Project Paperclip

AIR FORCE Magazine June 2007 

http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2007/June%202007/0607paperclip.aspx

Project Paperclip

By Walter J. Boyne

Contributing Editor

It was an all-out race to seize the best German scientists and technologies. America won.

Even as World War II ground toward its bloody climax, Germany continued to astound the world with amazing new technological marvels. Hitler’s reich, in the war’s last days, introduced rockets, jet fighters, V-1 unpiloted aircraft, lethal V-2 missiles, and a host of other military advances.

The nations on the verge of defeating Germany naturally wanted to exploit these developments and make the new war-making capabilities their own. Thus erupted a spontaneous international race to acquire equipment, documents, engineers, and scientists who produced the German weaponry advances.

The pressing need to secure the cream of enemy assets was obvious, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on July 20, 1945 codified many different intelligence efforts into Project Overcast.

This provided the initial guidelines for seizing, holding, using, and returning enemy nationals. After the surrender of Japan, however, protests broke out over the use of former enemy personnel for national military purposes. This forced a name change, and, in March 1946, the effort to gather top-secret Nazi technology became known as Project Paperclip.

The term “Paperclip” stemmed from the fact that dossiers of the most highly valued scientists were flagged with paperclips.

The initial driving factors behind Overcast-Paperclip were complex. The armed services wanted to use German capabilities in the war against Japan. The State Department’s primary concern was preventing a resurgence of German might, as had occurred after World War I. Underlying this was a pervasive desire to exploit the intellectual capital of the former enemy for the future.

The program was controversial; nearly all the sought-after scientists and engineers had connections to the Nazi party, the German war effort, or even, in some instances, to war crimes. Despite a universal reluctance to deal with anyone connected to the Nazi regime, necessity forced the military authorities to skirt the rules prohibiting their use.

The German intellectual capital was formidable and priceless. German achievements extended beyond mere advances in weapons. They included developments in wind tunnels, materials, and other disciplines necessary to build an advanced scientific infrastructure.

Other countries were less successful than was the United States, which clearly won this race despite the admonitions of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower that there were to be no dealings with any Nazi. Initially, the United States planned to permit only about 100 individuals to enter the country. Ultimately, however, Washington approved the entry of about 700, with family members.

There were many reasons for the United States’ greater success in exploiting the accumulated information and potential contributions of its former foes.
The primary cause of success was the vision of Gen. H.H. “Hap” Arnold, Commanding General of the US Army Air Forces, whose strong penchant for research and development led to his work with Theodore von Karman, the Hungarian emigre who established the Scientific Advisory Group (later the Scientific Advisory Board) in 1944. (See “Von Karman’s Way,” January 2004, p. 74.) Arnold’s backing and von Karman’s connections in academia created the climate and top cover for Air Technical Intelligence personnel to scour the German countryside and gather the necessary data, equipment, and personnel.

Col. Donald L. Putt, backed by Gen. Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz, led an aggregation of specialist teams in Operation Lusty. This was the most immediately successful of the competing operations racing across Germany, and it was the one that had the most direct effect on aeronautical research. (See “Operation Lusty,” January 2005, p. 62.)

Exploiting enemy technology was commonplace in World War II. Examples ranged from the purely serendipitous (as when an FW-190 fighter inadvertently landed in Wales) to the carefully planned (as in the daring British commando raid on the German Freya radar site at Saint-Bruneval on the French coast).

Dirty Dozen
The Allied countries devised multiple schemes to gather up hardware, data, scientists, and engineers. Some had a reckless “Dirty Dozen” flavor—and most failed.

Large-scale efforts did not get under way until after the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion of France. Then, teams were able to advance across the European countryside just behind the front lines. The AAF formally combined technical and post-hostilities intelligence objectives on April 22, 1945, using the code name Operation Lusty.

They were searching for technology for use against Japan and to accelerate American development of advanced systems.

For example, weapons such as the Henschel Hs 293 guided missile promised to be useful if the war against Japan continued.

Air Technical Intelligence units were competing with more than 30 allied technical intelligence groups to gain information from captured equipment.
Under Putt’s leadership, ATI teams swarmed over Germany as it collapsed. A special group led by Col. Harold E. Watson made the most immediate impression on AAF leaders by snapping up copies of the latest German aircraft, which were transported to Ohio for test and evaluation.

