Has lurid fiction like the movie Iron Sky any basis in fact? ÒšEveryone knows that WW2 Germany developed rockets far in advance of the Allies, but some argue that in 1945 the Third Reich was on the verge of developing a space program!
Tomorrow the world! A Sanger Silverbird conquers space. (Image credit: illustration by Josha Hildwine via www.luft46.com)
Ever since Adolf Hitlerò??s ò??Thousand Yearò?? Third Reich was utterly defeated, this awful regime has held a horrid fascination in the popular imagination. One aspect that interests many is Nazi Germanyò??s frightening array of military hardware. Despite an astonishingly corrupt and incompetent procurement bureaucracy, the Nazis fielded some very technologically advanced weapons (and less often-mentioned, many disastrous flops too). Among the successes were the Tiger heavy tanks, assault rifles, IR nightsights, the excellent Focke Wulf fighter ò??planes, the Me262 jet fighter and the V-2 ballistic missile (of course the Allies had their own brilliant technological triumphs: such as ULTRA, centimetric radar, the B-29 and above all the atomic bomb, the things that actually did win the war) .
An A4 (alias V2) is prepared for launch. (Image credit: Missile Defense Agency)
In the past few years stories of other, more amazing schemes from the Third Reich have appeared, stories of intercontinental missiles and orbiting spaceplanes (all adorned with swastikas). These started on the internet (for example, a few years ago Wikipediaò??s article on the Aggregate rocket family used to state that several Luftwaffe pilots made space flights in 1945 until saner editors prevailed) and since have spread to books and TV documentaries. Are there the slightest grains of truth in these tales of Nazis in space?
Of course, Germany was the first nation to field a ballistic missile in the sleek shape of Wernher von Braunò??s V-2. The name V-2, for Vergeltungswaffe 2 (Vengeance Weapon 2), was an invention of Nazi propagandists, more correctly, this missile was designated A4, one of the A-series rockets developed by von Braun (1912-77) and his colleagues since the 1930s. The German army had begun sponsoring von Braunò??s research even before Hitler came to power, seeing missile weapons as an alternative to the long-range artillery forbidden to post-WW1 Germany.
Built by a workforce of slaves labouring in hideous underground factories managed by sadistic murdering thugs (as many as 20 000 people died building A4s, and about 7250 more people were killed by the missiles, never forget this), the A4 was a staggeringly futuristic rocket. Rising from its launch pad under 25 tonnes of thrust from its alcohol and liquid oxygen-fuelled engine, it could carry a 975 kg (2150 lb) warhead at supersonic speed up to 314 km (195 miles) from its launching site. First successfully launched in 1942, it was fired against Allied cities, including London, Antwerp and Paris from 1944. Sometime in 1944, an A4 reached an altitude of 189 km (117 miles) making it the first man-made object to reach space. This would have been a propaganda triumph for the Third Reich, but the KÓÅrmÓÅn line, the boundary 100 km (62 miles) above our heads where space officially begins was not yet defined at that time.
Dedicated followers of Fascism: von Braun (centre) always claimed to have been an innocent designer of spaceships which those horrid Nazis turned into weapons. (Image credit: Bundesarchiv)
Yet impressive though it was, the A4 was not (except in Hitlerò??s dreams) a war-winning weapon, its range and destructiveness were adequate for a European war, but not for a global conflagration. Aware of this, von Braun and his team had investigated longer ranged A4 derivatives. One result was the A9, an improved, winged A4 (in 1944 a couple of A4s were lashed up with wings, a configuration called A4b, to test the A9’s aerodynamics), which was intended to glide up to 800km (497 miles) from its launch site, but von Braun was thinking on a yet more grandiose scale.
