by Amy Cherrix
He did not resist as he pulled on his old leather coat. Ksenia was desperate. She couldn’t imagine where these men were taking her husband or how long he would be gone. “I naively gave him two changes of underwear for the journey,” she remembered years later. “We said goodbye and kissed each other.”
At the window she waited for one last glimpse of Sergei as the police led him to their car. She had no idea it was the last time she would see her husband for six years. “I had golden hair,” she later said. “It went completely gray overnight.”
While he was under arrest, interrogators broke Korolev’s upper and lower jaws. After many beatings and episodes of torture, Korolev couldn’t take any more. He falsely confessed to crimes of treason to end his suffering and appeared before a judge. After a fifteen-minute deliberation, he was found guilty and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor. Korolev had escaped execution, but a quick death might have been a more humane punishment than his sentence. He would be imprisoned at Kolyma, the most feared and notorious Gulag camp, in extreme northeastern Siberia, only 217 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
Boy from a Broken Home
Sergei Korolev had been loyal to his country his entire life. He was born on January 12, 1907, in the Ukrainian town of Zhitomir, to a pair of academics. His father, Pavel, was a teacher at a girls’ school, and his mother, Maria, taught French. A year after their son’s birth, his parents separated and Korolev went to live with his grandparents. His new home was isolating but comfortable. There weren’t many children to play with, and the young boy depended on his mother’s aging parents for entertainment. At the age of six, he attended his first air show. From the safety of his grandfather’s shoulders, he watched as the pilot climbed into the plane. To the little boy’s amazment, it lifted off the ground and flew into the air. From that moment, young Sergei was mesmerized by flight.
As he matured, Korolev’s passion for planes and flight intensified. When he was a teenager, he joined a local organization dedicated to the pursuit of flight, the Society of Friends of the Air Fleet. At seventeen, he designed his first glider. His family was skeptical of Korolev’s fascination with aeronautics, worrying it was too dangerous and believing that it would be best for him to learn a trade. Out of respect for their wishes, the following year he found work with a construction crew as a roofer’s apprentice.
But Korolev never lost his passion for flight. By 1930, he had graduated from the most elite engineering school in the Soviet Union, Bauman High Technical School, Moscow (an institution comparable to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States) and obtained his pilot’s license. “Going up in the air,” he said, “my thoughts turned more and more frequently to the creation of a jet engine.” He daydreamed about ways to reach higher altitudes and greater distances. He continued to design gliders, but new possibilities were irresistible. Like von Braun, he sought a community of people who shared his passion, with whom he could design, build, and test liquid-fueled rockets.
Korolev seated inside one of the gliders he loved to build and fly.
After college, Korolev cofounded his own group of rocket enthusiasts called GIRD (Gruppa Isutcheniya Reaktivnovo Dvisheniya, or Group for the Investigation of Reactive Motion). Just as the German military discovered the potential of von Braun’s early rocket experiments at the Raketenflugplatz, the Soviet government recognized the potential of Korolev and his fellow experimenters. Two years after its formation, GIRD was acquired by the Soviet military and renamed RNII (Reactive Scientific-Research Institute), the official center for research and the development of missiles. Korolev was appointed its deputy chief. Four years later, Joseph Stalin’s “Great Terror” began and Korolev’s life had unraveled.
In July 1939, Korolev arrived at the Siberian labor camp with five thousand other prisoners. Nothing distinguished him from the rest of the miserable masses fighting for survival. During his first few months, he suffered brutal beatings from guards or other prisoners, leaving a large scar on his head. Food was always in short supply. The malnourished prisoners subsisted on soup made of spoiled cabbage, potatoes, and the heads and lungs of fish. Korolev developed scurvy as a result of his vitamin-deficient diet, a condition that cost him fourteen teeth.
Diseases like typhus were a constant threat in the cramped, unsanitary quarters. Bedbugs and other parasites, such as lice, amplified the prisoners’ suffering.