However, the most productive long-term discoveries were made by teams led by Putt and other members of the Scientific Advisory Group. These teams swept through the well-known German research centers in Stuttgart (the Graf Zeppelin Research Establishment), Goettingen (the Aerodynamics Research Institute), and von Karman’s old stomping ground at Aachen. There they met their peers, leading academics, many of whom they knew personally and had worked with before the war.

Putt was astounded when, on April 13, 1945, he was led to a previously unknown German research site, the Hermann Goering Aeronautical Research Center at Voelkenrode.

Never detected by American intelligence, it was a well-camouflaged facility of Goeringesque proportions on the outskirts of Braunschweig. Almost 80 buildings, including seven wind tunnels, were hidden under a carpet of earth from which trees grew, blending the facility into the surrounding forest. (Some wind tunnel parts captured in Germany are still in use in the United States today.)

Putt immediately saw that a full exploitation of the information available required the presence of his old friend, von Karman, and his colleagues.
Unfortunately for Putt, Voelkenrode was in the area designated for occupation by Britain, so he was forced to maximize his yield by doing some rapid “midnight requisitioning” of key documents and equipment and flying it out in war-weary B-17s and B-24s.

Putt’s work annoyed the British but pleased his taskmaster boss, Maj. Gen. Hugh J. Knerr, who ordered him to Wright Field.

The ATI teams continued to gather up German experts wherever they could be found. When the European war ended on May 8, 1945, the United States had in custody almost every leading German aircraft engineer, including the young inventor of the German jet engine, Hans-Joachim Pabst von Ohain.

(See “The Converging Paths of Whittle and von Ohain,” January 2006, p. 70.) It was a stupendous haul and was infinitely more valuable for the work the scientists might do in the future than for the work they had done in the past.

Army intelligence teams were operating with the same diligence as their ATI counterparts, searching everywhere for equipment, data, and personnel that would be helpful in the future. Enormous publicity had been generated by the debut of the notorious V-1 and V-2, nicknamed “vengeance” weapons by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. This tended to cause the intelligence teams to focus more intently on German missile development.

The V-1 (officially the Fiesler Fi 103) flying bomb was essentially an updated version of the 1917 Kettering “Bug” concept—a cruise missile. It was powered by a pulse-jet engine and equipped with a primitive guidance system. The characteristic noise of the pulse-jet lent the nickname “buzz bomb” to the weapon, also called “Doodlebug” by battle-hardened Londoners.

The V-1 entered combat on June 13, 1944 when 10 were fired against London. Two days later, almost 300 were launched, and the “Flying Bomb Blitz” began. Ultimately some 29,000 V-1s were built. Of these, 8,000 were fired against London, with 2,419 hitting their target, killing almost 6,000 Britons.

A much larger number of V-1s struck liberated Antwerp. The majority were launched from ground stations, with about 1,200 being air launched in the manner of a modern ALCM.

The V-1 was copied in the United States as the JB-2 Loon. About 1,000 were built, but were not used in combat.

In the meantime, other Army teams were after the German engineers who had created the V-2 ballistic missile, considered by many to be the most advanced weapon of the war other than the atom bomb.

Enter von Braun
The Army teams were impressed by the advanced technology of the V-2, especially compared to previous American efforts which lacked the size or payload of the V-2. More importantly, unlike the V-1, the V-2 was essentially impossible to intercept.

Led by the charismatic young Wern­her von Braun, the members of the Society for Spaceflight traded their technical expertise for German Army funds beginning in 1934. While their scientist eyes may have remained fixed on the stars, their lethal products were designed to hit London and, ultimately, New York.

Weighing almost 30,000 pounds, the V-2 was perhaps Hitler’s last remaining hope to force Britain from the war. More than 10,000 were manufactured, largely by slave labor working under hideous conditions. Some 1,400 were launched against Britain, with about 500 hitting London, killing about 2,600 people. As the Allies gained ground after the invasion, Antwerp became the principal target.

In retrospect, the V-2 was a wasteful project for Germany. It consumed scarce resources that might have been better used elsewhere, and its total delivered tonnage was less than that being delivered by the RAF or AAF in a single raid.

Nonetheless, more than any other German weapon, the V-2 pointed the way to the future, and the Army was determined to learn its secrets and moved swiftly to round up German scientists and equipment.

