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This is the second episode of a series. You can appreciate it on a standalone basis, but if you've not heard episode one, you might prefer to listen to that first. The movie theatres in Germany in 1929 are all showing Frau im Mond, the woman in the moon. Germany is giddy about rocket ships and space travel. There's even a society for spaceship travel, which aims to promote the exploration of space.
The Society is led by a science writer named Vili Ley. He'd received a letter from a young man keen to join the Society for Spaceship Travel. He replied, instructing the aspiring applicant to present himself at the Ley household. On the appointed day, Vili Ley was running a little late. As he arrived on his own doorstep, he could hear the Moonlight Sonata emerging from within.
His visitor had seated himself at Villelet's piano and was entertaining himself with typical self-assurance. Villelet could have been forgiven for asking himself, who on earth was this guy? I doubt the young pianist presented a resume, but it would have been quite a document.
He was then only 17 years old. His musical gifts also encompassed the cello and amateur composition. He was an enthusiastic hunter and a crack shot. He'd struggled with maths and physics at school until he found out that maths and physics might get him to the moon, at which point he focused his formidable intellect and became incandescently brilliant at both.
His father had been a senior civil servant and then a well-connected banker. His mother traced her ancestry back to the kings of four different countries. With bright blue eyes and light blonde hair, he looked like a movie star. And he knew it. He was charming. He was driven. He was brilliant. He was Baron Werner von Braun.
Von Braun flourished at the Society for Spaceship Travel, but the Society faced formidable obstacles. In the first episode of this series, we heard how rocket pioneers lost their eyes or their lives trying to develop the basics of rocketry.
The only reason the Society for Spaceship Travel didn't suffer more serious accidents is that it barely had enough funds to do anything. It was a ragtag collection of students and enthusiasts, woefully under-resourced. They did have permission to use a scrap of wasteland near Berlin. They called it the Raketenflugplatz, or rocket port.
It was a grandiose name, a statement of bravado when they were begging or bartering for gasoline, welding gear, even food. It wasn't easy to build a rocket at the best of times, but without money, it was almost impossible. Progress was slow.
But then, in 1932, a black sedan slowly rolled up to the rocket port and outstepped three officers of the German army. They had a proposal for the Society for Spaceship Travel. They'd fund more serious rocket research if the enthusiasts of the Society would devote their efforts to the challenge of using rockets as weapons.
To reach the moon would require an almost unlimited budget. The army was a ready source of cash. Werner von Braun later remarked, We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild. We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES
Of the three men who stepped out of the army car in 1932, the most senior was Walter Dornberger. As we heard in the previous episode, Captain Dornberger was in charge of the German army's fledgling efforts to build a ballistic missile weapon, and he took an instant liking to von Braun.
I was struck by the energy and shrewdness with which this tall, fair young student with a broad, massive chin went to work, and by his astonishing theoretical knowledge. Dornberger would become von Braun's boss. Together, the two of them would prove highly effective at milking the golden cow. The basic sales pitch was straightforward.
After the First World War, Germany had been banned from developing artillery weapons under the Treaty of Versailles. Ballistic missiles were a tempting alternative. But while the German army's accountants had been instructed to furnish Dornberger and von Braun with money for experimental apparatus, they kept a tight grip on the purse strings. This was just a research program after all. Yet they were easily blinded by science.
When the accountants approved the research team's request for... Appliance for cutting wooden rods up to 10mm in diameter. They didn't realise they'd just agreed to pay for a mechanical pencil sharpener. Similarly, when releasing funds for... Instrument for recording test data with rotating roller. They would have been astonished to learn that they had just bought Dornberger's secretary, a typewriter.
Of course, this is trivial stuff, and there should never have been any question of refusing to pay for simple office supplies. But it underlines the fact that nobody really seemed to understand what Dornberger and von Braun were up to. And if you didn't understand it, it was hard to stop them. In one exchange, a bureaucrat questioned some expenses. What was this money for? For experiments.
What kind of experiments? asked the bureaucrats eight weeks later. Secret experiments. They got the money. But no wonder they wanted to keep those experiments secret. It wasn't just about mischievous obfuscation. Had the top brass of the German army taken a closer look at those secret experiments, they would not have instilled confidence.
In their first work together, von Braun and Dornberger had tested a stationary rocket engine fixed to a new outdoor test stand. The day was bitterly cold, four days before Christmas 1932. Dornberger was 11 metres away, peeping from behind a tree as von Braun approached the rocket engine with a long flame-tipped rod and lit the cloud of alcohol fumes seeping out from below the engine.