They were issued clothing or uniforms that fit poorly. Pants, shirts, and coats could be torn or threadbare. Other inmates didn’t have shoes. After the short, sweltering, and mosquito-infested summer turned to winter, none of the garments were sufficient to insulate workers against the bone-chilling Siberian cold. At Camp Kolyma, some of the lowest temperatures on Earth were recorded. If the prisoners didn’t die of exposure, they were worked to death, murdered by fellow inmates and guards, or perished from starvation or disease.
The winter after Korolev’s arrival was one of the worst on record. Temperatures plunged to minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit. In this unforgiving environment, Korolev worked twelve hours a day digging gold for Joseph Stalin. He endured the misery of Kolyma for at least fifteen months.
Against overwhelming odds, he survived. He was then transferred several times over the next four and a half years between other types of Gulag camps. During these years, he drafted letters, pleading his case to anyone who would listen. “I am convicted of a crime I’ve never committed,” he wrote to the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union. “I have never been a member of any anti-Soviet organization.” His indignation and anger dissolved into hopelessness in a letter to Ksenia. “I am so very tired of life,” he wrote. “I can see no end to my dreadful situation.”
In July 1944, Korolev and thirty-five other prisoners were abruptly released from specialized prisons, known as sharashki; workshops and laboratories where prisoners with technical or scientific expertise worked on government projects. Conditions in sharashki were a vast improvement over the Siberian labor camps. At the time of his release, Korolev was imprisoned in the Russian city of Kazan. For reasons that remain unknown, however, Korolev did not immediately leave the area to reunite with his family after his release. Instead, he stayed in Kazan, as a free man, for about a year. During this time, little is known about the details of his life and activities, other than that he appears to have continued work on technical projects, possibly related to rocketry. Then, in early August 1945, the United States made a choice that would send Korolev from Kazan back to Moscow and alter the course of his life forever.
A mushroom cloud rises over Hiroshima after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city, August 6, 1945.
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States launched the world’s first (and to date only) nuclear attacks, against Japan, targeting the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending World War II. As the world stood in awe of the American weapons, Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin rushed to prioritize his country’s nuclear program. The relationship between the US and the USSR had quickly fallen apart at the end of the war in Europe, due to the ideological differences between the two countries. When intelligence revealed that von Braun was in American custody, Stalin knew that the US had a strategic military advantage. If the United States paired their nuclear weapon with one of the German engineer’s rockets, would they be able to fire a nuclear warhead that would reach the USSR? Stalin could not allow that to happen. He needed a rocket that would carry a nuclear warhead to the US to defend the Soviet Union against an American attack. He also needed a brilliant engineer to build it. Fortunately, such a man had been right under his nose throughout the war, clinging to life in the Gulag.
One month after Japan’s surrender to the United States, Stalin summoned Korolev to Moscow and, in a spectacular display of hypocrisy, offered him a job. Korolev accepted the assignment. He was to travel to Germany and study the V-2 rocket in order to build a replica for the Soviet Union. It’s difficult to understand why Korolev would have accept
ed the offer, given the brutality he had endured. But it’s possible to imagine his motivation as he boarded a plane for Germany. He was free, and grateful to be returning to the work he loved, regardless of the circumstances. With the newly bestowed civilian rank of lieutenant colonel in the Red Army, he arrived in Germany not long before von Braun departed for America. The two men never crossed paths, but it was the only time during their lives that they were in such close proximity to one another.
In Germany, Korolev borrowed a car, a dusty two-door Opel Olympia, and set off on his new assignment. How quickly his life was now changing, while every moment in prison had dragged on for an eternity. Confinement had made him paranoid and cautious. His health had also been severely compromised by life in prison. He developed a heart condition that remained with him for the rest of his life, and the damage to his jawbones made it difficult to fully open his mouth. They were physical reminders of what the Gulag had taken from him. So much time had been lost. What might he have accomplished during those stolen years? If the NKVD had never shown up at his door, could he have surpassed von Braun?