Von Braun had earlier forged documents that permitted him, 500 personnel, and extensive documentation to leave their experimental station to escape the oncoming Soviet forces. Despite this tremendous drain on V-2 brainpower, production continued at the notorious Mittelwerk facility at Nordhausen until April 10, 1945.

Knowing that Nordhausen was slated to come under Soviet occupation, the US forces worked swiftly to take as much from the Mittlewerk plant as possible. The first trainload of V-2s, parts, machinery, and equipment departed on May 22, 1945. Within nine days, more than three trainloads were sent to Antwerp, carrying enough material to manufacture 100 V-2s. Von Braun, his Nazi supervisor, and 126 principal engineers were captured on May 2, 1945.

Von Braun and the top seven members of his team arrived at New Castle AAF, Del., on Sept. 20, 1945. They were soon sent to a long-term assignment at Ft. Bliss, Tex.

Their first task was to prepare V-2s for launch at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. The repatriated German scientists were generally well-treated, but were unable to leave the station without military escort.

When Japan surrendered, ending the war, US use of former Nazi scientists provoked strong domestic political protests. The view was that, with hostilities over, there was no continuing need. The knowledge already flowing from the captured scientists ruled out any major change in course, however.

On April 16, 1946, the first V-2 was launched in the United States. This would be followed by 63 more rockets, all carrying a wide variety of instruments and all intended as scientific experiments.

This mass transfer of personnel and equipment accelerated the US development of ballistic missiles. The V-2 itself became the baseline from which many later rockets were derived. The first of these was a complex, sophisticated family of rockets under the project umbrella name Hermes. With a contract awarded to General Electric in 1944, Hermes came to include the V-2 test program itself as well as other derivatives from the V-2.

The success of the American V-2 experiments also provided confidence to other firms developing rocket designs that did not use V-2 technology per se, as in the case of the Convair Atlas or the Douglas Thor. This influence extended for decades. In 1955, the Air Force launched the Titan program as a backup to the Atlas.

Author William Harwood quotes Martin executive William G. Purdy as saying that the connections made with German engineers at Ft. Bliss continued on into the Titan era. Titan missiles carried the highest-megaton warhead of all USAF missiles and served as Gemini and later Air Force and NASA satellite launch vehicles.

Von Braun and his team were transferred to the Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Ala., in April 1950. Still nurturing his long-held dream of spaceflight, von Braun led the efforts resulting in the Redstone, which was longer and heavier than the V-2 and equipped with an inertial guidance system. The Redstone had a range of 250 miles and led directly to the larger Jupiter, an intermediate range ballistic missile with a 2,000-mile range.

In 1955, Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson gave USAF responsibility for developing the ICBM. For intermediate range missiles, the Air Force was to develop the Thor, while the Navy adopted the solid fuel Polaris. These sudden shifts meant that the Air Force had inherited the legacy of the von Braun team and was destined to assert its dominance in space.

Von Braun and his team moved closer to their original dreams as the Redstone and Jupiter became important factors in the space race. America’s long series of embarrassing, televised space-launch failures ended with the use of a Jupiter C on Jan. 31, 1958. It was used to launch America’s first satellite, Explorer 1.

The influence of the Paperclip scientists did not end yet. NASA came into existence on Oct. 1, 1958. In 1960, NASA opened the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, with von Braun as the center’s first director. In 1961, Mercury Redstones safely launched Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom on suborbital spaceflights.

Von Braun led the Marshall center until February 1970, where he and his team accelerated work on the Saturn series of launch vehicles that they had begun developing under Army auspices in the late 1950s. The original Saturn I was little more than a group of Jupiter rockets strapped together, but the later Saturn V was a massive and supremely reliable system.

The Saturn represented the peak of von Braun’s contributions to NASA, but he and many of his colleagues went on to serve the United States and the free world in many capacities. Their influence on the world of aeronautics and astronautics is felt to this day.

---

Walter J. Boyne, former director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., is a retired Air Force colonel and author. He has written more than 600 articles about aviation topics and 40 books, the most recent of which is Supersonic Thunder. His most recent article for Air Force Magazine, "The Pilgrim Airlift," appeared in the March 2007 issue.

---

 

Peenemunde

http://www.operationpaperclip.info/peenemunde.php

 

Peenemünde is a village in the northeast of the German island of Usedom. It stands near the mouth(s) of the Peene river, on the easternmost part of the German Baltic coast.

