Full Script

INTRODUCTION

As a kid, I was fascinated by the space age – the people and technologies – the disasters and triumphs.  But as I grew older, I realized that the aircraft and spacecraft we think of today were actually the result of an incredible Darwinian process that killed most concepts before they left a drawing board, entered a wind tunnel or built into a prototype.  Even those that managed to advance into production were winnowed further through the invisible hand of commercial competition or violent survival of the fittest during war.  So, for every plane or spaceship we know by name, there are dozens of failures.

So, when reading WWII history, I wasn’t surprised when a came across a brief reference to something I hadn’t heard of before - the Amerika Rocket.  It was a part of Nazi Germany’s far reaching weapon programs designed to bring the war to American shores, but fortunately failed.  Further reading opened a window to the world of Peenemunde (peenemun’duh)– the tiny town on the coast of the Baltic sea that became the epicenter of Germany’s rocketry ambitions during WWII.  To attempt to understand Peenemunde is to undercover a history of mad ambitions, brilliant scientists, and engineering breakthroughs coupled with an astonishing disdain for freedom and innocent human life.  This complex history inspired my first novel, Seeing by Moonlight, and drove me to visit the places and uncover the people behind this extraordinary period.

So after planning a research trip for more than a year, I almost didn’t make to Peenemünde. After a week of late dinner meetings at a conference elsewhere in Europe, my work responsibilities were finally complete. I had a weekend free for my research.  So, my flight landed in Berlin on an Autumn Saturday and I stumbled out of the Tegal airport well past sunset. 

Google Maps told me it was a simple 4-hour drive to the coast of the Baltic Sea. But arrival times are not an exact science, especially when you’re a newbie driving the German Autobahn.

I’d traveled before on the world-famous freeway without speed limits, but only as a passenger. I took heart when I learned that my rental car was Mercedes.  But my optimism was quickly tempered when I learned it was a little economy model, not the powerful car that I envisioned would make me the instant master of the Autobahn.

Within minutes, it was clear that I was out of my depth – I was a first time autobahn driver, in an underpowered car at midnight.  The Autobahn is as different as you can imagine. Other cars whipped by so rapidly, it felt like I was barely moving, even at130 kilometers or 80 miles per hour.

Peenemünde turned out to be an even bigger surprise. The town sits at the end of a strip of land along a natural bay that empties into the Baltic Sea. You pass through a beautiful but remote patchwork of farmland and national parks; and you can feel yourself getting further and further away from the energy of cities or towns. 

The whole town is less than 10 square miles. The last census puts the population at just 345 people. There are remote vacation homes here, a few docks for small boats, a ferry service that will take you to some of the villages around the bay. But as charming as that all sounds, it’s not why I was here. 

I pulled into an empty parking lot at 3am.  As the last potential motel was at least an hour behind me, my plan was to sleep in the car, thereby maximizing the time I’d have.  So, still in my suit (foolishly I might add), the car engine running to keep me warm, I folded up my jacket into a pillow, and tried to sleep on the car seat. I was streaming the broadcast of a college football game being played back in America; a little sound of home keeping me company in the dark.

And as the sun started to rise, I saw it – the largest remnant of the improbable, incredible role that this little town played in the history of the 20th century - the Peenemunde power plant, now the Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum. But it’s a Museum surrounded by the remnants of a state of the art aerospace campus, grim art pieces that depict cruelty and death. Old train tracks run through the compound; there are concrete steps and a loading ramp waiting for a factory that was never completed. Wooden stakes in the ground were once part of the foundation of barracks at a labor camp. An old church, in the shape of an octagon, dates back to 1876, and sits by a cemetery, where, after the War, an unmarked mass grave was discovered.

Inside the Museum are derelict machines in vast, industrial chambers befitting its prior life as a the powerplant that provided the energy for a facility the likes of which had never been seen on Earth.

The Peenemünde Army Research Centre worked in collaboration with Peenemünde-West, an airfield that served as a test site in World War II for the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. This is where the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket were developed; weapons that announced the future of warfare with a fiery roar. Models of those two weapons sit on the Museum grounds today. This is where a secretive group of scientists discovered ways to take destructive force higher into the skies than it ever had before, and perhaps even beyond. This is even where, believe it or not, a major part of the American space program was born.

The other structure that remained largely intact was the observation bunker – where military leaders, engineers and ground crews could safely observe tests and launches.  This building is squat and thick – built of thick concrete with only tiny observation ports, designed to withstand the explosive failures that were inevitable given Peenemunde’s mission. 