There was a swoosh, a hiss and an explosion. Shrapnel filled the air. Fragments of wooden panels, metal sheeting and cables rained down all around them. Dornberger and von Braun looked at each other in disbelief. They were incredibly unharmed. Their new test stand had been obliterated.
When the Nazis took over in 1933, Dornberger and von Braun realised that the game had changed. Hitler wanted to turn Germany back into a military superpower. If the rocket enthusiasts told the right story, it might be possible to get much more funding. But they weren't going to get it if their test programme teetered between slapstick and tragedy.
they needed to create a compelling vision of the weapon of the future in the minds of the leaders of the Reich. Captain Dornberger reminded the Nazi authorities of the Paris gun, which, at the end of the First World War, had fired 450-pound shells a distance of 80 miles to strike at Paris itself.
Von Braun's rockets could do far better than that, he said. They would fly twice as far and carry a hundred times the payload. They'd be more accurate than the Paris gun and they'd be portable, carried by road or rail, launched from anywhere. What would those authorities have thought if they'd seen the underwhelming reality of the war?
The first rocket von Braun designed for the army was called the A-1. It was tiny. It stood less than five feet high, and it couldn't have delivered much more than a hand grenade as a payload. But that was theoretical because the A-1 never got anywhere. Privately, von Braun joked, "It took us half a year to build and half a second to blow up." Publicly, he and Dornberger continued to boast about the amazing potential of rocket weapons.
The next effort, the A2, was barely bigger than the A1, but did fly to a height of 1.5 miles in front of senior army officers. The A3 was a step forward in ambition, over 20 feet long, but it was erratic, flying off at unpredictable angles.
Luckily for von Braun, that wasn't obvious to observers. They saw a long, sleek missile blast upwards into the sky amid a deafening roar and a blinding flame. The fact that it wobbled off at random was something few people noticed. Dornberger and von Braun were magnificent salesmen for the rocket. Despite this string of disappointments, they convinced many Nazi power brokers that Germany couldn't afford to ignore rocket technology.
The Third Reich was full of competing power structures. Adolf Hitler seemed to like it that way, perhaps because such infighting made his own position unassailable, or perhaps out of some conviction that the best men with the best ideas would triumph. Whatever the reason, this brutal internal politics was about to give Dornberger and von Braun the chance to divide and rule. Cautionary Tales will return after the break.
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In 1936, senior figures in the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, were unnerved that a supposedly spectacular rocket weapon might be left in the hands of the army. Some also wondered whether rockets might be used to power airplanes, perhaps to give a bit of extra lift to help the heaviest aircraft take off from short runways.
So the Luftwaffe approached Werner von Braun directly, bypassing his army boss, Dornberger. They made a staggering offer, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in today's money, to spend on a new rocket research centre, where he would build the next generation rocket, the A4, the rocket that would finally serve as a futuristic superweapon.
Von Braun must have been delighted. No more blowing up test stands while Dornberger peeked from behind a tree, eh? But instead of simply accepting the money, he took news of the offer back to the army, which had been funding the rocket research up to that point. Imagine the astonishment of General Carl Becker when a 24-year-old civilian strolled into his office to ask if the army had a better offer.
And on reflection, General Becker decided that the army did have a better offer. "I'm not going to let the Luftwaffe run the wheel of this business. I'm going to be the majority stockholder in this enterprise." The general agreed that the army would provide 20% more funding than the Luftwaffe had proposed. Von Braun accepted both offers.
The Luftwaffe wouldn't be at the wheel of developing the A4 rocket, it seemed, but neither would the army. Werner von Braun would. He was now in charge of a Nazi megaproject.
Von Braun and Dornberger used their new funds to build a vast facility at Peenemunde, about 150 miles north of Berlin, on the coast of the Baltic Sea. There was a supersonic wind tunnel, one of the first ever closed-circuit TV systems, so the rocket engineers could monitor test launches from a safe distance. The biggest factory in Europe. A coal-fired power station, housing for thousands of scientists and workers.
And it was here that von Braun's talents really started to shine. Still just in his mid-twenties, he proved to be a masterful technical director, marshalling and focusing the talents of the scientists and engineers who worked for him.
The power brokers of the Nazi state gazed on Peenemunde with a variety of emotions. Some were enthusiastic backers, giddy with excitement at this wonderland of technological advancement. Others were cynics, convinced that the money was being squandered. Still others were predators, looking for an opportunity to close in and seize the spoils. All of them were curious.
