Lower Bavaria, January 1946: sent south to put the chief of the Peenemünde rocket men on Sennett's ledger, the author meets the best salesman he ever heard, himself included, and closes on the buyer's terms, which were the seller's. What went unasked in that pleasant office waits two numbers on. —Ed.
They cut my orders the second week of January, and Getz drove me south through a Germany lying quiet under snow, which became it. The autobahn ran in installments, every bridge down and a detour worked around each, the grandest road in Europe delivering us back to farm lanes behind ox carts. Bunny's Tuesday letter had come as we left: the club, the weather, and Daddy asks are you finding good things. My entire board of directors sat in one leather chair in Lake Forest, and I meant to bring it an answer worth my salary. In the valise the Berlin card rode along, unconsulted; on my knees rode the folder, the big fair man grinning out of it with his arm in plaster, and Sennett's backhand under the photograph: This one. Whatever it wants, it gets.
Landshut is a brick town on the Isar, five hundred years old and unbombed, the war having gone around it the way rivers go around certain stones. The Army held the old barracks above the town, wire strung, sentries on it, and inside the wire a hundred-odd of the Reich's best technical men, wintering on contracts, waiting for shipping to Texas. Half the zone knew the place by the operation's own name, Camp Overcast, nobody having thought to classify the name itself.1
Custody belonged to an Ordnance major I will call Pell, a large mild Tennessee man who talked about his Germans the way a breeder talks about his line. The British had been down twice, he said on the walk from the gate, and been charming; an Air Forces colonel had left convinced he had discovered the group personally; somebody kept sending hams from the east. "And watch the Professor," Pell said. "He'll be selling you something inside four minutes."
At the mess he announced me the way a butler does an earl, our army having spent four years abolishing the German aristocracy at considerable expense in order to queue afterward for its good opinion. Men were doing calisthenics in the snow; a string quartet was working in one of the barracks; and the warm room was loud with grievance, rations, delays, the shortage of journals, aired by men who had been dreaming of Mars since boyhood and of America since roughly the second week of May.
He came across the room with his hand out before Pell had finished my name: big, fair, thirty-three, the left arm in plaster to the shoulder and carried before him like the prow of something, wearing the grin from Sennett's photograph. "Mr. Klipspringer. Halsted Instrument and Export." He had my card off Pell's clerk and read it as though it delighted him. "Tell me, what does one export?" "Instruments," I said, and he laughed outright, and Pell's four minutes had started. "And here am I, an instrument. Come, there is coffee, real coffee; your major spoils us, and we permit it."
He kept an office with a stove, drawings pinned four deep, the visitor's chair set where the light favored the host, which I noticed and approved. His English was fluent, polished on interrogators, and he ran the meeting from the first minute. "The team has a name for our position here; we say we are PoPs, prisoners of peace." He watched the joke land. "Now. You have come from Frankfurt to ask why the Americans, and whether I am to be believed, and your colleagues have all needed forty minutes to arrive at asking. I will save you the forty." He counted on the fingers of the good hand. "We despise the French. We are mortally afraid of the Russians. We do not believe the British can afford us. That leaves your country, by arithmetic. You see: candor. Candor costs me nothing, Mr. Klipspringer, because the thing I sell cannot be carried off in the night. It is here." He touched his temple, and the plaster rose a degree with the gesture.
I knew him then, the way one dog knows another across a street; I had answered a corporal at Fort Monmouth in that same fine open style, and it bought me a war. The difference was scale, and I drank my coffee and kept my feelings off my face.
I tried the standard opening anyway: a figure off a CIOS sheet, thrust or burn time, I forget which, given in its own accents. He corrected me the way you correct a promising student, then took the questioning away from me altogether. "You are asking yesterday's questions. Your Ordnance men ask range and payload. The British ask about fuels. The gentlemen who send the hams ask for names, always names. Nobody asks the right question." "Which is?" "What the thing is for."