In this episode, we’re going to talk about the scientific breakthroughs. And we’re going to talk about how the changing fortunes of war and drastic choices on both sides collided here and inspired a race against time between the Nazis and the Allies.

But we’re also going to talk about the dead. Peenemünde is a place that few would consider a battlefield, but it is a place of mass casualties. Thousands died here due to the war; and we cannot erase their presence. What they call a Museum is just as much a monument, and maybe the quiet of the surroundings is appropriate. Even 75 years later, I could still feel the heavy presence of the innocent lives lost in this place.

***

Hi, my name’s MF Thomas; I’m an author and a lifelong fan of strange stories from the dark corners of the world. Growing up, I was enthralled by any hint of exciting, forbidden knowledge that waited behind the names and dates we learned in school.  And these days, as I travel the world, there’s nothing I enjoy more than to get off the traditional tourist map and find a place or story that has been overlooked, dismissed or ignored.

This is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal.  What’s unique about My Dark Path?  Every topic, every destination is a place I’ve explored in person during my travels.  This podcast isn’t a retelling of a Wikipedia article.  Instead, we will explore unique topics that will intrigue and excite; and every once in a while, send a shiver down your spine.  So, if you geek out over these topics….you’re among friends here at My Dark Path.  

To see content related to every episode, visit MyDarkPath.com.  When you’re there, register for the My Dark Path newsletter and you’ll be entered for frequent drawing for a unique book or other interesting materials.  Also, you learn more about the Explorer’s Society, my membership program that offers exclusive episodes, unique and curious items, plus access to amazing live events.  Lastly, thank you for listening.  You have more choices than ever about where to spend your time.  I’m grateful that you’ve chosen to spend time here, with me, walking the Dark Paths of the world, together.  Let’s get started with episode 2, Peenemunde.

PART ONE

The end of the First World War saw Germany facing severe sanctions for its aggression. The Treaty of Versailles barred them from building any new tanks, military aircraft, and chemical weapons; they weren’t completely disarmed, but they couldn’t restock themselves in the traditional way, either. It also restricted the size of their Navy, leaving them no means to project power with existing technology.

But there was one area of military technology overlooked in the Treaty – one which had so little importance or history of being effective in battle that there was no legal obstacle against Germany pursuing it. This technology was rockets.

Hermann Oberth (Herman O-birth) had been dreaming of rockets since he was a child. He religiously read the science fiction novels of Jules Verne, like From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. He built his first working model rocket for a school project when he was only 14. This was 1908. He studied medicine before the outbreak of the First World War, where he was drafted into the infantry of the Imperial German Army. 

After the war, he committed to studying physics; writing his doctoral dissertation on rocket science. The University rejected his dissertation, calling it Utopian. Rather than revise it or prepare a new one, Oberth published it himself, deciding he would rather go without the title of Doctor than reject his own ideas. While other minds of his caliber were holding prestigious University posts, Oberth was teaching at a high school in Romania. But his book, The Rocket into Planetary Space, inspired a following all over Europe. Scientists and explorers and rocket enthusiasts formed a group called Verein für Raumschiffahrt – The Spaceflight Society – that revered his ideas as pointing the way to the future.

One member of the Society, a Slovene engineer named Herman Potočnik (Her-man Po-toes-nick), published a radically visionary book called The Problem of Space Travel. This was in 1928, and Potočnik created, with over 100 illustrations, the first detailed design for a theoretically-working space station. It contained so many ideas that had never been imagined before that, when it was published in America, it was in a science fiction magazine. You might even recognize Herman Potočnik’s vision for a wheel-shaped space station; Stanley Kubrick used the idea in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But speaking of film, let’s go back to 1928, when Hermann Oberth is hired to work on a very special project – a silent film, to be directed by the legendary Fritz Lang. It’s a romantic, sci-fi adventure called Frau im Mond, “The Woman in the Moon” Oberth designs the model spaceship for the film, and launches a working rocket as a publicity event. The film is a sensation, introducing to a global audience for the first time a visual representation of a multistage rocket. For the German public, rocketry carried the promise of adventure, of progress. Amid the decadence of the Weimar Republic and the looming global depression, here was a field where Germany was the unquestioned leader of the world.

Oberth was gaining more prestige, and with it, more resources to continue developing rocket motors. By 1930 he had a protege from the Spaceflight Society working for him, an 18-year old musical prodigy who was already telling people he intended to travel to the Moon someday. This, was Wernher Von Braun (verner von brown).