Rocket facility

During World War II, Peenemünde hosted the Heeresversuchsanstalt, an extensive rocket development and test site established in 1937. Prior to that date the team headed by Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger had worked in Kummersdorf, south of Berlin. However, Kummersdorf proved too small for testing. Peenemünde, located on the coast, permitted the launching of rockets and their subsequent monitoring across about 200 miles of open water.

Between 1937 and 1945 the Peenemünders developed many of the basics of rocket technology and two weapons, the V-1 and the V-2. Test-firing of the first V-1 occurred in early 1942 and the first V-2 (then called the A-4) first flew on October 3, 1942, from Prüfstand VII. The German Luftwaffe ran the V-1 cruise missile experiments in Peenemünde west, whereas the Heer (army) ran the ballistic missile development (V-2) project. Peenemunde also served as the development site for many cutting-edge night-navigation and radar systems, under the direction of Dr. Hans Plendl.

The Peenemünde establishment also developed other techniques, such as the first closed-circuit television system in the world, installed at Test Stand VII to track the launching rockets.

In the course of World War II some heavy air-raids targeted the site, including an attack by almost 500 RAF heavy bombers on the night of 16 - 17 August, 1943 ("Operation Hydra"). This raid killed, according to an official German report, 815 staff, mostly Foreign POWs, and Walter Thiel, the head of engine development. This raid prompted the moving of the production of the V rockets underground.

In spite of the raids, many technical installations in Peenemünde remained intact at the end of World War II, because most of the bombs landed on the surrounding woodlands, the housing areas and on the concentration camps for Foreign POWs.

Much controversy exists over how the Allies found out about Peenemünde. The official British version states that air reconnaissance collected all the information. However, witnesses (e.g. Danuta Stepniewska and Hanna Szczepkowska-Mickiewicz from Polish intelligence) and documents (e.g. the monthly reports of courier service from 1943) state it was Polish underground army (Armia Krajowa or AK) intelligence (who gave the British complete plans of the facility) unmasked Peenemünde. British intelligence for years denied that it received any information about Peenemünde from Poland, instead underlining importance of other sources, as a Danish pilot who photographed something looking like a V rocket nearby. However copies of reports emerged after the war in Poland.

One of the British intelligence workers who was receiving the information, R. V. Jones contradicted himself: first he denied that fact, and later in his book Most Secret War (ISBN 0 340 24169 1) he wrote that many bombs fell on camps for Foreign POWs who gave the Allies information; he failed to point out that these Polish workers were agents from AK intelligence. Within the last few years Polish politicians and historians have demanded access to British archives (since Britain held archives of most if not all AK reports). So far the British authorities have answered that all AK reports were destroyed.

Apart from Peenemünde, other sites in Germany saw noteworthy rocket launches. Some took place between 1957 and 1964 at Cuxhaven and between 1988 and 1992 at Zingst.

Peenemünde after World War II

At the end of World War II von Braun and most of the scientists fled westwards to ensure their capture by the Americans. The Soviets and British captured the site and most of the technicians, who feared trial for war crimes for the V-2 attacks on London.

In accordance with an agreement, the Red Army destroyed the site with explosives. Most destruction of the technical facilities of Peenemünde took place between 1948 and 1961. Only the power station, in what has now become a museum, the airport, and the railway link to Zinnowitz remained functional. The plant for production of liquid oxygen lies in ruins at the entrance to Peenemünde. Very little remains of most of the other buildings and facilities.

The Peenemünde Historical and Technical Information Centre, opened in 1992 in the shelter control room and the area of the former power station. It is concerned with history of Peenemuende and in particular with the history of rocket development between 1936 and 1945. Special show-pieces are the reproduction of the Fieseler Fi-103 and the A4-Rakete.

 

 