In some nightmarish but unlikely alternate timeline the A9/10 was the first space launcher (Image credit: Josha Hildwine via www.luft46.com)
The A10 design was started in 1936, and resembled a giant A4 with a unique 100 tonne thrust engine formed from six of the A4ò??s engines feeding a single exhaust. Originally the aim was to carry a 4 tonne warhead 500km (310 miles). By 1941 the A10 had evolved into the lower stage of an intercontinental missile. Mounted on top of the A10 would be an A9, launched from western France this combination was hoped to be capable of launching 1 tonne warheads at New York city. Just like the Space Shuttle’s SRBs, the A10 was meant to be reuseable, being designed to descend under a parachute into the Atlantic Ocean for recovery (in wartime, with the Royal Navy and USN on alert, the Germans would have needed some good luck to pull that off). The combined A9/10 would have been comparable in size to the 1950s US Atlas missile, later used to launch Mercury project astronauts into orbit.
This concept sounds impressive but it was a fantasy. The whole staging configuration of the A9/10 is primitive and would not have worked as designed. (I have no doubt at all that German engineers were capable of producing a workable ICBM, but I cannot see them achieving this before 1955 in peacetime conditions. Under wartime conditions with the pressure of round the clock allied air raids and the advancing Red Army approaching they could not have done this.)
No A10 component was ever built and the project was officially abandoned in 1943 (anything you may read to the contrary is a modern invention). The A9/10 was never referred to as the V3, V10 or any other V-designation.
The Germans planned a piloted craft based on this research. Among the engineering drawings of the A9 discovered after the war were a set of sketches (not blueprints, anyone can draw a sketch but aircraft are built from blueprints) showing a piloted craft derived from the rocket but with a pressurised cockpit and a tricycle undercarriage. Capable of a maximum speed of Mach 3.4 at an altitude of 20km, its performance would have been astonishing for the 1940s.
The purpose of this hypothetical vehicle is unclear; many sources claim that this was meant as a suicide bomber, imagining a fanatical Nazi pilot steering his craft into the Empire State Building or the White House. Ignoring the infeasibility of this scenario, the craft had no space for a warhead and was meant to land on a runway for reuse, presumably it was intended for high speed research or just possibly reconnaissance missions. Combined with an A10 booster, this manned craft could cross the Atlantic in 40 minutes, or fly above the KÓÅrmÓÅn line making a Nazi pilot the first human in space (assuming it all worked as planned, anÒš extremely unlikely prospect). This never happened and the piloted A9 vehicle was never built and was never anywhere close to being built. No Nazi astronauts flew into space on it and no CGI images, however pretty, will ever make this true. Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space, and the first German in space was Sigmund JÓ?hn who visited Salyut 6 in 1978.
Artist’s concept of the A9. I doubt it would have been painted in a Luftwaffe day fighter camouflage scheme in reality, a natural metal finish seems much more likely. (Image credit: Josha Hildwine via www.luft46.com)
Further decrying the modern myths, the combined A9/10 vehicles were not meant to launch payloads into orbit. However during his internment by the American military von Braun did claim that during the war he had designed a reusable orbital space vehicle to assemble and service a wheel-shaped space station. This seems to have been a lie aimed to promote his abilities to his US Army captors, perhaps to help sell his services to them. He called the conceptual spacecraft and its launch vehicle the A11/12 and they appear to have actually been designed while he was in detention in 1946. Again this project was never built and was far beyond 1940s technology, designed without later knowledge of high-speed aerodynamics and atmospheric heating, the craft as planned would have disintegrated in flight had it been launched.
The other great Nazi ò??space projectò?? was Eugene SÓ?ngerò??s Silbervogel (Silverbird) or ò??Antipodal Bomberò??, a fully-fledged spaceplane. SÓ?nger (1905-64), Nazi “Germany’s other rocket genius“,Òš was a gifted engineer who had been investigating supersonic flight and rocket engines since the early 1930s, he continued this sort of forward-thinking throughout his career; by the 1950s he was designing starships. In the 1930s he sketched plans for a rocket-powered supersonic passenger aircraft (note that contemporary airliners were mainly biplanes which cruised at 160 km/h or so). Offered a post by the Luftwaffe (the Nazi armed forces jealously guarded their pet projects from each other; von Braun was employed by the army and later the SS, he and Sanger were kept largely ignorant of each otherò??s work- the pair only met twice), SÓ?nger remodeled this civilian vehicle into an extraordinary bomber.