PART TWO

Peenemünde didn’t exist as a town before the War. The land belonged to a town called Wolgast until 1936, when the Nazi Air Ministry paid 750,000 reichsmarks (rikes marks) for it. It had already been discovered that rockets could be launched from underwater.  Having a launch site near the water might make it more difficult for foreign spies to recover tested rockets. So this bay by the Baltic Sea made for an ideal location. To protect the shore from high tides, they built a dyke, 4 kilometers long, which created an artificial lake. A residential settlement was built to house scientists and staff; it included a school, a store, and restaurants. Heating pipes snaked above and below ground across the compound, bringing modern comfort during the cold winters. And, scattered across the complex, were over three dozen concrete archways. They provided shelter in case you couldn’t get to a bunker quickly enough during an air raid.

When the Army Research Centre came online in 1937, Dr. Wernher Von Braun, just 25 years of age, was already in charge. The Nazi government had taken an early interest in Von Braun – his dissertation on liquid rocket propellant was classified by the German Army, with only a small portion of it publicly released to justify his doctorate. The facility at Peenemünde was constructed to focus on the Aggregat rockets, designs he had been working on since he was 21. At this new facility, he would have all the resources he would need to build and test his work on a scale he couldn’t have imagined before. He would also have the labor to take his concepts off the drawing board. The Nazis had a ready supply.

The first known concentration camp in Nazi Germany opened just five weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Mass arrests of Communists, anarchists and seditious leftists, filled the camps; and the Nazis granted themselves the legal authority to detain people indefinitely, even if they were never convicted of anything. As Hitler’s followers consolidated power, anyone viewed as resisting them could be imprisoned – including members of rival political parties and heads of trade unions, all in the name of security or law and order. As the population in the camps grew, the Nazis quickly found a use for them as slave labor. Soon, prisoners were building their own prisons, manufacturing the weapons that guarded them, and restoring the Germany military in new and terrible strength.

Slave labor built Peenemünde, and slave labor built the thousands of rockets based on Von Braun’s designs. It was SS General Hans Kammler, the engineer who designed Auschwitz, who suggested using slaves for the task. In addition to all the facilities I described before, Peenemünde also had its own crematorium, to dispose of those who had been worked to death.

The seeds of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union were already planted well before the conclusion of the Second World War. The first front of this new conflict, arguably, had to do with what happened to Germany’s scientists. Through cajoling, blackmailing, even sometimes outright kidnapping (at least on the part of the Soviets), the top minds of the Third Reich were divided among the two sides. In the United States, the intelligence community called this “Operation Paperclip”. In 1946, the Soviet Army, still occupying part of Germany took over 2,000 specialists, and their families, out of the country at gunpoint. They even took much of the equipment from Peenemünde. America, though, got Von Braun, and many of his senior partners. When they went to work for NASA, Von Braun said that he had never had any interest in politics, that he only joined the Nazi Party and the SS out of bureaucratic necessity, and that his research was solely about his dream to take humankind to outer space. Anything he said to this effect should be heard in the context of the seven years he spent in charge of a facility with its own crematorium for dead workers.

***

PART THREE

The Aggregat rocket series that Von Braun was working on consisted of 12 different designs, designated A1 through A12. Their progression tells a story of staggering ambition in just a few years’ work. 1933’s A1 rocket stood under five feet tall, and weighed a little over 300 pounds. While its engine test-fired successfully, its one attempt at flight exploded on the launch pad. And no design past the A5 was ever built into a prototype. We’ll talk about A 6 through 12 in a bit, but we need to focus on the pinnacle of technological achievement of Peenemünde, the breakthrough that caught the attention of the Allies, forced an excruciating choice on the British, and inspired Adolf Hitler to make a fateful change in the Nazis’ war strategy. The most successful design in the Aggregat series was A4; or, as it was called once it was put into military use – the V2 rocket. The V stands for Vergeltungswaffen (vergeltungswaffer)– in English – “Retribution Weapon”.

***

World War II changed the definition of battlefields. While soldiers and tanks might be fighting hundreds of miles from home, an airborne bomber could bring the war down upon your rooftop with sudden and lethal force. Years before the outbreak of the war, as British military leaders guessed at Hitler’s ambitions, there were studies and plans drawn up for how to defend against bombing raids on London. The Nazis targeted civilians deliberately in Poland in 1939, and their threat to level the city of Rotterdam, with the bombers to do it already in the air, is what finally persuaded the Dutch to surrender. 

