IN THE CLOSING WEEKS OF WORLD WAR II, AS ALLIED TROOPS RUMBLED INTO GERMAN TOWNS and the victors jockeyed to divide the spoils, one prize stood out: the people and machinery that had produced the V-2 rocket, one of the war's most exotic weapons. To the delight of U.S. intelligence, Wernher von Braun and most of his top associates on the V-2 development team chose to surrender to the Americans, shrewdly calculating where they might be allowed to continue their pioneering research after the war. One German rocket engineer, quoted by historians Frederick Ordway and Mitchell R. Sharpe in their book The Rocket Team, sized up his options in April 1945: “We despise the French, we are mortally afraid of the Soviets, we do not believe the British can afford us. So that leaves the Americans.”
On June 20, 1945, von Braun and about 1,000 other German engineers and family members made the exodus from east Germany into the U.S.-held western zone, just ahead of the advancing Red Army. When the Soviets arrived, they found the V-2 underground production center at Mittelwerk mostly abandoned, its top personnel gone and key documents missing.
Among the disappointed Russians was 33-year-old Boris Chertok, an aerospace engineer who had arrived in Germany two months earlier with a broad assignment to search for and evaluate Nazi technology, particularly the V-2. Today a consultant at RKK Energia, the company that built the Mir station and other Russian spacecraft, Chertok's career in the space industry goes back 65 years, including work on the Soviet attempt to send a man to the moon. In the mid-1990s he wrote Rakety i Lyudi (Rockets and People), a monumental four-volume memoir that became a bible for space historians around the world.
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