There was no time to regret such things. Korolev’s duty was to complete his mission as ordered by Stalin. Building a copy of von Braun’s rocket would never be enough for him, though. Korolev’s secret dream was to build one of his own: a Soviet original that would be superior to anything designed by von Braun.
Korolev increased pressure on the gas pedal. The Opel responded, and the ruins of Germany blurred outside the window. The road ahead was unfamiliar, but Korolev took each curve as it came, holding a steady course toward his uncertain future.
The first time Soviet engineer and Red Army major Boris Chertok met Sergei Korolev, the two men were standing inside a lavish villa in the town of Bleicherode, not far from Nordhausen, where the Mittelwerk V-2 factory was located. Villa Frank had been home to Wernher von Braun for a time near the end of the war. Now it served as headquarters of the Institute RABE, an organization of Soviet engineers whose job was to collect V-2s and other rocket parts. Chertok was the group’s chief.
Korolev carried himself like an officer, Chertok recalled, but “the absence of medals on his clean tunic immediately gave him away as a ‘civilian’ officer. His dark eyes, which had a sort of merry sparkle, looked at me with curiosity and attentiveness . . . I immediately noticed Korolev’s high forehead and large head on his short neck, . . . There was something about him, like a boxer during a fight.”
Chertok invited Korolev to sit and watched as “he sank into a deep armchair and, with obvious pleasure, stretched out his legs.”
Chertok began the briefing. He detailed the progress of the Soviets’ V-2 recovery project and noted that a number of von Braun’s former associates remained in Germany. Fortunately for the Soviets, not everyone who worked with von Braun had wanted (or been invited) to enter the United States under Operation Paperclip. Some of those German technicians now worked for the Soviets, locating parts to help re-create the V-2. A few engines had been recovered, and firing tests were underway. Satisfied with the overview, Korolev thanked Chertok and departed. Chertok watched as Korolev took his place behind the wheel of the dirty Opel and drove away. He had permission to pass through every Soviet checkpoint in Germany and could drive the Opel anywhere he chose. Years later, Chertok recalled the day he watched the former Gulag prisoner reclaiming his freedom. “He wasn’t yet forty years old. . . . But he had the right now to take something from life for himself.”
Chapter 7
Confiscating the Spoils of War
It should have been easy for the Soviets to locate materials to reassemble V-2s. But when they had first arrived at Mittelwerk, most of the V-2 rockets and parts were already gone. The American army had been the first Allied power to discover Camp Dora and its adjacent Mittelwerk factory, and had helped themselves to enough material to fully assemble at least one hundred V-2s as well as hardware for other weapons. But the V-2 material didn’t technically belong to the Americans. When the war ended, Germany and Berlin were divided into four occupational zones, each controlled by one of the four victors in Europe: the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Mittelwerk was inside the Soviet zone. The United States realized that all the V-2 components within the mountain factory would fall under Soviet control. The contents would be enough to kick-start a rocket program for the USSR.
Given the sweeping political differences between the two temporary allies, the United States could not allow the Soviet Union to acquire V-2 technology. On April 11, 1945, the US Army undertook drastic measures to prevent it. Special Mission V-2 was a large-scale operation that removed enough documentation, material, and mechanical parts from Mittelwerk to fully assemble one hundred V-2 rockets. But the packing and loading of the parts required the specialized skills of those accustomed to working with machinery. The most qualified team was the army’s 144th Ordnance Motor Vehicle Assembly Company, but it was stationed eight hundred miles away in Cherbourg, France. It would take the reinforcements almost a month to arrive, leaving precious little time to pack and load the confiscated material aboard railcars bound for Antwerp and then the United States.
With less than three weeks until the Soviets’ scheduled takeover of the site, and the area surrounding Nordhausen, the 144th finally arrived on May 18 and received help from an unlikely source. There were already a number of V-2 assembly experts in the area: the surviving former prisoners of Camp Dora who had been forced to work inside the mountain cave. For a fair wage, the army hired 150 former Dora prisoners to assist in gathering the rocket materials and loading them aboard as many as 350 railcars for transport. While teams hurried to empty Mittelwerk of its hardware, phase two of Special Mission V-2 began.