Then, On the 24th of August, 1940, Luftwaffe bombers struck civilian areas of London for the first time. It is not known if this specific attack was an accident, or carried out under orders; but the next day, the British Royal Air Force bombed Berlin for the first time. Two weeks later, Hitler gave a public speech in which he declared “This is a game at which two can play...When they declare they will attack our cities in great measure, we will eradicate their cities. The hour will come when one of us will break – and it will not be National Socialist Germany!”
This was what became known as the London Blitz. For months, day and night, from mid-1940 to early 1941, the Luftwaffe targeted British civilians relentlessly and indiscriminately. There was no question about strategy – it was a belief that the morale of the British could be broken. Hitler considered the British a, quote, “Germanic” people; and believed that would have a latent sympathy for the German cause, with sufficient pressure. But the result was the exact opposite – the Blitz produced a united population and hardened in their resolve.  It also forced the rapid development of ingenious advances in air defense that gradually rendered the Luftwaffe’s assaults futile.  One of the most fascinating museums I’ve ever visited in the world are Churchill’s War Rooms, the bunkers underground Westminster where he led the British empire’s fight against the Nazi onslaught.  The stories of this location and the people who worked there is a future episode of My Dark Path.

The German Army, meanwhile, was stymied on its Eastern front. Before the war, Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact – a peace agreement between Hitler and Stalin, two of the greatest mass murderers of history. But the Nazis, after months of secret planning, had broken the pact, sending an invasion force of three million soldiers. Even though Hitler had written and spoken for years about, quote, “exterminating” Communists, Stalin seems to have genuinely not anticipated that the Nazis would break the truce. To this day it is the largest theater of war in human history; producing death and atrocities beyond imagining.  It seems to me to be the highest degree of hubris to believe in the promise of peace when someone’s behavior demonstrates they want you dead.

As this was happening, the RAF responded to the Blitz by beginning to bomb civilian targets in Germany. The British believed, that with the Nazis devoting so much force along their Eastern front trying to invade Russia, a blow against their centers of industry could have a major impact while the Allies worked to muster a large enough force to retake the continent. 

The RAF could target a single area with hundreds of bombers, overwhelming all German defenses. For example, in a period of less than two hours, the RAF dropped over 2,000 tons of explosives and incendiaries on Cologne on the night of May 30, 1942. This was a town rich in medieval history and many of its core buildings were still made of wood. Cologne burned from one end to the other. Late in the war, the city of Dresden was also firebombed by the RAF. The fire was so out of control, even prisoners of war were forced to perform firefighting duties. The author Kurt Vonnegut was one of them, and he wrote about it in his novel Slaughterhouse Five.

Millions of Germans became homeless refugees; and this at a time when their Army needed replenishing. The Luftwaffe could no longer fly at sufficient strength to stage an attack at level of the original Blitz.  But Hitler was determined to avenge his losses, and believed he needed to strike a dramatic blow against London. This was when he took a new interest in the work being done at Peenemünde.

***

There were two “vengeance weapons”, of great promise the V1 and V2. The V2 was the military name for the A4, Von Braun’s ballistic missile. The V1, also developed at Peenemünde but by others, was not a rocket, but rather a flying bomb, powered by a unique pulsejet engine. By the way, if you’re a member of the Explorer’s Society, you’ll have access to a number of photos and documents that I captured during my visit to Peenemunde.  You’ll see that the V1 vaguely looks like an insect and the British came to refer to it as the doodle bug because of the distinctive way it moved. Sometimes, because of the unforgettable sound it made as it flew, it was called a buzz bomb. 

The V2, meanwhile, stood tall and vertical, with fins and a pointed nose, looking like every pulp science fiction vision of a rocket to the moon. And it flew without a sound. Both of these weapons, with sufficient testing, could strike the British mainland from Europe without an aircraft. Hitler referred to such a dramatic leap in technology as a “wonder weapon”; and he came to believe such advances would simultaneously restore German morale and bring him ultimate victory over the allies.

He had more than one facility working on so-called “wonder weapons”. At another facility, known as Trauen, an aerospace engineer named Eugen Sänger worked on an astonishing aircraft he called Silbervogel – the Silverbird. It was a bomber which, in Sänger’s vision, would be launched off a rocket-propelled monorail, pass the speed of Mach 17, and actually reach sub-orbital altitudes, where the pilot could then “skip” along the upper atmosphere like a stone along a pond, crossing an entire ocean with very little fuel before raining bombs from higher than any air defense could stop them. But Sänger had no test pilots with the skill to even attempt such a death-defying stunt. All the best test pilots were in Peenemünde.  As a note, we’ll cover more wonder weapons in future episodes and have a trip to Trauen on the books to explore the similarities and differences between it and Peenemunde.

