On June 20, 1944, as the Western Allies were pouring reinforcements into their Normandy bridgehead and the Red Army was about to launch Operation Bagration, its Wehrmacht-shattering summer offensive in the East, a portentous first was taking place above Nazi Germany. On that day, a test-fired A-4 rocket traveling at over 3,300 mph achieved a peak altitude of 109 mi/175 km — making it the first human device ever to reach space.¹ It seems the stuff of science fiction: nearly 80 years ago, the still perfectly empty space around Planet Earth disturbed for the first time ever, by none other than the silent menace of a Nazi missile… The A-4 rocket, better known as the V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe 2 (“Vengeance Weapon 2”), as Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry later dubbed it, epitomizes perhaps more than any other of Hitler’s so-called “Wonder Weapons” the terrible way in which the Nazis harnessed German technical genius in the service of mass violence.

The V-2 could only somewhat reliably carry its 1,600-lb warhead to a maximum range of about 200 miles. That level of accuracy and reach may not sound like much today, but getting such a vehicle to blast off, travel a great distance, and then land where you want it to is actually a tremendously complex business. A ballistic missile is not like an aircraft or drone that can be “flown” from Point A to Point B, remotely or otherwise. The technologies needed for the the V-1 “Buzz Bomb” and the V-2 ballistic missile were nothing alike, aside from the fact that both were powered by a kind of jet propulsion. A ballistic missile naturally wants to rotate once it has left the ground; it will leave and re-enter the atmosphere, encountering a series of fundamentally different conditions over the course of its flight; after a certain point it cannot be aerodynamically “steered” or even stabilized by fins, rudders or control vanes of any kind; and so its trajectory must be adjusted by other means.² Much of the technological achievement represented by the V-2 therefore resided in its solutions to the guidance problems. Other countries were working with jet engines and rockets, but none were as close as the Nazis to making it work.

Roughly 3,000 V-2s were fired in anger, the first against Paris in September, 1944. About 1,100 were launched against Britain in all, reaching a peak rate of 60 rockets per week in February and March of 1945. The remainder were fired mostly upon France and Belgium, including many against the strategic port of Antwerp. Although for various reasons 25% of all launches failed to detonate anywhere near their targets, it is nonetheless estimated that these missiles caused about 12,000 casualties, over 5,000 dead among them. The real death toll, however, must also include the estimated 10,000 forced laborers who died in horrific conditions while manufacturing these weapons in an underground factory at the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp in Nordhausen.³

It is risky to try to reduce the horror of war to mere numbers, but in terms of sheer destructive force, one might argue that for all the man hours, Reichsmarks, talent, and blood that went into them, these missiles “didn’t do much” in the end. After all, the four-engined, propeller-driven bombers designed by Boeing flattened or burned whole cities and destroyed many thousands more civilian lives than the V-2. But psychologically the V-2 took the terror of war to a new level, both because it was so “futuristic” and because the rocket’s approach, traveling faster than the speed of sound, was utterly silent to those on the receiving end. No one in the target area would ever hear it coming. It must have seemed like one might catch you anywhere, anytime, hundreds of miles from the front, in an imperceptible instant. Terrifying as that unpredictable threat must have been, the true and lasting significance of the V-2 was of course that it opened the door to the “Space Age,” for better and worse.

Once the War ended, teams from every one of the victorious powers scrambled to get a piece of this revolutionary technology, along with as many German scientists as they could scoop up. So it was actually the Nazi V-2 program that ultimately laid the groundwork for all the rocket programs that followed. It is sobering to realize that none of the highs and lows of the Cold War Space Race, from the triumphant Apollo moon landings to the nightmarish ICBMs that could destroy the entire planet many times over, would have been possible — or would at least have taken much longer to develop — without this blood-bought science. Wernher von Braun, who became America’s lead rocket scientist for decades after surrendering to the U.S. Army in the spring of 1945, exemplifies the moral ambiguity surrounding the achievements of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

Was von Braun himself an out-and-out Nazi? If so, should that have disqualified him from serving the United States’ rocket program? It’s probably easier, though not particularly comforting, to answer the second question first. Whatever level of Nazi ideology von Braun may have subscribed to, it is hard to imagine that the U.S. — or any other country — would ever have abstained on moral grounds from taking advantage of his services. The fact that the V-2 project had taken the lives of 10,000 concentration camp laborers is about as morally repugnant as a scientific development could get, but as the Cold War revved up and matters of national security took precedence over all else, all states were desperate to benefit from whatever work the Nazis had done, however ruthlessly they had done it.

As for von Braun’s complicity in the crimes associated with the production of his rocket, it has been pointed out that having visited the assembly works on numerous occasions he must certainly have known of the concentration camp labor force and the lethal conditions under which they worked. The question then becomes: Should he/could he have refused to continue working under those circumstances? In fact, von Braun kept at his rocket work to the very end, even after he himself was arrested by the Gestapo. To me it seems that von Braun was neither a particularly moral nor political animal, but rather a rocket man before all else.

Michael J. Neufeld, author of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, sums up von Braun this way: “What choice did he have? Well, by the time he found himself in the middle of concentration camp labor, it’s probably true that he didn’t have many choices. And my argument in the book is, in many ways, he had sleep-walked into a Faustian bargain—that he had worked with this regime without thinking what it meant to work for the Third Reich and for the Nazi regime. And he bears some responsibility for his own actions, therefore. In the case of concentration camp labor, there wasn’t much he could do to help. But he still bears some moral responsibility for being in the middle of that situation, seeing the concentration camp labor personally, face to face. Seeing the horrible conditions and continuing to work.”⁴ Like so many other Germans of that time, von Braun was apparently loyal to his country and worked under the auspices of the Third Reich with some enthusiasm as long as the regime brought success and opportunity — and he could manage not to see its ghastly crimes. Later, even if an individual like von Braun had wanted to protest, that choice might have meant his own death.

The story of von Braun and his rocket science raises complex issues of war guilt greater than this essay can hope to process fully here, but at the very least it is important in the end to acknowledge the terrible human cost of this technology and the ethical choices that were made, by both friendly and enemy governments, to enable its development.

I wrote this brief history in order to provide needed context for the diorama post I have made of the same subject, which you can find here.

1. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “V-2 Rocket”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 23 Jun. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/technology/V-2-rocket. Accessed 16 August 2023.
2. Durant, Frederick C. , Fought, Stephen Oliver and Guilmartin, John F.. “rocket and missile system”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 Aug. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/technology/rocket-and-missile-system. Accessed 16 August 2023.
3. National Air and Space Museum. “V-2 Missile”. Smithsonian Institution. https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/missile-surface-surface-v-2-4/nasm_A19600342000#:~:text=The%20V%2D2%20rocket%2C%20developed,fuel%20rockets%20and%20launch%20vehicles. Accessed 16 August 2023.
4. Tedeschi, Diane. “How Much Did Wernher von Braun Know, and When Did He Know It?” Smithsonian Magazine, 1 January, 2008, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/a-amp-s-interview-michael-j-neufeld-23236520/. Accessed 16 August 2023.