In the Shadow of the Moon

by Amy Cherrix

  Survivor Albert van Dijk remembered his first day of incarceration inside the tunnels, which reeked of human waste, death, metal, and dust. Van Dijk had watched as a group of malnourished prisoners strained under the heavy loads they were forced to carry. “They were crawling on their knees and carrying heavy rocks . . . there were corpses on the floor. It was terrible.” Van Dijk’s job was to tally the dead. “Sometimes I was so depressed that I lay down on the floor, or looked for a dark corner and wanted to die. I didn’t even know my own name anymore.”

  It was a miracle van Dijk survived. A strong and healthy man could expect to live six months in Mittelwerk before dying of starvation, if he managed to keep up the inhuman pace of work for that long. Estimates put the death toll average at 160 people per day. Victims died from severe mistreatment; some were murdered in cold blood. Ruthless guards shot many prisoners outright, while others were executed in mass hangings as their fellow prisoners were forced to watch. When work resumed, they had to walk past the dangling bodies, a dire warning against resistance, laziness, or plots of sabotage. An estimated twenty thousand of these forced laborers died in the manufacturing of the V-2 rockets at Mittelwerk—more than were killed by the rocket itself during the war. Amid this unimaginable human suffering, the V-2 weapon rolled off the assembly line.

  Wernher von Braun witnessed the horrible conditions inside Mittelwerk. He visited the facility as many as fifteen times and handpicked prisoners with education and engineering skill for specialized projects. Von Braun’s job as head of Nazi rocket development automatically made him a part of the Mittelwerk system. He was not in control of the entire V-2 operation at the plant—his Nazi superiors were—and they required him to analyze the rocket production schedule to maximize its productivity. To that end, he calculated the most efficient ratio between skilled German workers and forced laborers. Regarding those calculations, he wrote a memo:

  In view of the difficulty of the testing processes to be carried out there, the ratio of prisoners to German skilled workers for the foreseeable future cannot exceed 2:1.

  This series of handwritten calculations is physical evidence of his knowledge of forced labor. And his participation in a decision to use it in the manufacturing of his rockets suggests he may indeed have been guilty of a crime against humanity—a war crime—punishable by death.

  However, von Braun was never tried and convicted of a war crime, and therefore the question of his guilt or innocence remains officially undetermined. While no proof has ever surfaced to support that von Braun was prejudiced against Jews, or made anti-Semitic statements, neither is there evidence to suggest that he was concerned about what was happening to them during the war. Nor does he appear to have been a devoted Nazi fanatic like Himmler or Kammler, however. Von Braun did not wear the black dress uniform and armband unless it was required, and omitted his rank from official correspondence The reason why von Braun may have rejected consistent use of these symbols of his SS membership is unknown, but it’s possible that his choices reflected the rocket designer’s general disinterest in party politics. One engineer reported that when he once expressed surprise at seeing von Braun in the uniform, the rocket designer replied, “There was no way around it.”

  But these facts hardly qualify as active resistance against Hitler’s policies and fail to absolve him of moral responsibility. Von Braun chose not to speak out against the lethal conditions inside the V-2 factory or halt his work in protest. What if he had? Would someone else have been able to carry on in his place, or would he have been arrested—or executed? We’ll never know.

  Indeed, if von Braun was fanatically devoted to anything, it was his lifelong goal of building a rocket to the moon, and nothing—not the deaths of thousands of concentration camp prisoners, or even Adolf Hitler himself—would stand in his way.

  Chapter 5

  Betraying Hitler

  By April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler had more pressing concerns than the whereabouts of Wernher von Braun. Two and a half million Red Army troops swarmed Berlin with six thousand Russian tanks and more than forty thousand artillery weapons to crush what was left of the Nazi regime. The war Hitler had started was almost over, and it was not ending at all like the dictator had imagined. The bloody Battle of Berlin had raged for two weeks between the Nazis and the Soviets, killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and countless civilian men, women, and children. Facing defeat and certain death, Hitler hid underground in a secret bunker fifty feet beneath Germany’s capital. While his people fought and died in his name, he had sequestered himself there for five months with his partner, Eva Braun. When confronted with the choice to fight for his life, he did not go down battling to his last breath the way he had demanded of all German citizens. Rather than risk arrest or death at the hands of the Russians, Hitler and Braun committed suicide.