It was Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and the second most powerful Nazi next to Hitler, who prevented the two facilities from sharing resources.  He even prevented the two sites from communicating with one another. Whether it was operational paranoia, a belief that competition would produce faster progress, or simple megalomania, Göring constantly manipulated conditions at these facilities.  And it wasn’t just these two sites - he did the same across the other facilities devoted to the quest for “wonder weapons”. The atomic bomb was one weapon that they feverishly pursued at multiple research facilities. one of these atomic research programs was led by another scientist who is a household name to this day – Werner Heisenberg. 

But the institutional rivalry between all these facilities was fully and finally settled by Hitler himself in the middle of 1943. When he watched a film narrated by Von Braun, showing the successful liftoff of a V2 rocket, Hitler proclaimed “If we had had these rockets in 1939 we should never have had this war…” He declared Peenemünde to be the number one priority in the entire German armaments program. 

PART FOUR

Even though not a single V2 had yet been used in battle, the Germans weren’t the only ones in awe of its potential. The British had been eavesdropping on high-ranking German prisoners of war, and surveillance photos had revealed the construction of launch sites in Northern France. They needed to decide whether these sites were just a decoy, or the intelligence was legitimate, pointing to a new technology that could strike all the way across the English Channel. It was a choice with major repercussions for the war effort, and British were running out of time.

We do know that an escaped Peenemünde slave from occupied Luxembourg, Léon-Henri Roth, had provided details of his work at the facility to the Allies. Others contributed intelligence, including Polish janitors who created maps and detailed descriptions of the grounds.  This was passed to the remnants of the Polish Intelligence service, which, in turn, passed them to the British.

We also know that, around this time, a Catholic priest who led an Austrian resistance cell, was able to smuggle a complete schematic of the V-2 to the American OSS, the precursor to the CIA. This remarkable individual was named Heinrich Maier. After the Nazis occupied his country, Maier rebelled against the orders of his Church and made himself into a self-taught master spy. He was the last person in Austria to be executed by the Gestapo before the Nazis retreated.  Importantly, Maier was among the first people to have provided evidence of the Holocaust to America. His story deserves to be much more widely known, and we are working to learn more about him for a future episode. 

One of Winston Churchill’s top scientific advisors said that, to the best of his expert knowledge, the wonder weapon programs at Peenemunde and elsewhere were a hoax. Another top scientific advisor said he believed it was real. Gambling on his best judgment, Churchill made the fateful decision – to attack Peenemünde. The plan was named after the mythical beast with many heads – Operation Hydra.

***

Now, it’s August, 1943. The pilots for Operation Hydra were not even informed what their target would be as they trained. They did practice under extraordinary conditions.  Their mission required to fly under a full moon, without radio navigation, at an unusually low altitude, passing through a blinding smokescreen, and then use landmarks on the ground to time the release of their bombs. Operation Hydra also called for some misdirection.  The night of the raid and many miles away, a squadron of eight Mosquito combat aircraft would fly to Berlin.  This would simulate the beginning of an air raid on Berlin and, hopefully, divert the attention of the Luftwaffe from Operation Hydra’s real target.

Over the course of two raids, the first on the night of August 17, nearly 600 British bombers assaulted the once-secret facility. Some 75 percent of the surface buildings were damaged or destroyed. A targeting flare mistakenly landed at the forced labor camp. With no protections, at least 500 work camp prisoners died in the barrage. The 4,000 German personnel were better protected once they made it to air raid shelters. Only 175 of them died. The British, meanwhile, lost 40 bombers, and 215 pilots. For a mission this dangerous, for 93% of the planes to have survived, is nothing short of miraculous.

But the British had struck a serious blow. Dr. Walter Thiel and Dr. Erich Walther, two of the project’s chief engineers, were among those killed. The consensus of history is that the V2 program was slowed by around two months. Furthermore, the strike forced the Nazis to realize that they could no longer control the air over Europe. Anything exposed to the sky was vulnerable to bombed.  This included their valuable engineering and manufacturing in Peenemünde.  They initiated plans to move production of the Retribution Weapons to a new location near a town called Nordhausen. The facility, known as Mittelwork, included factories, assembly lines, liquid oxygen plants, all of it embedded deep inside a mountain, connected by massive tunnels. It, too, had its own concentration camp for labor, the infamous Mittelbau-Dora camp.  Nordhausen and this massive underground manufacturing facility were kept underwraps buy the Soviets for decades until the site was opened to researchers after the fall of the USSR.  My research visit to both the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and the Mittelwork facility will be the future episode that closes the chapter on this incredible and heartbreaking element of World War II. 

Now delays caused by Operation Hydra might not seem like much; but when you are fighting against the future of warfare, we will see that this extra time proved to be very meaningful.