He stood, wedged a drawing flat under the cast, and gave it to me standing; I set it down as near his words as fifty years allow, because it is the best selling I ever heard, and I have heard my own. "Consider what your government believes it is buying. A longer gun: London from two hundred miles, so; therefore Moscow from five hundred, Moscow being the application every colonel arrives at unassisted. It may have that; it is the trivial case. Now consider what it is buying in fact. A vehicle. The first vehicle since the ship that does not care what lies between departure and arrival. Put instruments in the nose instead of a ton of amatol and it will watch your storms being born two days before Kansas hears of them. Put up a station that circles as the moon circles, and the nation keeping it holds the high ground over every acre of the earth at once. And once the station exists, the moon is not philosophy, it is a timetable. The mathematics was finished twenty years ago; the metal, five. I am thirty-three, Mr. Klipspringer, and I intend to see it, and I am indifferent, within limits, to which flag pays for my ticket. Your government believes it is buying the last weapon of the old war. It is buying the front door of the next fifty years, and the asking price is salaries and a fence in Texas."2
It was magnificent, and the shape of it was the trick entire: the past reduced to a bill paid to the only bank then lending; the future thrown open. I said it sounded expensive, to be saying something; he agreed the way men agree who have never paid a bill themselves. I understood none of the mathematics, which never yet stopped me selling a thing up the line; what I understood was the method, it being my own. He was not defending what he had built. He was making the buyer ashamed of the smallness of the question.
Frankfurt paid me to ask the small question anyway, so I asked it. "There's a line in your file, Professor. Memberships."
"Ah," he said, and it was beautifully done: no flinch, only the light regret of a man asked at dinner about an old operation. "You wish to know, was I a Nazi. I held the party card from 1937; the institute was a state institute, and the card came with the chair, as oaths come with commissions. There was also a commission in the SS, honorary, pressed on me from above; I attended nothing and wore the uniform once, when not wearing it would have been conspicuous. You will hear that I was ambitious among bad men. Mr. Klipspringer, in the Germany of those years there were no other men to be ambitious among. And you will find one item more in the file: in March of 1944 the Gestapo took me from my bed at two in the morning, and I sat a fortnight in a cell in Stettin, charged with defeatism, because I had said at a party that the rocket was a spaceship with the wrong cargo and the war a detour. Himmler wanted my program for himself. So examine me, please, thoroughly; I have been examined by professionals, and they are all now being hanged or hired."3
It was the finest mislaying I ever witnessed, and I have mislaid a Caltech expulsion, a trustee's wife, and the entire contents of my own head in my time. Every word of it true, I didn't doubt, and checkable, which is the art: answer the asked question so generously that the unasked ones die quietly in the anteroom. I went down my list to production, the series drawings; Ordnance would want the factory, not the philosophy. There came a half beat, the first of the interview. "Complete," he said, to the window rather than to me. "Production went underground in 'forty-three, into the Harz; central Germany. The documentation is very full. German documentation is always very full." My cup clicked against its saucer, and I set it down and blamed the distance from the stove. I can smell catastrophe at two days out, and the nose has never once rung early; whatever it caught in that office was months off, and I did what I always do when the money lies the other way: breathed through my mouth, and turned to a fresh page of my notebook, which was blank, and stayed blank.4
He walked me out afterward, bareheaded in the cold, and the sentries came to attention faster for him than for Pell. By the wire he drew with one finger, in the snow on a staff car's hood, an arc from a dot up over a long curve and down; the dot was Kansas. "Twenty-five years. With money, twenty." Then, in the same tone: "You were at Los Alamos in the war, Pell's clerk tells me. Physics?" "Of a kind," I said, and he nodded and let it lie, one professional sparing another. "They sent me two hams at Christmas, you know. From the east." "And?" "We ate them. One does not negotiate with a ham. Also I have flown over their country, Mr. Klipspringer. It looked hungry from a thousand meters."
The terms came out of his breast pocket, typed: a hundred and twenty-seven names. "These men, entire; some are in other camps, and you will collect them. You cannot hire the first violin and call it an orchestra. The families follow inside the year, and their passage is a term of the contract, not a favor to be earned. The archive from the mine travels with us and is inventoried by my people, not your quartermasters, the paper being our capital. And a range with more sky than Bavaria." I began the speech I had come with, "I'm authorized to discuss—" "You are authorized," he said, "to give me what I ask. I have watched four of you arrive now. I know the walk of a man with an open checkbook." Since my instructions sat in a backhand under a photograph, whatever it wants, it gets, I haggled for twenty minutes out of self-respect, and won a concession I invented on the spot so that each of us had a negotiation to report. We shook on it, the good hand doing the work of two. "You will find us excellent Americans," he said at the gate. "We have had practice at being excellent something."
