The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (review)

Michael Neufeld, curator of World War II history at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, aims to provide a balanced and readable history of the German liquid-fuel rocket project. In large measure he has done so. The archival foundations—mainly fourteen tons of materials buried in a mine in north central Germany, seized in 1945 and later microfilmed by the U.S. Army, and archives in Berlin, Koblenz, Freiburg, Munich, and elsewhere— seem to have been well used. One can only wonder, however, if everything has been looked at; the guide alone to some of the microfilms is almost three thousand pages long. Additionally, the author used more than a dozen interviews with participants.

The German rocket work described here had four stages. The first, in the 1920s, grew from the fact that the constrictive weapons clauses of the Treaty of Versailles did not mention rockets. Although amateur inventors and Fritz Lang’s film The Woman in the Moon led to a certain popularization of the idea of space flight, it was Karl Becker, with a doctorate in engineering, who pushed the idea into practicality. As dean of the faculty of military technology at the Technical University, Berlin, he sought projects that would provide funding and draft exceptions. When he later became head of army ordnance, Becker converted the banned Prussian artillery laboratory into a university institute with a small group of former Prussian officers. University science, allied with and paid for by the military bureaucracy, propelled this work from then on.

The second phase began with the Nazi accession to power in January 1933. Although the Nazi regime became a collection of warring bureaucratic empires, these empires had access to greatly expanded rearmament funding. By the time Werner von Braun, then a young student, graduated in 1934, his dissertation was so secret that even the title was classified. Becker, Walter Dornberger, and von Braun made an alliance with Goering’s Luftwaffe to allow Peenemünde to be built.

The third stage of rocket work began in September 1939 with World War II. This period saw the decline of the army’s power within the overall Nazi state and the frantic search for funds and support from other government sources, who long remained unconvinced of the rockets’ utility. The direction of the war after December 1941 and the search for miracle weapons with which to rescue Germany propelled Armaments Minister Albert Speer and, later, SS Gen. Hans Kammler into rocket work. In the last several years of World War II, Germany employed massive slave labor to build the missiles. Two months after the Allied landing in Normandy, when it was clear that hundreds of cruise missiles—the V-1—fired each week on London had failed to change the course of the war, Hitler ordered renewed emphasis on the missile upon which their hopes still depended, the A-4.

The results of this final effort were marginal. The A-4, the only one of sixteen rocket projects to have a substantial production run (6,000), was a unique weapon: more people were killed making it than died from being hit by it. But it was too little, too late. The problems, as Neufeld outlines them, were many. First, electronics and computers were then too primitive for the missile technology to be cost effective. Additionally, the missiles were prematurely forced into mass production by a manufacturing organization ill prepared for this. Other manufacturing problems were the confusion in component production and the constant alterations in the details of various parts. The result was that the actual weapon had a much greater margin of error than postwar technology.

Stage four of rocket work took place after 1945, after the United States and Soviet Russia split the scientific spoils of war. The United States got most of it because the German rocket workers...