***

What made the V2 such a potent psychological weapon? What made the Nazi’s double down on their investment and force the British to commit such an overwhelming force to slow it down before it had even been used in battle? Its operational range wasn’t much longer than that of the V1 “buzz bomb”, and it carried roughly the same payload. But the first reason to fear the V2 was its speed. The V1 flying bomb averaged about 340 miles per hour in the air. A British fighter plane called the Hawker Tempest could actually fly faster than that in a dive and intercept it. In midair, pilots could use their own wings to gently “tip” the wing of a V1 and sending it spiraling to the ground before it reached its target. But these tactics would be useless against the V2. It flew ten times as fast – and brought with it the first sonic boom ever heard over London. And the V1 flew only a few thousand feet off the ground, placing it in-range of a wide variety of British air defenses.  In contrast, V2 cruised many miles up in the atmosphere, a precursor to today’s ballistic missiles.  This made the V2 virtually undefeatable with the Allies’ anti-air weapons. 

And along with all of this came the knowledge that this technology was only at its beginnings. If the Nazis were able to continue their research, the V2 would be just the start of their ability to reach and destroy Allied cities without risking a single pilot or aircraft.

***

As I mentioned earlier, Von Braun had designed a series of Aggregat of rockets – A6 through A12. The V2 being number 4 in that series.  Each one was more stupendously ambitious than the last. They were born from the vision of Von Braun’s idol and mentor, Hermann Oberth.  One of the most visionary concepts was the creation of multistage rockets, with the multiple rockets stages working as boosters, lifting the payload higher and further than ever imagined before. Von Braun had even brought Oberth to work with him at Peenemünde; and he was there when the bombs of Operation Hydra struck.

The A9 and A10 designs were combined.  They were given a chilling name that spoke to its intended purpose – the Amerika Rakete. The estimate is that, with the A10 as a booster and A9 as the final stage, the America Rocket could travel the distance between Berlin and New York City in a mere 40 minutes. At this time, was no GPS or sophisticated guidance system capable of leading the rocket to its target over such a distance. So the Nazi engineers developed several alternatives.  One plan would have guided the America Rocket to New York via a series of radio beacons hosted on German submarines strung across the Atlantic.  The final beacon be held by a Nazi spy in New York City. But a second, perhaps more plausible, plan called for the Amerika Rakete to be designed to carry a special, extra piece of cargo – a human pilot.  In a pressurized cockpit, the pilot would guide the rocket to its target, bailing out with a parachute right before impact.  Eerily, the museum at Peenemunde hold the earliest planning documents for the Amerika Rocket, including a map showing targets in NYC.

I mentioned that the best test pilots in Germany were stationed at Peenemünde. One of them was a national celebrity named Hanna Reitsch. Reitsch was both fanatically loyal and fiercely charismatic.  She was the very picture of the Aryan ideal with blonde hair and blue eyes. Before the war, she won flying awards all over the world. She was the first woman to pilot a helicopter and even appeared in a German propaganda film about a love triangle between ace flyers. So intense was her commitment to the Nazi cause, she even volunteered to pilot an advanced flying bomb as a suicide weapon if needed.  If Von Braun had ever completed the Amerika Rakete – he would have had people like Hanna Reitsch willing and able to fly it.

Later, Hanna was designated Hitler’s personal pilot if he needed to escape, and as he retreated into his bunker for his final days, he personally handed her a suicide pill so she could die with him. She didn’t use it.

And Von Bruan wasn’t done. An A9 rocket, stacked on top of an A10, on top of an A11, on top of an A12, was designed to do what humankind had never done before in history, and orbit the Earth from space. He was testing models for this in wind tunnels even during the final months of the war.

***

But back on Earth, more human-scaled problems were adding up. The V2 rockets were largely fueled by alcohol, and Germany was losing its largest source of alcohol – the potato crop. Not enough people were left working on farms after years of military conscription. And the orders to Von Braun to relocate his program to Nordhausen cost even more precious time. Then, before the V2 could even be launched against the British for the first time, the D-Day invasion put Allied boots back on the ground in Europe. V-2’s could only reach London from a small strip of launch sites along the French and Dutch coasts. If Hitler were to lose those positions, his vision of retribution would be over.

He ordered the launch of V2’s at all possible speed. The first V2 hit London on September 8, 1944/. The British, who had been studying every scrap of intelligence they could find, had not developed any effective military defense. Other than taking control of the V2 launch sites across the channel, the only option to mitigate their impact was a risky one.  It was a strategy that could save many lives, but it brought with it a crushing ethical dilemma. 

