Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  To Staver’s good fortune, some obscure order in lofty administrative circles set back the date of the Soviet takeover to 21 June. The best people to help, Staver decided, would be the Germans themselves. He immediately made arrangements for the leading scientists to be transported back to Nordhausen and assigned to searching out the most essential staff in the surrounding villages. Staver himself personally escorted von Braun along with Dr Richard Porter. Winning people over was difficult and, as the days passed, the number who would ultimately be on the train to the west was not easy to ascertain. When a cottage door was opened in a sleepy village, and the proposition put to a particularly indispensable technical expert, the response was frequently: ‘What kind of treatment can we expect from the US for our assistance as compared to the approaches made by the Soviets?’ ‘The Soviets,’ the German engineers said, ‘were baiting them with homes, research facilities and special consideration for continuing their missile developments.’ For others, however, the presence of von Braun was sufficient; his immediately recognizable figure, still in the cumbersome plaster cast, was persuasive enough. Von Braun himself had high hopes that America would be the Promised Land and he was unceasing in his efforts in persuading the men to join him.

  It was thought that about a thousand would avail themselves of the chance to go to the American zone, but getting an unknown number of men, their families and possessions to the train in Nordhausen presented considerable logistical problems. There was not enough transport to take that number of people from the outlying villages on the day of departure. After a week of much begging and many small miracles, the morning of 20 June saw the gathering of three hundred assorted vehicles in a variety of conditions ready to play their part in the great escape. In each vehicle was a German assigned to collect one individual or family. The message delivered to all was the same: ‘You have a quarter of an hour to make up your mind. Stay here and face the Soviets or pack up what you can and go with us.’ Most made the doorstep decision to change their lives and accepted the American offer.

  By noon, a crowd of nearly one thousand of the original Peenemünde team and their families were assembled at the station, but there was no sign of a train. There were some carriages in a siding, but no engine. The Soviets were due in less than twenty-four hours. The hot afternoon wore on. Enquiries yielded no information. Tempers became frayed, people were nervous, tension rose to critical levels as an increasing number of displaced persons joined the crowd. ‘I was close to being a mental case waiting at the station,’ recalled one observer. ‘Every time a German would say “Ruski” I would jump ten feet.’ Just as it was looking as though everyone would have to be transported into the American zone by car, at last the engine arrived.

  The scientists and their families hurriedly boarded the fifty carriages provided. This, however, proved complicated, as, inevitably, German civilians and people displaced by war were also fighting for places on the train. When order was restored, the train moved south-west on a journey that took its passengers to the west banks of the River Werra in the American zone. It was a mere forty miles but the distance that was to separate their lives from those of their colleagues left behind was immeasurable.

  There was one more outstanding task for Staver, once again to be undertaken against the clock. Before leaving for the Bavarian Alps in April, Dornberger had taken the precaution of hiding his own private documents and blueprints. With their exact whereabouts unknown and with less than twelve hours to find them before the Soviets arrived, Staver found himself hunting down a large-scale map of the area. Some hours later, with a small detachment of soldiers, some digging tools, an invaluable mine detector and a borrowed map, the search began in what was thought to be a likely area. A few more hours of nail-biting suspense and the mine detector located the metal boxes. With a certain feeling of satisfaction, Staver, knowing he had the last piece of the jigsaw, took the papers – all 250 pounds of them – through the lonely byroads to the US zone.

  Staver had made good use of his few short few weeks in Mittelwerk. Von Braun’s team were in the American zone, he had the 65,000 irreplaceable documents and a hundred V-2s were on their way to the United States. He had outmanoeuvred the British and the Soviets. Despite the Soviet’s superior intelligence, Staver, with an entrepreneurial American touch, had run rings around them. The Americans had won the first lap in the race for the secrets of the V-2. Staver congratulated himself on having acquired everything worth collecting. Little did he know he was dangerously discounting Soviet persistence and ingenuity.