Persistent rumors about a secret document archive belonging to von Braun and hidden near Nordhausen convinced intelligence officials that it likely existed. The US Army ordered twenty-five-year-old Major Robert Staver to find and confiscate the documents before the area fell under Soviet control.
US intelligence was right to believe the rumors. Hitler had ordered von Braun’s rocket research destroyed to keep it out of the hands of the Allies as Germany fell. To protect his archive, von Braun had once again defied Hitler’s orders. Two of his most trusted engineers, Dieter Huzel and Bernhard Tessmann, secretly transported fourteen tons of documents and schematics to an abandoned mine shaft in Dörnten, forty-eight miles north of Nordhausen. The men then dynamited the entrance, sealing the homemade vault behind an avalanche of rock.
Von Braun believed his documents could be used as valuable leverage against the Americans if he needed to further persuade them of his usefulness. He departed for the US under Operation Paperclip having never revealed their location.
Racing against the clock, Major Staver falsified a note suggesting that von Braun had ordered the disclosure of his archive’s hiding place to the Americans. Staver presented the bogus statement to Walther Riedel and Karl Otto Fleischer, two former colleagues of von Braun’s who likely knew the documents’ secret location. Assuming the note was authentic, Fleischer revealed the location of the mine, and Staver took possession of von Braun’s collection of papers.
On May 31, at nine thirty p.m., the last train, loaded with the life’s work of Wernher von Braun, departed Mittelwerk just hours before the Soviets arrived.
With the Americans’ shameless looting of both Mittelwerk and von Braun’s secret document stash, the US expanded its technological advantage. It was a blow to the Soviets. Korolev’s job was more difficult because he would have to start from scratch. His proud Russian upbringing and devotion to his country mattered more than this setback. He was driven and skilled, undaunted by the unique challenges presented by large-scale rocket projects. To successfully reverse engineer the V-2, he first needed to draft a new set of rocket schematics. Helmut Gröttrup, a former assistant to von Braun, was one of the engineers who had chosen to stay behind in Germany. In exchange for a good salary and comfortable accommodati
ons for himself and his family, Gröttrup accepted a job working for the Soviets to help them build V-2s. Gröttrup and other associates of von Braun’s were willing to disregard any concerns they may have had about working for the Soviets because they needed to feed their families in devasted postwar Germany. During negotiations, Gröttrup stipulated that he would not relocate to the Soviet Union with his wife and child, wanting to remain in Germany. The Soviets agreed to these terms with Gröttrup and the other Germans who worked for them.
Their new employers, however, maintained strict control over the new V-2 rocket program.
The Russians eventually realized that if they were going to establish a successful rocket production operation in their own country, they needed the Germans with them in the Soviet Union. Given the choice, the German engineers, especially Gröttrup, could refuse to leave. It was a risk that Soviet intelligence was unwilling to take.
On October 19, 1946, the Soviet special deputy for counter-intelligence, Colonel Ivan Serov, arrived in Germany. In his memoir, Boris Chertok described a meeting between Serov and the Soviet engineers working at Institute RABE. Serov wanted lists of valuable German specialists who could be useful working in the Soviet Union. These specialists, Chertok wrote, “would be taken to the Soviet Union regardless of their own wishes.” Serov reportedly said, “We will allow the Germans to take all their things with them, even furniture. We don’t have much of that. As far as family members, they can go if they wish.”
Then Serov laid out his plan. “No action is required of you except for a farewell banquet. Get them good and drunk—it will be easier to endure the trauma.” Chertok struggled to comply with the order. He had worked alongside the Germans. He knew they were about to be tricked into leaving Germany and forced to move to the Soviet Union. “It was difficult,” Chertok wrote, “to seriously discuss future projects knowing that one night soon, they and their families would be ‘seized.’” Korolev had reservations about the plan as well and reportedly remarked that the Soviets “must have a little more self-respect.” He knew what it felt like to be torn from one’s home in the middle of the night.