British intelligence had succeeded in identifying, and turning, all of the key Nazi spies in London.  Then, they strategically used them to feed misinformation to Germany, who believed their spies to still be loyal. This was known as the Double-Cross System. A plan was proposed – use Double-Cross to report the positions where V2’s struck London, but only those that struck the far Northern edge of the city.  If this were believed, the Germans would think they were overshooting their targets, adjust their calculations, and, with any luck, start missing central London.

But executing this was not without great cost.  If the V2s were retargeted, they wouldn’t just hit empty ground. While densely-populated London would see less damage; rockets would instead rain down on nearby Kent. No matter what decision was made, civilians would die – the choice was either to do nothing; or by taking action, put at risk a smaller population of British citizens.

Astonishingly, at the time this decision needed to be made, Winston Churchill was away at a conference. It was a longtime civil servant from Scotland by the name of Sir Samuel Findlater Stewart who made the decision on Churchill’s behalf. Double-Cross was put into action.

It worked exactly as intended. The V2 rocket was still experimental and prone to failing – and thanks to the spies of Double-Cross, the rockets that did survive the journey became even less accurate. To hide the impact of those that did hit London, the British government put out false stories that the explosions were due to ruptured gas mains.

By March of 1945, the last coastal launch site was overrun by the Allies, and no more V1’s or V2’s hit the British isles ever again. The last V2 struck the town of Kent on March 27th. One month later, Adolf Hitler would be dead.

The British had their first encounter with the future of warfare and survived.  The threat to Americans faded into the shadows when the Amerika Rocket’s development was stopped in 1942.  That threat would remerge later as the America Rocket’s technologies would be deployed in ICBMs during the cold war.

PART FIVE

Ironically, once the German’s stopped using the V2 against civilian populations, the V2 demonstrated that it had significant tactical potential. Still, it was used just once on a military target, a critical bridge over the Rhine River that the Allies had captured and were using to move troops and tanks. The V2, launched all the way from a town in the Netherlands, successfully collapsed the bridge, slowing the Allies down. But it was too late to deploy it anywhere else. Germany was falling.

In hindsight, we can see that the V2 rocket was a failure when weighing the costs of the program vs. its strategic and tactical benefits.  Even using slave labor, the Retribution Weapon program cost twice as much as the Manhattan Project in America. The Manhattan Project produced the atomic bombs that would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, triggering the final surrender of the Japanese military and stopping a land invasion that was projected to kill a million US soldiers and millions more Japanese soldiers and civilians.

But the V1 and especially the V2 had the effect Hitler desired – they provoked fear in the British population, as it revealed that how cities could be destroyed without a single enemy soldiers or pilots occupying land or sky. But, spurred by that fear, the British and the Allies didn’t turn away, instead they took the actions that managed to delay Hitler’s frightful plans just long enough that the USA and the Allies could overwhelm the Nazi military.  Churchill said the following of those who fought the battle of britian in 1940: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Even so, they still seem appropriate in recognition of the sacrifices of the airmen, soldiers, civilians and even spies who slowed the V2 and sister programs until the entire Nazi war machine could be destroyed.

There are further stories to tell about the movement of the program to the Mittelwerk facility in Nordhausen, and Germany’s increasingly desperate hope for a powerful counter-weapon as its resources ran out. The final judgment on the effectiveness of the V1 and V2 can only be made after we’ve explored Nordhausen. I’ve gone in-person to the remains of that astonishing underground compound, and I’ve chased strange rumors of advanced projects they pursued there. It will get its own episode in the future.

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But I want to wind up the story of Peenemünde by talking about a man who was never there, and who I haven’t mentioned up until now – Robert Goddard. Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882. A frail child, beset by chronic health problems, he often had to skip school but had a voracious interest in science, devouring texts on his own time and conducting experiments in his backyard, with the loving support of his parents.

One night when he was 17, he climbed up a cherry tree to cut off some dead limbs, and instead found himself gazing at the sky. He had read H.G. Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds, and he suddenly found himself imagining how you could build a device to take humankind to Mars. Every year for the rest of his life, he would privately celebrate the anniversary of that night in the cherry tree; the moment he found his purpose.

I mentioned that Wernher Von Braun’s rockets were liquid-fueled. It was Robert Goddard who patented the concept of a liquid-fueled rocket in 1914. He even held a patent on the multistage rocket which Oberth and Von Braun made famous.

American publications rejected his earliest articles about rocketry, considering them too fantastical. In 1913 he was struck with severe tuberculosis and had to give up his teaching position at Princeton. Doctors didn’t expect him to live. But he never stopped experimenting; and he beat the odds against his disease. He once said in a speech “...the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” He worked incrementally, one invention, one innovation, at a time. If he could make something the world would accept today, it would bring him one step closer to the future he imagined.