The Silverbird (seen in model form) was an astonishingly audacious scheme for the 1930s (Image credit: Allen B. Ury/www.fantasticplastic.com)
A flattened metal cigar 28m long with stubby wings and a pressurized cockpit in its pointed nose , a Silverbird would have begun its mission pushed along a 3 km (2 mile) long monorail track somewhere in Germany by a large rocket-powered sled. Once airborne, the craftò??s pilot would ignite its large rocket motor accelerating it to ten times the speed of sound. Gliding over the Atlantic, the Silverbird would drop up to eight tonnes of bombs (once again claims that it was meant to carry a nuclear device have been made up recently) on targets in the eastern US, before traversing the whole American continent. As it flew it would make a series of hops, soaring high out of the atmosphere, then diving back in a rollercoaster-like flightpath. Each time it skipped into space it would lose velocity and radiate some of the heat generated by its hypersonic flight, avoiding the need for a heatshield. Finally it would land on a runway somewhere in the Pacific (presumably on some Japanese-occupied island) where a second track would launch it back to the Fatherland.
It is an amazing scheme but completely unworkable with WW2-era technology and the Luftwaffe agreed, closing the project down in 1942 and putting SÓ?nger to work on more conventional projects. Even today we would have difficultly building such a vehicle, only the Space Shuttle and X-37B have higher performance. In fact the Silverbirdò??s predicted performance was based on a completely unrealistic empty weight of 10 tonnes plus 90 tonnesÒš of propellent. By contemporary standards this empty weight seems a ludicrous underestimate, using WW2 era technology building so lightweight a vehicle would have been impossible. The planned craft contained many elegant technical solutions, the self-cooling engine for example, but despite all the modern computer-generated movies and images of the Silverbird in flight, it would never have worked as designed.Òš The Silverbird could have never attained its fantastic Òšspeed and range.
Even if it had succeeded in reaching the proposed speed and altitude, the proposed ò??hoppingò?? flight path to shed heat was hopelessly inefficient; at high speed a Silverbird would catastrophically turn itself into a shower of aluminium meteors. Although SÓ?nger tested wind tunnel models of this project, it never came anywhere near construction. Some websites feature an indistinct photograph claimed to be of a partly assembled Silverbird but this is incorrect. The Silverbird (itself a nickname) also never received a V-designation.
I should also mention, but only briefly as they are nonsense, the wilder still ideas that the Teutonic supermen were planning an orbiting battle station (das Todesstern?) to focus intense beams of sunlight onto terrestrial targets or evenÒš invented anti-gravity devices and installed them in a fleet of flying saucers. Apart from the sheer foolishness of this latter theory, some of its promoters are deeply sinister apologists for Hitlerò??s regime who deserve only to be ignored. Parodying this nonsense seems to the aim of the Iron Sky movie.
In reality, Nazi Germany never had a space program in the sense of a plan to explore and exploit Earth orbit and beyond. I would argue that it is a pity that it didnò??t. The world today might even be a better place if Hitler had taken a personal interest in these proposals. An ignoramus on technical matters, the FÓÌhrer often overruled his less fantasy-prone advisors, deciding to throw resources at projects that appealed to him, no matter how ludicrous such as the impressive-looking, hugely expensive yet militarily pointless 188 tonne Maus tank and Dora superguns. As a result millions of Reichmarks were squandered and Allied victory crept a little nearer. According to historian Steven J Zaloga, the A4 missile project ò??achieved nothing of significant military valueò?? but cost Germany the equivalent of $2 billion (1945 values, and roughly the same as the Allies spent on the Manhattan Project). That was $2 billion not spent on the tens of thousands of tanks or fighter planes which could have slowed the Alliesò?? advances, building transatlantic rockets, spaceplanes or other space vehicles would have strained the Nazi economy even more.
Just think, if Germany in 1940 had started to seriously develop von Braun and Sangerò??s creations, how much more money would have been wasted, speeding the Third Reich’s inevitable fall? The war might have ended in Allied victory years earlier! Had Hitler sponsored a space program, any surviving Silverbird or A9 prototypes would today be just be popular exhibits to intrigue the crowds at the Smithsonian and Imperial War Museums and just possibly millions of innocent lives could have been spared by their development.
