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Operation “Ost”
for a long time; Kharchev argued that they needed to share the German specialists
because they were war spoils.The commandant explained that a special assignment
was in charge of guarding them. Kharchev then tried to turn the conversation to
von Braun. The commandant said that he was the most important war criminal
and was being very heavily guarded. After the conversation, they put Kharchev
back into that same Jeep and as quick as the wind they drove him back to the
checkpoint, where he hopped into his own vehicle and an hour later reported this
adventure to us.
when we let him go rest and sober up,Pilyugin reproachfully said to me,
“He’s your ward.What would have happened to us all if he had given in to temptation?
The commandant or somebody else there would have taken pictures of him
in bed and then presented the photos to ‘the right people’!”
Several months later, when Korolev was working in our company, he just about
split his sides laughing over that story. But in contrast to Pilyugin he said,“What a
fool Kharchev was not to accept the American’s offer.” As regards von Braun,
Korolev was pleased that the operation had failed. He did not conceal this. Having
seen the conditions in which Gröttrup lived and worked among us, he could imagine
what would have happened if the most important German missile specialist had
also showed up. Korolev thought that Von Braun clearly would have gone against
the ideas that he was developing here, and changed the plans he had made through
all his suffering during the last years in Kolyma and in the Kazan sharashka.
Having heard somehow about our attempt to make contact with von Braun,
Gröttrup was quite amused. He said something to the effect that it was out of the
question to think that von Braun would voluntarily come over to us.Von Braun
was, of course, a very good engineer, a talented designer, and an effective organizer
of ideas. But he had also been a baron, a member of the Nazi party, and even
a Sturmbannführer. 3 He and his mentor, General Dr. Dornberger, met several times
with Hitler and received high state honors. Reich leaders Goebbels and
Kaltenbrunner kept close tabs on his work. In his youth,Wernher von Braun had
dreamed of space travels under the influence of Hermann Oberth’s works, but life
forced von Braun to use his talent for purely military objectives. We asked
Gröttrup to discuss the beginning of von Braun’s career. He agreed, but with great
reluctance. It ended with his wife inviting a small, select circle to coffee with
whipped cream. She promised that Helmut would tell us a bit about the very
beginning of their work.
Von Braun’s story is no longer novel, thanks to numerous publications by American,
German, and Soviet researchers, and even television documentaries. For that
reason I will not cram my memoirs with yet another version of von Braun’s biography.
Gröttrup said that one of von Braun’s very good traits was his striving to
3. Sturmbannführer was equivalent to the rank of major in the SS.
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