  PART TWO

  The Race for Supremacy

  ‘I am convicted of a crime which I have never committed … The charges are all false and made up. I have never been a member of any anti-Soviet organization …’

  SERGEI PAVLOVICH KOROLEV from Kolyma in Siberia, one of Stalin’s notorious Gulag camps, 1938

  ‘I was incredibly happy to be in the presence of Comrade Stalin …’

  SERGEI PAVLOVICH KOROLEV, 1947

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘We’ve not got the right Germans’

  When the Soviet army entered Peenemünde on 5 May, the sound of infantry boots echoed through derelict work sheds, research buildings and test stands. Soviet intelligence, hoping to inherit a vast fortune of German technology, found that the retreating Germans had blown up about 75 per cent of the site and removed anything of value, including precious documentation. None of the caretaker staff who had been left behind were able to impart any scientific information, yet the Soviets were in no doubt about the purpose of the site and saw it as a matter of increasing urgency to recover the men responsible for producing such advanced weaponry.

  Within less than a week, the State Defence Committee set out plans to coordinate the activities of the army and the NKVD in the search for German weapons technologies. The ruthless secret police officer Colonel General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov was put in charge of an NKVD operation to assess the value of any German specialists who could be found and to procure them for the Soviets. Serov had joined the NKVD in 1939 and been rapidly promoted during the war following the successful execution of a series of brutal campaigns in Soviet-occupied territories which had met the approval of his NKVD superiors, among them the notorious Soviet Chief of Secret Police, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria. Serov’s first task had been the ‘expulsion of the anti-Soviet elements from the Baltic States’, which he had accomplished by arresting families that fell under suspicion and segregating men, women and children before sending them to camps. Such campaigns of terror were repeated when he was appointed head of the NKVD for the Ukraine, working closely with Nikita Khrushchev, then Ukrainian Party First Secretary. Later in the war, Serov was responsible for the mass deportation of Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Kalmyks and during 1944 he established an NKVD presence in Poland and supervised the crushing of the Polish resistance. For these ‘victories’, Serov was awarded the title ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ in May 1945, and given sweeping powers across Soviet-occupied territories. He was entrusted with applying his methods to ensure that German advances in atomic weapons and rocketry did not slip through the net.

  However, in June, when the NKVD followed the infantry into Mittelwerk as the Americans departed, it was soon apparent that the Americans had lost no time in taking all the important trophies from this facility as well. At first sight, the Soviets had inherited nothing – no fully built V-2s, no documentation, no senior experts. Stalin’s fury was uncontainable. ‘This is absolutely intolerable,’ he said to Serov. ‘We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde, but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this allowed to happen?’ Serov was left in no doubt that he had to rectify the situation.

  As head of the NKVD in the Soviet-occupied zone in Germany, Serov ordered his men to investigate the factories and technological institutes that had fallen under his control to find out what could be salvaged. At Mittelwerk, former prisoners of war an
d people held in camps for repatriation were put to work clearing the site and searching for anything of value. In the absence of any technical information, Serov needed Soviet specialists in rocket technology to make any headway. This was difficult since Stalin had effectively destroyed the Soviet rocket programme before the war. During the purges of the 1930s, many of the senior figures in the field had been denounced and shot or imprisoned, and consequently many of the new recruits at the scientific research institute NII-1 were young and relatively inexperienced. Under the guidance of Major General Lev Mikhailovich Gaidukov, Chief of the Interdepartmental Technical Commission in Germany, engineers with suitable experience were found and sent out from Moscow. One of the first to arrive was Boris Yevseyevich Chertok, who was promoted to major in the Red Army and wrote an engaging account of his experiences in Germany after the war.