When would the mysterious genius von Braun get round to producing this much vaunted A4 rocket? What was he really up to? Werner von Braun had come to the army from the Society for Spaceship Travel. They really should have been able to guess. Werner von Braun's proposed A4 rocket was as tall as a five-storey building.
It needed a mixture of super-cooled liquid oxygen and alcohol to power it, and clever pipework to make sure the oxygen didn't freeze the alcohol. It needed gyroscopes to stabilise it, and sophisticated fuses to ensure the warhead exploded at just the right moment. It needed to be triggered by impact at any angle, yet foolproof against accidental detonation.
The rocket needed aerodynamics that would allow for the change in air pressure as it reached the stratosphere, and it would have to withstand temperatures of 1200 degrees Fahrenheit as it arced down to re-enter thicker atmosphere. All of this added up to an astonishing technological challenge.
It took the engineers into uncharted territory. There was absolutely no room for error in design, manufacture or deployment. The first test launch in February 1942 was not a success. The rocket slipped while being mounted on the launch pad, crushing its fins. This was a distinctly undignified way to lose a rocket. And after some attempts at repair...
It was scrapped. Von Braun's team slunk back to the factory to build another. Three months later, they were ready to try again. Some powerful Nazi figures came to Peenemunde to watch the test under gloomy low clouds. Hitler's personal friend, Albert Speer, recalled the occasion.
At first with a faltering motion, but then with the roar of an unleashed giant, the rocket rose slowly from its pad, seemed to stand upon its jet of flame for a fraction of a second, then vanished with a howl into the low clouds. Werner von Braun was beaming. Speer didn't know it, but that beaming smile was masking some alarm. Von Braun, with his expert eye, could see that the rocket had been unstable.
It reached supersonic speeds and a height of 30 miles, but after 54 seconds, the rocket cut out, and it began to spin and fall right back down towards the launch pad. The roaring noise of the falling rocket grew louder and louder. Were they about to be struck by their own rocket? In the end, it spun into the Baltic Sea less than a mile away. Von Braun had gotten away with it.
The visible launch had been spectacular, and the dramatic failure had been concealed by the cloud cover. Another launch in August 1942 was another failure. This time, the warhead fell off, and the rocket itself disintegrated. But it too had reached supersonic speeds, and that was enough for von Braun to spin it, as he always did. The firing was 100% successful.
This dashing young man seemed so confident and assured. He'd spent colossal sums of money that the Reich could scarcely afford. Surely he knew what he was doing. Large, ambitious projects have a certain reputation these days. Over time, over budget, over and over again.
That reputation is perfectly accurate, according to the world's most prominent expert on large projects, Bent Flubier, a management professor at Oxford University. Flubier has accumulated a large database on what he calls megaprojects, and his data do not tell a pretty story. Nine out of ten of these huge projects have cost overruns.
Benefits often fall short of what's been promised. This is true all over the world, and it's true for public and private sector projects alike. But why? There are two explanations. One is that we fool ourselves. Whatever we do always takes longer and costs more than we expected.
One classic study of this phenomenon was conducted by a young doctoral student named Roger Buehler in the early 1990s. Buehler asked a group of undergraduates to predict how long it would take to submit their honours thesis and to consider upside and downside scenarios, if everything went as well as it possibly could and if everything went as poorly as it possibly could.
The students' optimistic estimate was 28 days, and their baseline guess not much longer: 34 days. Their worst-case scenario estimate was 49 days. In reality, the average thesis took 56 days, twice the optimistic estimate, but also even worse than the worst-case scenario.
I hardly need to cite this research. We all know it's true. Surely there's no more reliable source of disappointment anywhere in the world than looking at all the incomplete tasks on yesterday's to-do list. Werner von Braun was as guilty of this wishful thinking as anyone.
His biographer, Michael Neufeld, says that von Braun was always an enthusiast, always an optimist, that this was one of the traits which made him such an inspiring leader. But like Roger Buehler's experimental subjects, he was perfectly capable of being optimistic to the point of delusion.
Von Braun was far more interested in conquering space than in conquering the British or the Soviets. Not only that, but he was obsessed with the idea that he personally would one day travel into space. Needless to say, he never did. Like all the undergraduates who answered Roger Buehler's survey, he was surprised at how long everything seemed to take.
Von Braun struggled to see that by the time there was such a thing as an astronaut, he'd be far too old to be one. But there's a second explanation for why megaprojects are so often over time and over budget. It isn't delusion, it's deception. The promoters of large projects almost always exaggerate their benefits and understate their costs.