  The next day, Germans learned of Hitler’s death in a somber radio announcement that failed to disclose that he had taken his own life. With the loss of Hitler, the war in Europe was ending, but Hitler’s fanatical followers were determined to carry out his last wishes. The previous month, Hitler had issued a “scorched earth” policy. If the Allies won, the Third Reich and Germany would burn in a fire they would set themselves, leaving nothing for the Allies but ashes.

  In the aftermath of Hitler’s death, von Braun and his associates realized their moment had come. They had to surrender before Himmler could have them shot or use them as leverage against the Allies to save himself. Either way, everything von Braun had worked for—and his dream of space travel—was at risk with every minute that passed. He doubted the Soviets’ Red Army would welcome the Nazis’ lead rocket designer with open arms. Would they execute him on sight? Arrest him? There was another possibility, of course. They could offer to fund his research if he agreed to build rockets for the Soviet Union. But he knew the Russians didn’t have the financial resources to fund the rocket program he wanted. America did. The country’s wealth would be crucial if he had any hope of reaching outer space with his rockets. It was a dangerous gamble, but von Braun liked his odds. Would he be greeted as a valuable scientific asset or an enemy of the United States government? There was only one way to find out.

  Two days later, on May 2, 1945, von Braun’s twenty-five-year-old brother, Magnus, set off to initiate the group’s surrender. “I hopped on my bike with nothing else but a story,” he later wrote, and set off down a steep, foggy mountain road known as Adolf Hitler Pass. It was spring, but stubborn snow clung to the ground. Patches of green pasture were visible here and there. The season’s first flowers strained toward light and warmth, but there was not yet enough of either to melt the brittle, frozen earth. Behind Magnus, Wernher and a group of his trusted engineers were sequestered at a ski lodge, Haus Ingeborg, near the Austrian border. Magnus served as messenger because he spoke the best English. The plan was simple but bold. He would ride directly into the path of the nearby American troops, betting his life that they would hear him out before they fired a shot.

  When US Army private Fred Schneikert of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, looked up from his post, he saw a young man pedaling a bicycle in the distance, just beyond where he and the 44th Infantry Division anti-tank platoon were stationed. The cautious private held his ground and raised his rifle as the man eased his bicycle to a stop and began to speak in German-accented English. He identified himself as Magnus von Braun. He told Schneikert that his brother was Wernher von Braun, the designer of the V-2 rocket.

  Scheinkert immediately summoned intelligence officers, who must have been eager to verify that one of the most wanted Nazi engineering teams had just fallen into their laps. “They showed up with a carton of Camels,” Magnus von Braun recalled. Cigarettes were rare treats when such luxuries were rationed, if they were available at all. By late afternoon, von Braun’s plan had worked just as he’d hoped. He and his team had escaped the German and Soviet armies and were safe in the custody of the United States government.

  Von Braun and his brother Mag
nus on the day of their surrender to the US Army. Von Braun, in a cast, had broken his arm in a car accident in the days leading up to their surrender.

  Now the only remaining problem was how American intelligence officers were going to get the Nazi scientists into the United States.

  The solution was a classified military project called Operation Paperclip. What sounded like a clandestine trip to an office supply store was actually the code name for a top secret plan to relocate one thousand German scientists, engineers, and other technicians into the United States. Given the sensitive nature of their expertise, and the fact that some of the Paperclip participants had been Nazis, it was easier to cover up their past than explain it to the American public. The project was named for the discreet procedure used to mark the dossiers of those included in the program. A paper clip was attached to each file, signaling which Germans would bypass the legal US immigration system. Intelligence officials were in a hurry to learn from these experts, especially von Braun and approximately 350 members of his team, whose V-2 technology could revolutionize American military defenses.