Further reading
Lowther, Scott, ò??Raumwaffe 1946ò??, Aerospace Projects Review, September-October 2003, p3-57
Parsons, Zack, My tank is fight: deranged inventions of WWII, Citadel Press, New York, 2006 (NB: this is an interesting read but the author has included some historically dubious material)
Rose, Bill, Secret Projects: Military Space Technology, Midland Counties Publications, Hersham, 2008 (Again the author has accepted as fact some material I believe to be post-war inventions)
Zaloga, Steven, J, ÒšV-2 ballistic missile 1942-52, Osprey, Oxford, 2003
SÓ?nger-Bredt Silbervogel: The Nazi SpaceÒšPlane
A Brief Criticism of ò??A Rocket Drive For Long Range Bombersò??
World War 2 Space Nazis in fiction
Despite the popularity of Nazi victory tales in alternate history fiction, semi-realistic depictions of German rocketry are rare. A Silverbird attack on the US is thwarted in Allen Steeleò??s short alternate history tale Goddardò??s People (1991), Steele’s novel V-S Day (2014) seems to be an expanded version of this story . The 1965 movie Operation Crossbow (starring George Peppard and Sophia Loren) is an entertaining but historically dubious yarn about the Allied response to the development of the V-weapons; at the film’s climax a giant intercontinental rocket is being prepared for launch from an underground silo but it is destroyed by RAF bombers.Òš Vengeance 10 (1982) by Joe Poyer goes a step beyond this, being both an epic ò??Boys Ownò?? adventure of a British agent investigating Nazi rocketry research and a parallel story of German preparations for a lunar mission in WW2 (Iò??m not sure it this is meant as an ò??Alternate Historyò?? or a ‘Secret Historyò??), it is an interesting read but whitewashes von Braunò??s character to a remarkable extent.
My own interest in this kind of thing dates back to March 1975 when I spent my pocket money on an issue of Commando (a long-running series ofÒš UK war story comics) which featured the amazing sight of a swastika-bedecked orbiting satellite on the cover (this was issue No 920, republished in the 1980s as No 2212) The story Project Doomsday was as far as I remember was a remarkably restrained yarn about a British scientist teamed with a tough commando to sabotage a mystery Nazi project. This turned out not to be an actual weapon but rather a plan to launch a satellite to transmit navigational data to Luftwaffe bombers – kudos to the writer for a forward-looking idea.
(Article by Colin Johnston, Science Education Director)
A very interesting article Colin. Of course the US Space Programme was born out of the work of the Nazis and the Americans actually built a 2-stage version of the “V-2” called “Bumper” launched in 1950, though the second stage was a smaller rocket on top of the original design, not a bigger one underneath it which might have made more sense.
Paul.
Hi Paul, I’m sort of half in agreement with you. Von Braun is a really important figure in the early history of the US space program, but I’d argue that he was more important as a organiser and propagandist than an engineer. He wasn’t essential to actually building spacecraft and rockets as both his admirers and detractors would have us believe. If the US had never taken him and his colleagues into custody (say if the RAF had been luckier when they bombed Peenemunde), I’m pretty sure that the USA would have began launching satellites and spacemen on a similar schedule as they did historically.
I think Bumper was the best that could be done at the time, the USSR did some pretty similar stuff with their R-1 and 2, both A4 knock-offs.
Thanks for the kind words!
What a unique view – perhaps we would have been on the USSR schedule.
USA owe their spaceships to GERMANY, their language to UK, and their land to INDIANS.
They shall be forever grateful.
Dear Richard,
Robert Goddard would disagree with you! Seriously, the influence of German engineers on the US space programme is grossly exaggerated!
Except that Robert Goddard is recognized as the man who made space flight possible. When asked about their V-2 program, one of the scientists said “why are you asking us? We learned everything from Robert Goddard.”
Actually, no. Everybody seems to miss the fact that America developed the liquid rockets. Namely Robert Goddard was the start of all viable space programs. In fact, the NAZIs used his work to get to where they were.