Von Braun had been happily doing this for years, making ambitious claims about the range, payload and accuracy his rockets would achieve. And the more the difficulties became evident to Von Braun, the bolder his claims became. But would his unachievable promises eventually catch up with him? When the Second World War began, Von Braun recalled...
The army told us in very clear terms that either we had to produce something of promise as a weapon in the very near future, or we must go out of business. And by the time of the next test in October 1942, the war was not going well for Germany. Von Braun really needed to put on a show. The luxurious facilities in Peenemunde had been sucking in resources for more than half a decade. Where were the results?
Von Braun's boss, Falter Dornberger, later recalled how anxious he felt. Had we really discovered the cause of failure of the last two attempts? A great deal depended on this launching. We all knew that. Dornberger saw one of his officers, pale with worry, and tried to say something encouraging. Keep your fingers crossed. It must come off this time. There's so much at stake.
The roar of the engine was so spectacular that witnesses felt they were inside a thunderstorm. And this time, the sleek fuselage remained stable even as it accelerated through the sound barrier. It was an unforgettable sight. In the full glare of the sunlight, the rocket rose higher and higher. The flame darting from the stern was almost as long as the rocket itself.
The rocket reached an altitude of around 50 miles, flew for 4 minutes and 56 seconds, and plunged into the Baltic Sea 120 miles away. At last, at last, the A-4 rocket might actually be usable as a weapon. It would soon gain a new name, the V-2. The V stood for vengeance.
And Peña Munda would soon, quite suddenly, be crawling with Nazi power players. Von Braun had finally started to succeed, and that, perhaps, was much more dangerous than continuing to fail. Horshenry Tales will be back in a moment.
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Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis and even their extensive archives. So where
Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.
As soon as it looked like Werner von Braun's V2 weapon might actually be going somewhere, senior officers from the army, the SS and the Luftwaffe started to appear at Peenemunde, handing out orders and setting delusionally optimistic targets. At the start of 1943, Dornberger agreed an ambition of building 100 rockets each month by the end of the year.
That target was soon revised upwards to 300, then changed again to 800, then finally set at an absurd 2,000 a month. Even von Braun was unsettled by this, as Dornberger recalled, Professor von Braun was giving me imploring and despairing looks, shaking his head again and again in incredulous astonishment.
Von Braun's concern was that there was no way that he could build 2,000 V2 rockets a month. But even if he could, what about the fuel? Even if every tank of liquid oxygen in Germany were sent to the V2 program, that wouldn't be enough for half those rockets. The other key fuel component was alcohol, which was distilled from potatoes.
Food in wartime Germany was becoming scarce. While in areas attacked or occupied by German forces, 4 million people starved to death as the Germans seized food supplies. Each V2 rocket needed 30 tons of potatoes to supply its fuel. Where would those potatoes come from? Who would starve as a result?
The goal of building so many V2s was simply impossible. But anyone who objected was threatened with dismissal or worse. The megaproject had acquired its own momentum, as megaprojects do. The problem was magnified by the derangements of the man at the top, Adolf Hitler, sometimes viciously insightful, but often unhinged.
Sometimes he'd been an enthusiast for the rocket programme. Sometimes he'd dismissed the rocket engineers as dreamers. Sometimes he made absurd suggestions, like firing the rockets out of a gigantic cannon. In July 1943, Hitler summoned Walter Dornberger and Werner von Braun. Together, they watched the film of the latest successful test launch, with von Braun providing the commentary.
The Führer could barely contain his enthusiasm. "Why was it I could not believe in the success of your work?" he asked. Dornberger later proudly recalled Hitler's words: "I have had to apologize only to two men in my whole life. The first was Field Marshal von Brauschitz. I did not listen to him when he told me again and again how important your research was. The second man is yourself. I never believed that your work would be successful."
With Hitler now fully on board, the V2 megaproject and the Peenemünde complex became prizes to fight over for the Nazi barons in the Third Reich. But just a few weeks later, in August 1943, the British bombed Peenemünde. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, happened to be with Adolf Hitler when news of the raid reached them.
As head of the SS, Himmler was one of the architects of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews, which was already well underway. He was one of the most evil and dangerous men in the Third Reich. Himmler immediately proposed that missile production be moved underground, to a disused mine or freshly blasted tunnels. Hitler agreed.
The move underground from Peenemünde to a mine near the city of Nordhausen, right in the centre of Germany, began with punishing speed. The human cost, as we'll soon see, was appalling. Himmler also suggested to Hitler that the SS should now take the lead on the rocket programme. Hitler said no. He liked to divide and rule. He kept the army in charge, for now, but Himmler didn't give up on his ambition.