  At its inception, Operation Paperclip was a temporary program to acquire German scientific intelligence that could benefit the United States. Each person selected would receive a six-month contract to work in the US. Nazi Party members, officers in Hitler’s SS, or recipients of Nazi awards were to be disqualified. Some of the Paperclip participants fit into one or more of these disqualifying categories, but they were considered so valuable by the US military that they were allowed to secretly enter the country anyway. Such was the case with von Braun, who met all three criteria. Membership in the Nazi Party was not uncommon at the time. Hitler’s authoritarian government consisted of a single party, the Nazis. Von Braun had been pressured to join because of his importance to rocketry and national defense. His status as an officer in the SS who had received numerous Nazi awards was more problematic. These two most damaging facts about his past became part of von Braun’s highly classified record within the secret army program, concealing what were believed to be his worst offenses.

  Von Braun, however, knew the truth. He had darker secrets than a rank in Hitler’s SS and Nazi honors pinned to his uniform. He had witnessed the deadly conditions inside Mittelwerk. What would he say if confronted by American intelligence with questions about his connection to the underground rocket factory and its adjacent concentration camp? If he told the truth, would he be allowed to enter the US as part of Operation Paperclip or be detained as a criminal pending a war crimes investigation? Once again, luck was on von Braun’s side. It seems impossible to fathom in hindsight, but no one appears to have asked the V-2 designer if he’d had any direct involvement in the underground V-2 factory. This fact is further complicated when you consider that the liberation of Camp Dora was common knowledge within the US military in Germany at the time, as were the atrocities at Mittelwerk, yet no one seems to have pressed von Braun for answers. Were intelligence officials simply careless in their mad dash to acquire von Braun and his technology for the US? Or is it probable that they didn’t ask because they did not want to hear the truth? It is impossible to know for certain. However, the fact that the US Army was eager to use von Braun and his team to learn about their rocket technology and wanted to expedite their entry into the United States is well documented. Meanwhile, the German rocketeers maintained they were simply doing their jobs as ordered, and blamed Hitler’s SS for everything else. By all accounts, it appears these excuses were enough to satisfy their interrogators.

  With that, von Braun’s most dangerous secret was hidden from his earliest interactions with the Americans. Like an unexploded land mine, it would remain buried for forty years.3

  By late afternoon on September 18, 1945, any worries von Braun had about his hidden history would have been eclipsed by his hopes for the future. He and six members of his scientific team secretly departed for America. Everything was going just as he had planned. He had a six-month contract to teach the Americans how to fly his V-2 and was leaving his secret behind him, in the ruins of Hitler’s Germany.4

  While the events of Wernher von Braun’s life to this point are extraordinary, they are only half the story. In the Soviet Union, another man was rising to claim his place in spaceflight history. Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was a brilliant engineer who was equally obsessed with rockets. But Korolev’s quest for the moon would follow a different path than his privileged German rival’s. Where did his story begin and how did he become one of the two most important people in the race to space? To find out, we must rewind the clock to June 27, 1938, two months before Hitler would invade Poland and begin World War II—and the worst day of Sergei Korolev’s life.

  CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOSSIER

  TOP SECRET

  DO NOT COPY!

  Korolev’s arrest photo.

  Subject: SERGEI PAVLOVICH KOROLEV

  Status: Suspected traitor. Classified as an enemy of the Russian people.