The Rest of the Rocket Scientists Some went west. This is the story of the ones who went east. By Anatoly Zak Air & Space magazine, September 2003   http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/cit-zak.html IN THE CLOSING WEEKS OF WORLD WAR II, AS ALLIED TROOPS RUMBLED INTO GERMAN TOWNS and the victors jockeyed to divide the spoils, one prize stood out: the people and machinery that had produced the V-2 rocket, one of the war’s most exotic weapons. To the delight of U.S. intelligence, Wernher von Braun and most of his top associates on the V-2 development team chose to surrender to the Americans, shrewdly calculating where they might be allowed to continue their pioneering research after the war. One German rocket engineer, quoted by historians Frederick Ordway and Mitchell R. Sharpe in their book The Rocket Team, sized up his options in April 1945: “We despise the French, we are mortally afraid of the Soviets, we do not believe the British can afford us. So that leaves the Americans.” On June 20, 1945, von Braun and about 1,000 other German engineers and family members made the exodus from east Germany into the U.S.-held western zone, just ahead of the advancing Red Army. When the Soviets arrived, they found the V-2 underground production center at Mittelwerk mostly abandoned, its top personnel gone and key documents missing. Among the disappointed Russians was 33-year-old Boris Chertok, an aerospace engineer who had arrived in Germany two months earlier with a broad assignment to search for and evaluate Nazi technology, particularly the V-2. Today a consultant at RKK Energia, the company that built the Mir station and other Russian spacecraft, Chertok’s career in the space industry goes back 65 years, including work on the Soviet attempt to send a man to the moon. In the mid-1990s he wrote Rakety i Lyudi (Rockets and People), a monumental four-volume memoir that became a bible for space historians around the world. When I met Chertok in Moscow last year, his health was declining, which slowed his movements and forced him to talk loudly to overcome deteriorating hearing. Yet his memory of events that took place half a century earlier was still vivid. He recalled the scramble in 1945 as he and his colleagues tried, with little success, to lure top German talent to the Soviet side. His emissaries made risky dashes into the American zone, approaching the rocket specialists with offers of hefty salaries, food rations, and—most importantly—the opportunity to stay in Germany. That was one of the few battles von Braun and his colleagues had lost in negotiating with the Americans, and the Soviet recruiting campaign appealed to the Germans’ longing to remain in their homeland. Few took the bait. One who did was Helmut Gröttrup, a physicist by training and a top expert on the V-2’s flight control system. Historians have debated why Gröttrup turned down the offer to work in the United States, suggesting that it was a combination of his leftist views and his refusal to become a bit player on von Braun’s team. Chertok thinks the primary reason was Gröttrup’s wish—and the even stronger desire of his wife Irmgard—to stay in Germany. He doesn’t discount, however, the scientist’s left-wing politics. “He was what we would call a social democrat—definitely anti-fascist,” Chertok recalls. For whatever combination of reasons, Gröttrup signed up with the Soviets, who established a rocket research institute in the town of Bleicherode, not far from the Mittelwerk plant, and set him up with a $1,250 per month salary and a spacious house (the owner, an affluent merchant, was rudely turned out, according to Ordway and Sharpe). Gröttrup’s first task was to compile a detailed report about the rocket research he and his colleagues had been engaged in at the Peenemünde center on the Baltic coast. He also was placed in charge of hundreds of Germans, whose main job was to produce a full set of drawings for the V-2 and re-start production. Irmgard volunteered to search for food and other provisions for institute personnel in the midst of devastated Germany. It wasn’t long before the other shoe dropped, however. As flightworthy V-2 missiles started rolling off the restored production line in 1946, the Soviet government made a secret decision, signed by Josef Stalin on May 13, to transfer all ballistic missile work, along with the German rocket experts, to Russia by year’s end. Ivan Serov, the head of the Soviet secret police in Germany, devised a plan, code-named “Osoaviakhim” after a Soviet aeronautical organization, to accomplish the deportation in just five days, with no advance notice. As Serov bluntly put it, moving quickly and relying on the element of surprise would “prevent Germans from running away when they learn that Soviet organizations deport their German employees.” Some 2,500 security officers were assigned to the operation, along with regular army units. Chertok, who had tried hard to build good relations with his new recruits, favored the decision. “I believed it was a useful step,” he says. “We worked with Germans almost a year and a half, achieved a lot, and I considered it necessary to continue in Russia for some period of time.” Not everyone agreed. Chertok’s friend and colleague, Sergei Korolev, who would go on to lead the stunning Soviet space achievements of the 1950s and 1960s, despised the move. In 1946, the man who would later become the Soviets’ chief designer for space nurtured ambitions of building his own rocket team. “Korolev had a negative attitude toward German participation in our work from the very