An interesting article despite the politically correct invective.According to the best boigrahies of Adolf Hitler and diaries published by his own staff.Army Adjuctnet Gerhard Engel,and his Luftwaffe counterpart Von Below, Adolf Hitler was greatly interested in technology,and belived in innovation and trying new things.Nor did he personally endorse the MAUS Super Tank,or huge rail guns.The Maus was an experiment conducted by Dr.Porsche,and the rail guns a request of the very traditional artillery department.Germany and her Allies were fighting with limited resources, the most powerful Empires on earth in a bid to make Germany a world superpower.It is not being a so-called’evil’YAWN,Nazi apologist in saying so.The best books on the German atomic programme is THE VIRUS HOUSE by David Irving.The Mare’s Nest by Irving as well.(He actually interviewed the scientists, and found the records-no hearsay or politicaly correct self rightious propaganda)If the victories allies,which included Stalin’s Soviet Union,(Von Ardenne went East) were so ahead.Why were they so eager to employ German Scientists,and capture prototypes,Operation Paperclip, after the Third Reich’s defeat?
Hi, thanks for your comments. Thanks for the compliment, I do love pointing out much the Nazis sucked!
I totally agree that Hitler was very interested in technology (far more so than any other WW2 leader) but he was also a doofus who surrounded himself with idiots. He and his entourage meddled in research and procurement planning to a ridiculous extent leading inevitably to a cyanide capsule for tea in 1945. Result!
I don’t believe building the Maus was Porsche’s personal project; every reference I have read says Porsche lobbied Hitler to be allowed to develop the Maus as the Germany army was very lukewarm about the idea. Hitler loved it and as a result the Russian army got a really cool exhibit for their tank museum.
The superguns were indeed developed to a German army requirement (to bombard Paris in a repeat of WW1 I believe) but Hitler did push their actual construction. Was it worth for the German war effort? No.
I have read both the Irving books (they’re both about 50 years old, I’d be interested to see what more recent works with less emotional investment in their subjects would say) but I don’t really see your point. And yes, I do agree that Irving is a nasty old bore (I assume that is what you are trying to say).
I find it completely understandable that the victorious allies wanted to exploit the talentsof German technicians, I’m not saying that the Nazi engineers were incompetent, not at all, it was their leaders who were drooling imbeciles!
Have you ever heard about aircraft gotha 229? That’s why, that plane was undetectable by radars of that time. And well, it was jet plane as well, both were advantages but only few were made.
Yes, I’m well aware of the Horten Ho229, it was a lovely-looking aircraft. But it is another of those Nazi projects which is grossly overpraised by its modern fans. You read its impressive speed and range performance specifications in books but these are pure estimates. The sole jet-powered prototype (which I believe lacked armour, guns and other operational equipment) made three flights in total (it crashed) and never achieved the hoped for speed and range. I utterly disbelieve it was undetectable by radar, designing a stealth airframe was tricky even in the 1970s, I do not believe modern authors who claim the Ho229 was a deliberate stealth design.
It is not impossible that the Ho229 could have been eventually developed into a useful combat aircraft, but not in Nazi Germany under wartime conditions.
It was actually meant to be a stealth bomber. The design would only leave the engine intakes and cockpit detectable and with the radar the British had it would have been dismissed as a large bird due to the fact that that the radar used waves to find location and size not speed. In the original design it was supposed to be armed with 2 30 mm cannons and 4 5.62 mm machine guns. it was expected to carry 1 1000kg bomb in its cargo bay as well so it had a good load out. I agree that it wouldn’t be used in combat due to the high price to build and arm it but it was successful in the stealth part.(it was made solely to go to Britain undetected drop the bomb destroying power,radio and radar lines then return before the British could react.
Hi, thanks for your comment. Iò??m sorry but Iò??m going to have to question your statement.
