The German Genius

liquid oxygen, in a multistage rocket. 17 Building on this, the motor car manufacturer Fritz von Opel financed a number of tests for rocket-driven road vehicles, all of which experiences came together in the army after 1933. Experiments were run on the remote island of Borkum in the North Sea, where the A2 rocket was developed, the prototype for the V1 and V2 rockets (V for Vergeltungswaffen = revenge weapons) that were to torment London toward the end of World War II. More was spent on this weapon in World War II than on anything else except the Manhattan Project for building the atomic bomb in the United States.
    The rocket development facility was established at Peenemünde in 1936 where at first Göring hoped for a rocket-assisted aircraft—it was only later that the pilotless plane, or drone, was conceived. The Germans were ambitious, seeking a missile that would have a range of 160 miles, with a payload of one ton, traveling at five times the speed of sound (at a stage when no rocket had ever broken the sound barrier). 18 Three wind tunnels were built at Peenemünde to help scientists reproduce the conditions of supersonic flight.
    Hitler had high hopes for the pilotless rockets, in particular that they would terrify Londoners and encourage the British government to sue for peace. The pilotless rockets did see the light of day, roughly 11,000 of them being launched on Britain, of which about 3,500 landed in London or in the south of England (the rest crashed on the way or strayed off course), killing 8,700 and injuring three times as many. But the “terror effect” never materialized. In 1945, 118 German rocket scientists surrendered to the Americans and were taken en masse to Fort Bliss in Texas as part of the secret Operation Paperclip, to use their skills to develop the U.S. space program. In addition to von Braun, Ernst Stuhlinger’s expertise proved crucial to the American effort to launch its first satellite after Russia shocked the world by putting Sputnik I into orbit in October 1957.
    Poison gas was also developed. As early as 1936 Dr. Gerhard Schrader, working on insecticides at IG Farben, had discovered a substance he named Tabun, which attacked the human nervous system, disrupting a neurotransmitter that controls the muscles, causing the victim to choke to death. A year later his team came up with an even more powerful substance, isopropyl methylphosphorofluoridate, or “sarin,” which causes coma, nosebleeds, loss of memory, paralysis, trembling, and many other symptoms. Sarin was named in “honor” of its discoverers, Gerhard Schrader, A mbros, R üdiger, and Van der L in de. Both substances were produced at a factory built in Silesia, where 12,000 tons of Tabun were found by the Allies in 1945. The Germans never used these agents, fearing they would provoke a deadly chemical war. 19 (Hitler had himself been exposed to poison gas in World War I, and this may have been a factor.)
    By the 1930s, certainly by 1939, IG Farben was the largest company in Europe and the fourth largest in the world, behind General Motors, U.S. Steel, and Standard Oil. The company had followed the nineteenth-century successes in dyestuffs and pharmaceuticals by remaining at the forefront of “big chemistry,” meaning that by the time the Nazis achieved office, Germany led the world in synthetic fuels. It cost ten times more to produce than fossil fuels, but synthetic fuel was popular with the Nazis because its production was under their direct control and production figures could be kept secret. The same arguments applied to synthetic rubber, which IG Farben also manufactured on a grand scale. When the war began, Germany was threatened with a shortage of rubber, and IG Farben was pressed into service. Famously, the company settled on Auschwitz as the site for its rubber plant, apparently quite independently of Himmler’s decision regarding the siting of concentration camps.
    Over the years of war, IG Farben’s use of forced or slave labor in the production of synthetic fuel and rubber plants, plus substances like nitrogen, methanol, ammonia, and calcium carbide, rose from 9 percent in 1941 to 30 percent four years later. 20 This resulted in twenty-four members of the board of IG Farben being tried at Nuremberg. Five were found guilty of “slavery and mass murder” and received between six and eight years imprisonment. 21 President Dwight Eisenhower wanted the company broken up, but in fact it was folded back