  Date of and Place of Birth: January 12, 1907, Zhitomir, Ukraine

  Occupation: Engineer, Reactive Scientific-Research Institute, Moscow, where he was employed as the deputy chief of the institute, developing missiles

  Family: Ksenia Korolev (wife), Natalia Korolev (daughter)

  Education: Bauman High Technical School, Moscow

  Special Skills: Experienced pilot

  Location: Moscow

  Chapter 6

  An Innocent Traitor

  A dark new moon rose over Moscow as thirty-one-year-old Sergei Korolev walked home from work to the apartment he shared with his wife, Ksenia, a medical student. The dark-eyed, barrel-chested Russian was an engineer at a top secret rocket research facility, the Reactive Scientific-Research Institute (RNII) in Moscow.

  At RNII, he developed missiles for the Soviet government. It was thrilling to work with new technology, but it was a dangerous time for every Soviet citizen. Some of his colleagues at the institute were disappearing, and Korolev feared he would be next.

  Josef Stalin, the country’s paranoid communist dictator, was determined to eliminate political rivals at any cost. At that time, the Soviet Union, like Hitler’s Germany, was an authoritarian state. In an authoritarian society, extreme secrecy dominates every aspect of life, isolating its people from the outside world and concealing crimes committed by their ruler. Stalin, like Hitler, was in complete control. People were encouraged to spy on one another and report any anti-Soviet activity. Since 1936, Stalin’s brutal secret police force, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), had begun arresting Soviet citizens (many of them innocent of crimes) on false or fabricated charges.

  It was a period of rampant arrests known as the Great Terror, during which Stalin sought to eliminate his enemies by incarcerating millions of innocent Soviet citizens. Without a trial or proof of guilt, anyone could be detained. There were whispers of people being abducted on the street and never heard from again. Most were wrongfully imprisoned in an elaborate system of labor camps known as the Gulag. Between 1929 and 1953 this network of barbed-wire labor camps and guard towers spanned the length and width of the Soviet Union and detained approximately eighteen million people.

  Stalin’s plan was twofold: he would remove his political enemies while simultaneously creating a prison labor force. Anyone he believed threatened his leadership or contradicted his authority was jailed. The prisoners farmed the land and mined the Soviet Union’s rich mineral reserves. Stalin needed the gold trapped beneath the frozen Siberian tundra to trade with the West for technology and equipment to modernize his country.

  No one was safe, not even the Soviet Union’s greatest scientific minds. Korolev was already a suspect. One of his colleagues at the institute, a brilliant rocket engine designer named Valentin Glushko, had been accused of consorting with “enemies of the people” and deemed untrustworthy with military secrets. In March, the NKVD had arrested him. While other coworkers denounced Glushko in order to escape arrest, Korolev refused to lie
and defended his colleague. A brave and selfless act that made him a target as well.

  Hurrying along that summer evening, Korolev paused to buy a copy of Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, and to pick up a loaf of French bread for supper. The couple would dine alone that night, as their only child, three-year-old Natalia, was visiting her grandmother. Later, it would prove fortunate that she had not been home.

  Korolev climbed the stairs to the sixth floor and opened the door of their one-room apartment. Ksenia was still at work. Some time later, she arrived, nervous and afraid. There were men downstairs, she said. They were dressed in dark suits, asking questions and interviewing their neighbors. They looked like NKVD officers.

  The arrival of the infamous black NKVD vehicles, known as “Black Ravens,” filled everyone with dread. Some of the building’s tenants had already been arrested. There was no way to be certain who they had come for this time, but Stalin’s enforcers never left empty-handed. After supper, Sergei and Ksenia listened to music on their phonograph. They waited.

  The doorbell rang.

  Korolev opened the door and saw two NKVD officers, each carrying a semiautomatic Tokarev pistol. One of the men flashed official-looking credentials. They stepped inside and ordered Korolev to sit down.

  When the NKVD entered the home of a suspected traitor, they tore through drawers, tossed furniture, and smashed anything that got in their way. Sentimental heirlooms crashed to the floor as they searched for papers, diaries, and scraps of circumstantial evidence that might incriminate the accused. The police found nothing suspicious in the Korolevs’ apartment, but they arrested Sergei anyway.