  Boris Chertok reached Nordhausen on the evening of 14 July 1945 and joined forces with his colleague Alexei Mikhailovich Isayev. They had already made preliminary studies of von Braun’s V-2 as various parts of the German missile had fallen into Soviet hands. In the morning, their first step was to examine the site at Mittelwerk. Outside Camp Dora a straggling line of people offered to help. A former Soviet officer stepped forward, curiously attired in assorted items of US army uniform. With great charm, he introduced himself as Lieutenant Shmargun and explained that he had been an inmate of Camp Dora and was the man most qualified to show them around. Noticing that he did not look as thin as the rest, Chertok and his colleagues wondered if he was an American spy and asked how he had managed to stay alive. Shmargun replied that the Germans had had to keep some people alive to dispose of the corpses of the dead and he was sure he would prove indispensable once again as he had contacts among the Americans. ‘I know the places where the SS hid the secret components of the V-2 and the Americans have not found them,’ he said. ‘We, the prisoners, knew many things.’ Chertok and Isayev decided that if SMERSH ‘passed’ Shmargun, it was in their interests to keep him.

  SMERSH, the Ninth Section of the NKVD’s Special Division, the ‘Section for Terror and Diversion’, was also operating in occupied Germany under Serov’s control. SMERSH, an abbreviation for Smert Shpionam, or ‘Death to Spies’, had been formed in 1941 and operated on foreign territory as military counterintelligence. It aimed to remove all opposition and danger to the Soviet regime by liquidating anyone considered a threat. Victims who fell under suspicion could be dispatched ruthlessly; often they simply disappeared without trial. People of any nationality, not just defectors, but anyone engaged in activity that undermined the defence of the motherland, could be considered a threat. Serov was anxious to stop all Allied attempts at espionage on the Soviet rocket programme.

  Despite his concern that Lieutenant Shmargun was a spy, Chertok soon found he proved his value when he took them on a detailed tour of Mittelwerk. It was a hot, bright July day but inside the rancid-smelling tunnels it was dark; the Americans had broken much of the lighting before they left. The Soviet engineers had witnessed industrial endeavours on a giant scale but had seen nothing like the huge complex at Mittelwerk, 200 yards underground with its seemingly endless forty-two miles of tunnels. Guiding them skilfully around abandoned equipment and inspection pits, Shmargun pointed to a bridge crane high in the shadows. There were still nooses on the beam where he claimed as many as sixty suspected saboteurs could be hanged at one time when the crane operator pressed a button. ‘This was done in front of all the “striped people”’ – the prisoners – he added. Shmargun, now warming to his task, described the horrors until Chertok felt the ghostly presence of those unfortunate phantoms around him in the darkness. The crematorium was visited; they were shown where the prisoners had to rake the ashes. Chertok had had enough. ‘The unseen ash was hammering at our hearts and temples,’ he wrote.

  Chertok and Isayev had an altogether better experience when they spoke to the local burgomaster about accommodation. ‘The Villa Frank would be accommodation worthy of your status,’ he assured them. ‘Von Braun used to live there.’ A short drive up a cobbled road to the top of a hill took them to a great mansion. An elderly woman with a key was found and the massive cast-iron double doors opened on to a scene of magnificence that stunned the Soviet visitors. They took in the resplendent hall; the library with polished black wood shelves; the imposing drawing room with its view of the large garden with magnolias and scented roses around a fountain. Reached by a marble staircase were impressive bedrooms, their floors laid with thick carpets, the walls covered with pictures and mirrors in gilded frames. The largest bedroom, wrote Chertok, ‘had a mahogany bed, big enough to sleep four people. Snow-white down-filled covers instead of blankets. And the ceiling. The ceiling is a mirror! You can look at yourself while lingering in bed.’ As they eyed the opulence, for Isayev the magnificent bed was one temptation too far. Without pausing to remove his boots or his dusty uniform, he dived into the crisp linen and the sea of soft pillows, a contented smile on his tanned face as he retrieved a crumpled packet of Belamor, his favourite cigarettes, and declared: ‘You know, Boris, being in this damned den of the fascist beast isn’t so bad.’