He designed rockets that could study atmospheric conditions for meteorology. He created the first experimental ion thruster. A proposal he made to the Army for a tube-based rocket launcher eventually evolved into the bazooka. He even, around the same time as Hermann Oberth, developed a working model for an early form of solar power.

In 1919, the Smithsonian Institute published his report “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes”. He spent most of the 1920’s achieving breakthrough after breakthrough in rocketry, while sensational and misleading news coverage had most of the public thinking of him as a crackpot. The New York Times published a correction apologizing for its coverage of him – a half-century later, after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.  Rather than critique journalists publicly, I’ll simply say that one is better of reading and talking with the doers, thinkers and creators vs the people who pretend expertise by writing about them.  

The scientific community knew he was on to something though, and he corresponded regularly with the likes of Oberth and Von Braun, sharing their discoveries, until the rise of the Nazis. Goddard broke off communication with anyone in Germany and worked zealously to prevent his technology from being stolen by enemy spies.

The Guggenheim Foundation provided generous funding to Goddard to relocate his family and his work to the desert; where he could work in greater secrecy, and the climate would better suit his ongoing fight against tuberculosis. Goddard established his facility in Roswell, New Mexico, the future home of UFO lore. The locals there were known for preferring privacy – if anyone came asking about the location of Goddard’s lab, they would be sent in the wrong direction.

General Jimmy Doolittle, a legend in military aviation, visited Roswell to consult with Goddard about fuel mixtures, and was given an up-close work at what Goddard had done throughout the 30’s. Although his rockets never flew as high or as far as the Germans’, his goal wasn’t to reach the highest altitude right now. He wanted to perfect the design of his engine and guidance systems for the rockets of the future.

The work opened Doolittle’s eyes to the true potential of rocketry. He wrote in a memo "interplanetary transportation is probably a dream of the very distant future, but with the moon only a quarter of a million miles away—who knows!" He couldn’t persuade the Army of the potential of Goddard’s work; but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Goddard was compelled to go to work for the Navy in whatever capacity they might need him. At great risk to his health, his throat so damaged by now that doctors advised him to not even speak, he relocated to Annapolis, Maryland. The engine he helped design for the Navy ended up powering the Bell X-2 rocket plane, which pushed supersonic flight beyond any of its previous limits. But he never saw that, nor did he see the formation of NASA, which used many of his innovations. Robert Goddard passed away in 1945.

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Why do I bring up Goddard? It’s because of that impression I first got at Peenemünde – that this was not just a landmark in scientific progress, but a place haunted by death. When Wernher Von Braun, Eugen Sänger, and other German scientists were brought to America after World War II, the atrocities of the Nazi regime were well-known. How should we feel about the knowledge they developed, and the discoveries they made, coming as they did with the support of a genocidal regime, built on the backs of dead slaves? When science allows us to do great things, it’s dangerously tempting to sanctify the process that brought it to us. It’s a little too easy to forget. I mention Robert Goddard because his life’s work, his humane vision, and his astonishing inventions achieved in more ethical conditions, refute any idea that the means used at Peenemünde were necessary. Goddard’s legacy is as important to space travel as anyone’s.  Add his name and life to your list of future episodes of My Dark 

If we are to wonder at what humanity has accomplished, we must also never forget the tragedy, and the monstrous evil, woven into the story. I think back to what Goddard said: “...the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” It’s a dark path that runs through the town of Peenemünde, where too much thought was given to the future, without doing what was right in the present. 

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Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host. I appreciate that you’ve chosen to spend your precious time here with us.  I’d also be grateful if you’d take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5 star rating wherever you’re listening.    

And get ready for the next episode…we’re moving from Europe to Asia, from aerospace to, well, ghosts and haunted hotels.  It’s going to be an amazing episode…even now, it gives me goosebumps.  I hope you’ll tune in! 

We are preparing to launch our membership program – we’re calling it Explorer’s Society – hopefully evoking some of elements of intrigue and discovery of similar societies of the 18th and 19th century. To learn more and subscribe to the Explorer’s Society, visit www.mydarkpath.com.  Members get exclusive episodes, books, live online Q&A with our researchers and so much more.  In addition to the photography and materials on the public site, also, I’ve posted some unique photography of the Peenemunde and the Amerika rocket plans in the Explorer’s Society.

And don’t hesitate to reach out via email – explore@mydarkpath.com.  I’d love to hear from you.

I want to thank Alex Bagosy for contributing research to this episode, and our story editor, Nicholas Thurkettle, for helping me put it all together.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me, your host, MF Thomas.  Until next time, good night.