Take one lesson away free, whoever inherits the gathering trades: the whole secret of taking a caught man is to sell him the catching as a choosing. I had worked it in December on a frozen instruments man, with coffee and accurate flattery; what I watched in Bavaria was the same trick run from inside the wire, a prisoner selling a great power the privilege of capturing him, the guard presenting arms as we passed. When you meet your own art at a size you cannot see across, there is no sense competing. Close, carry the bags, and study.
My report went to Frankfurt by teletype, drafted by me, initialed by an Ordnance captain, signed by nobody. Sennett's answer came back in two days and ran to four words, which from Sennett was oratory: CONTRACTS FOLLOW. GET PAPER.
Considine had a map of the zones up when I got back, and a grease-pencil ring around a patch of mountain in the middle of Germany. "Your professor's dowry," he said. "The paper out of the mine, and hardware for a hundred rockets besides, sitting at a railhead in country the gentlemen in London drew for the Russians without asking where anything lived. Lines get honored in the spring; that's the window, and the friends who send the hams have surveyors on the road already. Sennett wants all of it west on rails and nobody's name on the moving of it, which is why it's you." "Where's the railhead?" I said. He put his finger on the ring, on a town in the mountains I had never heard of, called Nordhausen.5
The Peenemünde specialists gathered under Army Ordnance custody after the surrender were quartered with their dependents in and about Landshut, in Lower Bavaria, where the establishment was known openly by the code name of the enterprise itself; the compromise of Overcast was among the reasons the project was rechristened Paperclip in March 1946. The bidding the author reports is documented. The Army Air Forces and the Navy pressed rival claims to the group; the British had borrowed a number of the men that autumn to fire assembled V-2s into the North Sea from Cuxhaven and returned them with reluctance; and Soviet recruiters, operating across the zone line with contracts, superior rations, and gifts, secured several of the team's former colleagues on exactly the terms the hams advertised. —Ed.
The sales talk is corroborated in substance by the men who received it officially. Its author had preached spaceflight since his schooldays and the amateur rocket field outside Berlin; part of the Gestapo's 1944 case against him was precisely that his mind ran on space travel rather than on weapons; and a memorandum he wrote in American custody in May 1945 predicted artificial satellites, orbiting stations, and voyages to the moon. Delivery followed in due course: the Collier's spaceflight series of 1952, the first American satellite in 1958, and the Saturn rockets of the lunar landings, built under his direction at Huntsville, Alabama. He is the rare witness in these papers who oversold nothing but himself. —Ed.
Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun, born 1912, was the son of a baron who had served the Republic as a minister of agriculture. He joined the National Socialist party in 1937 and held a commission in the SS from 1940, rising by 1943 to Sturmbannführer, matters he related afterward very much as the author renders them; the arrest of March 1944 and the fortnight in the Stettin cell are real, and served their owner ever after in just this employment. An early security report on him, which found a potential security threat and an ardent Nazi, was in due course succeeded by one that found nothing objectionable, the file passing through several helpful hands on its way to that opinion. As to the calendar: the plaster came off in the summer of 1945, and its wearer crossed to America with the first party of seven specialists that September, spending the author's January at Fort Bliss, Texas. The shipping records and this memoir cannot both be right; readers of the first bundle know the editor's practice in such cases, and will note that the portrait, whatever its date, is confirmed by every man who ever bought anything from its subject. —Ed.
One question the author, an asker of questions by trade, shows himself not asking. The rocket left Peenemünde for series production in the autumn of 1943, into galleries driven under a mountain in the Harz, a plant called Mittelwerk, worked by prisoners of the camp established at its mouth, called Dora; more men died making the weapon than died under it. The professor's remark that German documentation is always very full is accurate of that plant's records also. The ground itself belongs to a later number, and the author walks it. —Ed.
Fourteen tons of the project's papers, walled into a gallery of an iron mine near Goslar against all comers, were recovered by an American document team in the last days of May 1945, a week ahead of the British occupation of that district; and the contents of the Mittelwerk itself, parts for a hundred rockets, went west in three hundred and forty-one railway cars in nine days, ahead of the Soviet occupation of the zone as drawn. The author's dates, here as in the previous number, run a season and more behind the Army's, and the editor has ceased adjusting them. What stands in every record is that the paper and the hardware moved west by rail, that more than one nation wanted the same train, and that the moving of it wanted men whose names appear nowhere. The railhead is the business of the number that follows. —Ed.