In February 1944, he ordered Werner von Braun to fly over to his field headquarters near the Eastern Front. Himmler's command centre had the nickname the Black Lair. At first, a few concrete bunkers, hidden from air assault by the Polish forests. It had grown. Low wooden buildings were scattered through the trees, heavily camouflaged. There was even a command train parked up on a ramp,
SS guards were everywhere. It was the kind of place people were summoned to, never to return. Even the self-assured von Braun was unnerved by the prospect of meeting the most sinister man in the Third Reich. Himmler received von Braun behind a simple wooden table.
I must confess that I felt a bit jittery when I was shown into his office, but he greeted me politely and conveyed rather the impression of a country grammar school teacher than that horrible man who was said to wade knee-deep in blood. "I trust you realize that your V2 rocket has ceased to be an engineer's toy and that the German people are eagerly waiting for it. Why don't you come to us? You know that the Fuhrer's door is open to me at any time, don't you?"
I shall be in a much better position to help you lick the remaining difficulties than that clumsy army machine. Heinrich Himmler was making his play. The SS was launching a hostile takeover of Peenemünde and the entire rocket program. Von Braun pushed back. General Dornberger is the best chief I could wish to have, Rex Fuhrer. It is technical trouble and not red tape that is holding things up.
You have to laugh. Von Braun, speaking to the head of the SS, compared the SS to a jet of liquid excrement. It was bold, very bold, if he ever said it.
We only have von Braun's account of the conversation. But in any case, Himmler apparently smiled or laughed, and the conversation with one of the most powerful and murderous men in Germany ended on pleasant terms. Von Braun flew back to the rapidly shrinking team at Peenemünde. One month later, the day before his 32nd birthday,
Werner von Braun was visited at 3 o'clock in the morning by the Gestapo. Professor von Braun! Professor von Braun! Open the door! They were there to invite von Braun to make a witness statement at the nearby police headquarters. You wish to arrest me? There must be a misunderstanding. By no means are we talking about arrest. We have the express order to take you into protective custody. Protective custody was worse than arrest.
It might mean torture, it might mean death. There would certainly be no trial and no judicial oversight. People would simply vanish. But von Braun was so indispensable to the rocket program, even Himmler hesitated to simply have him disappear. Instead, von Braun was held in good conditions, allowed to receive birthday flowers and gifts, but he knew he was in mortal danger.
Von Braun's biographer, Michael Neufeld, is sure that he would never have been arrested if Himmler hadn't seen some advantage in doing so. Himmler was simply waiting to see what the fallout might be. To discover how powerful Von Braun's protectors were,
The Gestapo had an excuse for bringing von Braun into custody, of course. Ostensibly, they wanted to investigate a report of a drunken conversation at a party at which von Braun had apparently been rather indiscreet about his milking of the golden cow. The war will not end well. It is clear enough where this is all going for Germany. But what of your weapon, Professor von Braun? Surely it is a source of hope for the German people.
My feeling about the weapon is that it is aimed at the wrong planet. Rockets are not designed to conquer Britain or Russia. They are designed to conquer space. Did he ever say such things in an unguarded moment at a party? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it rings true. Werner von Braun had come a long way since playing Moonlight Sonata at Villelet's piano.
Had he only ever thought of the Nazi war effort as a handy source of funds for the Society for Spaceship Travel? Perhaps so. Von Braun, like most promoters of megaprojects, systematically exaggerated the benefits and understated the costs of his ambitions. The Gestapo began to question Von Braun. He found the process "grotesque and had a macabre unreality."
He wasn't, and he couldn't, and luckily for von Braun, he didn't need to.
The second day of questioning was interrupted by his long-time boss, General Walter Dornberger, resplendently clad in full dress uniform, who marched in, shot von Braun a genial glance, and, without a word, placed a document in front of the chief interrogator. It was an order to release von Braun, signed and stamped at Hitler's office.
It had been a narrow escape, which von Braun and Dornberger celebrated with a large bottle of brandy, then returned to working on the V2 rocket program. A few months later, the Third Reich would be collapsing, and von Braun would be plotting his next move. He didn't know it then, but his unnerving arrest had been the most extraordinary piece of good luck. In our next episode...
Cautionary Tales will return with this story's final shocking instalment. Michael Neufeld's definitive account of Germany's V2 programme is The Rocket and the Reich. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. MUSIC PLAYS
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Litao Mollard, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.com.
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