Are you sure about both parts of this? Is there any contemporary documentation confirming the Ho 229 was designed for a low radar signature? Iò??ve been aware of this aircraft since the 1970s and books back then never claimed this at all. I doubt it was meant as a ò??stealthò?? aircraft not only because modelling an aircraftò??s radar signature requires theory and computers that no one had in the 1940s, but also because it is clearly following the same design philosophy as the Hortenò??s earlier gliders yet none of them were meant to be operational military aircraft. The Horten H.III is very similar yet was designed as a civil sporting aircraft and flew in 1937 (before the Germans were aware of British radar developments). Also I never seen any reference to the Ho229 being intended as a bomber (there was no bomb bay or provision for a bombsight).
I regret that several modern authors on Nazi rocket and aviation technology appear for what reason to make stuff up to make the German technologists appear to be intellectual supermen rather than competent engineers led by murderous buffoons. Unfortunately this modern propaganda has been widely accepted.
The Ho9/Go229 was designed as a fighter bomber and would probably have carried the bomb load externally. However, there does seem to be a ‘bay’ aft of the nosewheel in the V3 prototype in the Smithsonian. As the surviving example is a V3 (Versuchs – research/prototype) it wouldn’t have had any armament or bombsights fitted
Regarding the ‘stealth’ technology, it didn’t have full stealth, Reimar Horten did state after the war that he mixed charcoal dust in with the wood glue to absorb electromagnetic waves (radar), which he believed could shield the aircraft from detection by British early-warning ground-based radar that operated at 20 to 30 MHz (top end of the HF band), known as Chain Home.
While not ‘stealth’ as we know it, tests by Grumman Northrop in 2008 on a full size mockup did show that it reduced the radar signature to 40% that of a Bf109 fighter and, at the projected speed, it would only have given about 2 1/2 minutes warning for a scramble
Dear Daithi, thank you for your comments but I will repeat that a lot of material on the web, TV or even books about amazing technology made in Nazi Germany has been either extremely exaggerated or even wholly invented over the last 30 years. Horten only declared the Ho229 to be intended to be a stealth aircraft in the 1980s when stealth was a new and exciting idea. I do not believe him.
The staff at the Smithsonian facility where the remains of the the Ho229 are kept have found no conclusive evidence of charcoal dust in the glue. See Is It Stealthly? (link)
Great article and spot-on! I have done a lot of research on the German ‘Space Program’ and although my family originated in Germany and I am biased when it comes to ‘thinking’ the Germans are super smart LOL! Von Braun was an avid admirer of the American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard and wanted (before WW2) to work with him but Goddard was a loner and was always afraid of someone stealing his ideas but he did (Von Braun) learn enough to start work on the German rocket program long before the Nazis took power. It’s a shame Goddard (in my opinion) didn’t throw in with Von Braun as I believe Von Braun wanted to stay in the USA and work on rockets away from the politics that was sweeping Europe.
After the war when we ‘acquired’ Von Braun and his team, other than projects like ‘operation bumper’ etc. our rocket program was terrible! We couldn’t seem to get a rocket off the pad let alone get into space with any of our new projects!
It was good old American ingenuity along with what the Germans had learned that eventually got us ahead of the ‘Space Race’ also, to Von Braun’s credit he did develop the Saturn V , but all the rest of the hardware (lunar lander, etc.) was a team effort from the collective minds of scientists here in the USA.
Best regards,
Phil
Sr Engineer
A nice straightforward article with an excellent finale. A point well made.
I am one of those drawn into fascination with these matters but I am also concerned as to why it is that such popular ruminations of the ò??what ifò?? variety fixate uniquely upon the Third Reich. Is it that ò??The Devil has the best tunesò?? or the fact that the Third Reich ended absolutely, thereby making greater leeway for fantasy. Like a Rock star dying young, its destruction at the hands of the Allies saved it from the failures that it was undoubtedly destined to exhibit otherwise. I for one take the supposed superiority of German engineering with a few buckets of salt. They certainly cant keep the trains running reliably in Berlin.
