at a beach party in Zinnowitz, in the company of Professor von Braun, Dr Helmut Gröttrup and Dr Klaus Riedel, state that the war was lost, the rocket would not save Germany, and your aim all along had been to build a spaceship?
In the second or so that followed, even as his throat constricted and his heart seemed to hollow, his engineer’s brain tried to work through every possible option to find the safest reply. What had the others said? If this, then that; if that, then this…
Gentlemen, I don’t recall saying any such thing. I think there must be some mistake…
Listen to me, Rudi. This is the absolute truth. The road to the moon runs through Kummersdorf.
No, my dear Wernher, for all your genius, the road from Kummersdorf has not led us to the moon. It has led us precisely here.
* * *
—
He heard a noise behind him. His joints had stiffened in the cold. He stood and turned awkwardly. Someone was coming up the track through the forest. Torches flashed between the trees. A dog barked. First one SS guard appeared, his gun aimed from his shoulder, then another, and finally the dog handler with a big German shepherd straining at its leash. Graf raised his hands. A torch shone straight into his face, blinding him. He tried to shield his eyes.
One of the shadowy figures shouted, ‘Don’t move!’
‘I’m Dr Graf. I have authorisation.’ He flinched and turned his head away. ‘Can you get that thing out of my eyes?’
A second SS man said, ‘It’s the civilian from Peenemünde, Sturmmann. Don’t you recognise him?’
‘Yes, I know him. Papers!’
Wearily Graf reached into his inside pocket. ‘If you recognise me, why do you need my papers?’
In the distance, a klaxon sounded.
He handed over his pass. ‘That’s a launch. I ought to be there.’
‘Then what are you doing here?’
‘Just get on and check it, will you?’ He glanced into the trees as the guard went through the laborious process of shouldering his gun, transferring his flashlight to his other hand and directing it onto Graf’s identification. Sensing Graf’s impatience, he took his time.
‘I asked you a question, Doctor: what you are doing in a restricted area?’
The boom of the V2’s first-stage ignition rolled across the forest. Graf swivelled in the direction of the sound. The SS men followed suit. It was impossible to say how far away the launch site was. A glowing hemisphere appeared in the darkness, lighting the pointed tips of the firs so that they seemed to extend like a sea in moonlight. Above them, a column of fire ascended slowly. It reached a height of perhaps fifty metres, then stalled. For several seconds it hovered, pulsing red and blue, before appearing to drift sideways. Still vertical, it slowly subsided on a diagonal line and disappeared out of sight. The wood lit up with the brilliance of a summer’s day. Moments later came a roar as the fuel tanks exploded.
No one spoke, or made a sound – at least that was how Graf remembered it – and then he came out of his trance and pushed his way past the SS men, scrambled down the sandy track and started running through the trees.
He ran for a couple of minutes until he could see the fireball up ahead. Not the warhead, he prayed, not the warhead. Men were shouting. Figures were moving to and fro. He wanted to shout at them to keep back, but he was too far away. Behind him the SS guards were crashing through the undergrowth, almost on his heels. The dog was barking. One of them was blowing on a whistle – an action as pointless as it was irritating. He was just about to turn and tell him to shut up when the trees bent towards him and he ran h
ead first into what felt like a wall of earth. It filled his mouth and eyes. The ground dropped away beneath his feet. He trod air. His arms flailed in panic. His back struck something hard.
When he opened his eyes again, the trees around him were on fire. Burning leaves and paper floated in the smoke. He crawled on his knees, then pulled himself up and staggered through the blasted trees towards the smouldering crater. Just before he reached it, the dog trotted past him, proudly carrying something in its mouth that only afterwards he realised was a hand.
8
IN THE GROUNDS OF DANESFIELD House, in the dormitory at the far end of the hooped metal Nissen hut, Sunday night turned into Monday morning to the accompaniment of nothing more noisy than a murmuring of snores. Of the four women, only Kay was awake – lying on her side, studying the luminous green markings of her travel clock with such concentration she convinced herself she could see the big hand edging forward with infinitesimal slowness.
Beside the softly ticking clock, on the chair that served as a nightstand, lay the papers that were to be her passport out of this place. The first affirmed that WAAF Section Officer A. V. Caton-Walsh of the Central Interpretation Unit, RAF Medmenham, had been temporarily reassigned to 33 Wing, 2nd Tactical Air Force, the transfer having been requested by Wing Commander C. R. Knowsley, approved by her commanding officer, Wing Commander L. P. Starr, and authorised by Air Commodore M. S. Templeton, DFC. Attached to this chit by a paper clip was a second document: a crudely typed and duplicated movement order directing her to report to RAF Northolt by 0900 hours the next day. The rows of dots left empty for name, rank and serial number had been filled in by a careless hand in an indecipherable scrawl of blue ink.
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