beginning,” says Chertok, “and he did see them as potential competitors.” The German engineers had little warning of what was coming. Early in the morning of October 22, 1946, Soviet soldiers showed up at the homes of top technical workers and informed them that they would be deported to work at various Soviet industrial ministries. It was the same story at each house: A Soviet security officer, accompanied by an interpreter, shocked half-asleep families by ordering them to pack up personal belongings and prepare to board trains for Russia. A promise of a five-year contract in the Soviet Union and an offer of assistance with packing and moving were little consolation. According to recently published Soviet accounts, as many as 7,000 workers and family members were rounded up. Only 500 or so were rocket engineers and their families—the rest worked primarily for the aircraft and nuclear industries. When an angry Helmut Gröttrup asked when he and his colleagues might return to Germany, Dmitry Ustinov, the head of the ministry responsible for missile development, joked, “As soon as you can fly around the world in a rocket!” Gröttrup boarded one of the 92 trains transporting the deportees and immediately dictated a letter of protest to his secretary, but it was to no avail. He arrived in Russia a few days later. Growing up in Moscow in the 1970s, I spent my summer vacations at a dacha in Valentinovka, in the city’s northeastern suburbs. It was a place of magnificent pine and birch trees, gravel roads, and unpaved trails, twisting between ageless wooden cottages with brick chimneys and glass-covered porches. Back then, the hemorrhaging Soviet economy left local food stores largely empty, prompting my mother, in her never-ending quest for groceries, to make frequent trips to nearby Podlipki, where the shelves always seemed well stocked. Official Soviet encyclopedias listed timber production as Podlipki’s main industry, but even then we knew it was home to the rocket industry, whose privileged workers could find cheese and milk even during the worst shortages. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the town’s true mission was made public, and it was renamed Korolev to honor the luminary of the Soviet space program, who spent the most productive years of his life there. It was here that Helmut Gröttrup was sent, to work at the newly established NII-88 scientific research institute, the first Soviet industrial facility dedicated to rocket development. Boris Yezhov, a Korolev town historian, says that about half the Germans were accommodated in vacation houses in the northeastern suburbs. Most of the residences no longer exist, but at least one, in Bolshevo, is still standing. On the way to see it, Yezhov showed me an old black-and-white photo of a majestic stone mansion, sitting oddly in the middle of a forest. Today it’s a vacation house for Russian movie executives. But when Germans lived there it was nicknamed the “Fascist Palace,” and it housed “I don’t know how many tenants,” according to Irmgard Gröttrup. She and Helmut moved into a six-room villa more befitting his status, and were given a chauffeur-driven BMW. Later, though, when Helmut was transferred out of Moscow, Irmgard would spend a few months in the Fascist Palace. During her first night in the crowded building, her Russian hosts asked when she and her fellow Germans were going to bed. She recalled, “We looked at the 10 bottles of vodka on the table and laughed out loud: We hadn’t the slightest intention of going to sleep.” Other Germans were housed according to their jobs. Specialists in guidance and radio systems, perhaps the most challenging task in the Soviet missile development program, settled in the town of Monino, farther east on the Yaroslavskaya Railroad. Another group, led by V-2 propulsion specialist Erich Putze, was attached to the collective of Valentin Glushko, the other principal figure in Russian rocketry at that time. Glushko worked on rocket propulsion systems at the OKB-456 design bureau, now known as NPO Energomash, the company that builds engines for almost every Russian rocket as well as the U.S. Atlas booster. Like Korolev, Glushko was not enthusiastic about German participation in his work. “He distanced himself from the Germans,” says Vladimir Sudakov, a historian at NPO Energomash. Without support from above, Gröttrup struggled with badly equipped laboratories and a lack of tools. The Germans working for Glushko were taken off work on a more advanced engine for the V-2, designated RD-102, and given secondary and often humiliating jobs, such as designing the foundation for industrial buildings. For the Russian rocket pioneers, it was partly a matter of pride. Korolev and Glushko had been at this business for years, and believed they could improve on the already outdated V-2 with no outside help. But Stalin himself was keen to have his scientists launch German missiles before moving on to their own. He believed that by copying Western designs, like that of the American B-29 bomber (see “Made in the USSR,” Feb./Mar. 2001), Soviet engineers could quickly absorb foreign innovations. Decades later, veterans of the Soviet aerospace industry publicly admitted they had done just that. So in August 1947, Gröttrup and several other Germans boarded a train to a new launch range at Kapustin Yar, near the border with Kazakhstan, to assist with the first launches of V-2s. Out here, Irmgard wrote in her diary, the camels outnumbered the cars. Still, the engineers were excited to be launching rockets again. The atmosphere, she noted, was “