In any case, I think these ruminations are about to be boosted by Ridley Scott’s movie version of Philip Dick’s ò??The Man in The High Castleò?? (if it is produced). Set in a world where Germany won WW2, the novel starts with the protagonist crossing the USA in a German rocket plane. I cannot help visualising the title sequence showing a Sanger styled sub-orbital airliner skimming through the edge of space (set to the opening of Pink Floyds ò??Wish You Were Hereò??) and baring a flash of Swastika on a tail-fin before it descends into the atmosphere (cue interior cabin scene ironically harking back to ò??2001 A Space Odysseyò??, going down instead of going up, German metallic Gothik-Dekor instead of the white nylon techno-interior of Kubrick’s Space Clipper).
All this aside there is another way of regarding the German rocket program entirely. Effectively, it was Von Braun’s puppy: all he was interested in was spaceflight and going to the moon. NAZIsm, WW2, slave labour and everything else were in his mind merely the opportunities he needed to edge his dreams nearer to reality. Though the Wehrmacht thought they were getting a weapon ( a ò??self propelled bombò??) they were in fact footing the bill for Von Braun’s one man space programme. Moreover, the A4 was utterly critical in making the prospect of large rockets and spaceflight credible. It seems natural now but totally incredible then. R.V.Jones in ò??Most Secret Warò?? recounts how British scientists refused to believe that what they were shown in aerial photos was a rocket. Too big to be a rocket they said. It must be a 46ft long torpedo. This was the mindset of the time, when one exalted physicist ò??provedò?? by arithmetical argument that space-flight was physically impossible.
My view is that without Von Braun (single minded, self serving and obsessively uncaring about the fate of those he trod down on his climb to realising a dream) and without his weapon (phallic pun intended) the USSR and USA would have continued to develop bombers instead of missiles and there would never have been a space programme. Even today.
Viewed from that perspective, it could be said that the Third Reich did indeed conquer space!
In my opinion, the geman culture has a natural tendency towards theory and theoretical achievements, while the american culture tends to be more practically ingenius. The first one can lead to rediculus technical faliurs such as the one you described (which i’m not sure is true) while the second can lead sometimes to a lack of vision. There is no reason to diminish the glory of the V1/V2 developement and to describe it as a continuation of goddard developement, since he only outlined the basic principles of rocketry and there huge loops in theory and machinery needed to be made to get a v2. On the other way, i see as a complete exegerration the assumption the germany was on the verge of a space program. As for stealth vehicles, a more interesting subject than the horten plane is the U480 stealth submarine, which incorporated both unechoic tiles and radar absorbant materials, both of wich worked unprecedently
I actually have an original armband that I was told was used to identify those involved in the secret space program. It is black with stitched lettering in tan that says Nordwest and then on both sides of the word are 2 crossed swords. Any idea what exactly it is and who might be interested in this memorabilia?
You do understand that there was no secret Nazi space programme, don’t you?
It was not an agency but there were applications that would have brought about space exploration if the war had gone the other way. I don’t think you have to convince everybody of the ugly side of the National Socialists; however, I think you may be losing credibility by not recognizing the fact that the adminstrative abilities of the regime were impressive given the scientific and military accomplishments demonstrated by the organisation behind these efforts.
These people continued to work not only for the allies after the war but where instramental in making the two Germanys the most valued Cold War assets for their respective liberators. Good article – thanks.
It existed but not a secret.
If it was secret no one would even be debating it…lol
23 juli 2015 Kepler data reveals Another eart-like planet nasa says
Anyone have any comments on the Nazi UFO’s that were seen by the Allies in flight..They were the Foo Fighters?
They were not officially classified.?
Dear Lori, I cannot say what every such sighting was of, but I can say that they were not some weird Nazi secret weapon, there’s zero evidence for that idea.
If the Germans would of made it and slightly augmented the shielding it would of worked but the set back would of been a slightly smaller payload.
Dear Austin, thanks for your question but no, neither the Sanger project or the A-9 could have been made into practical spaceplanes by adding heat shielding. They would have needed complete redesign and this would have required knowledge that did not exist in the 1940s.
For a History project, I am creating a documentary about Von Braun and I need an interview. Is there anyone who I could interview, Skype, or even email? Thank you for this website, it is very helpful.
Dear Savannah, thank you for your query. You can contact me through the info email address on our Contact Us page at this link.