  It was clearly now the turn of the Soviets to sample the delights of the Villa Frank. However, the burgomaster and caretaker, concerned at their prolonged absence, soon came to find them and, seeing Isayev – who was ‘dirty and dusty’– in the pristine bed, enquired politely: ‘Is Mr Officer not well? Should we bring the doctor?’ If Chertok and Isayev had any doubts at all that enjoying such luxury might be construed as anti-communist, they smothered such thoughts as they hit on the delightful idea of turning the Villa Frank into something of a club – a headquarters for their group. It would be called the ‘Institute Rabe’ – in German short for ‘Rocket Manufacture and Development’.

  They established workshops and laboratories for the Institute Rabe in a large building which had formerly housed an electric power station in Nordhausen. Chertok, as one of the self-appointed leaders of the institute, was given an office, which, by Soviet standards, was grandiose, complete with an impressive row of telephones for internal and external use – even one for calling Berlin. Soon a young typist was employed, Fraulein Ursula, and an interpreter, Lyalya. A committee was formed with Chertok assuming command. They decided the state of affairs was not quite as bleak as first thought. Some blueprints for parts of the V-2 had already been found hidden at Mittelwerk and these were to be copied and developed. Germans could be employed for this task from the still plentiful number of scientists and technicians of lesser grades available in the area who were anxious for work. In addition, they aimed to recover and evaluate as many remaining V-2 parts, sub-assemblies and tools as possible. Chertok and his men were joined by more colleagues from NII-1, including the twenty-eight-year-old Vasily Pavlovich Mishin, who soon gained a reputation for being particularly assiduous in deducing details of the German missile from the fragments they could find. With painstaking attention to detail, they would dismantle every component they retrieved and had technical drawings made by the Germans. Piece by piece, the Soviets aimed to recreate the missing blueprints of von Braun’s rocket.

  As the Soviet team set about trying to understand German technology, according to Chertok’s memoirs they began to attract interest from the Soviet Union. On one occasion a group newly arrived from Moscow joined Chertok and Isayev and wore them out with searching questions, from two professors in particular. At the end of the day, when Chertok and Isayev thought they would have peace at last in the opulence of the Villa Frank, they still could not get rid of the two professors, who ‘closed in on us with an enormous hunger for information’. Isayev, who was fond of practical jokes, decided it was time to get rid of them – and he had just the plan.

  The unsuspecting academics were invited to make a social call later that evening. Once the party was relaxing with a few drinks, Isayev casually announced that the timing of their presence was perfect because any moment now they expected the arrival of an
English intelligence officer who knew the whereabouts of some of von Braun’s secret documents; better still, he knew where von Braun himself could be found. The rocket team were rumoured to be held in the town of Witzenhausen almost forty miles south-west of Nordhausen. Would the comrades from Moscow help them to kidnap von Braun?

  Suddenly there was a tap on the window. A face appeared in the darkness. Isayev, playing the part, produced a gun. Shmargun then appeared in his motley American uniform and gave an impressive performance as ‘the agent’. A heated discussion in German followed which, when ‘translated’ to the astonished visitors, revealed that the Soviet professors were known about and, furthermore, were on somebody’s ‘wanted list’. They would be wise to leave. The professors did not hesitate. They left for Berlin the following day.

  Later that night, Isayev and Chertok found their way to the local café, set up in a bomb shelter; popular and heavy with cigarette smoke, it sold beer and black-market schnapps. Although it was in the Soviet zone, American soldiers and their girlfriends still drank there. As soon as Chertok and Isayev entered, an American officer called to the bar and in no time mugs of beer were placed in front of them. The singer, a brunette, looking voluptuous in gypsy costume, gave Isayev – whom she could see bore the rank of lieutenant-colonel – a kiss and said: ‘Finally, the Soviets have come. What do you want me to sing for you?’ They were enjoying the party atmosphere when Chertok noticed that another Soviet officer had joined their table. He gave Chertok a big Russian bear hug and said quietly, ‘I am from SMERSH and I want you and Lieutenant-Colonel Isayev to come to my headquarters tomorrow morning.’