Von Braun quickly looked away. The gunshot was still echoing off the valley walls when he felt Sanger touch his arm. “Don’t show your feelings,” he said softly. “There’s nothing you can do, and someone might see you.”
Von Braun darted a glance at Sanger, was surprised to see sympathy in his eyes. Until then, he’d always considered the Austrian engineer to be something of a cold fish, obsessed with making his creation a reality at the expense of all else. It was a small relief to discover otherwise.
Von Braun had been secretly pleased when Goering finally ceded to Sanger’s repeated demands that he be allowed to supervise the final steps of Silver Bird’s construction. That gave von Braun an excuse to remain in Peenemünde, which continued to be Wa Pruff 11’s headquarters and research facility, while the final vehicle fabrication moved south to Mittelwerk, the underground rocket base built within unfinished railroad tunnels in the Harz Mountains. He’d never liked Eugen Sanger very much, but there was also another reason why he was reluctant to move to Mittelwerk.
Like many other German citizens, von Braun had tried hard to ignore the concentration camps that had sprung up around the country. At first he’d pretended that they didn’t exist, or that the only people there were criminals who deserved to be incarcerated. And even after it became obvious that the Gestapo and SS were cleaning out the cities and towns and sending anyone they considered to be less than a perfect German—Jews, gypsies, Catholics, homosexuals, dissidents, or anyone else they determined to be detrimental to the Third Reich—he’d preferred to believe the newsreel footage of the camps: clean and uncrowded dwellings with comfortable beds, good food served in dining halls, contented “detainees” tending vegetable gardens and sewing Army uniforms in workshops. Anything else was nothing more than ugly rumors that had no basis in truth.
Concentration camp prisoners had done hard labor at Peenemünde, but they were mainly foreigners, Russian and Polish soldiers who’d been sent to Germany. None of them seemed to be mistreated, at least not so much to draw von Braun’s notice. So when he was presented a form requisitioning prisoners from the nearby Dora camp to Mittelwerk, he signed it without a second thought. Himmler’s demand that Silbervogel be ready to fly by late next spring was his top priority; the project was already behind schedule, and it needed a new source of raw labor if it was going to be completed by its deadline.
It wasn’t until lately that he’d discovered the horror that he had helped create.
And there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
Sanger took him by the arm and gently turned him away from the monorail. “The main engine has been installed within the fuselage,” he said, deliberately changing the subject, “but I’d like to test it again, just to be sure.”
“It was given a final static test before it was shipped down here,” von Braun said.
“Yes, it was… but still, I’d like to make sure.” Sanger motioned to the iron tower that straddled the launch rail. “Once the mating tower is complete, I think we can use it to brace Silver Bird for a short ignition test… say, ten to fifteen seconds. We can do the same for the launch sled. In fact, I’d recommend it.”
Von Braun nodded, barely noticing that Sanger was leading him uphill toward the tunnels. “That would be a good idea, yes. And it will give us a chance to practice the procedures for mating the vehicle with the sled… but only if we can do so without damaging either of them,” he added.
Sanger chuckled. “Wernher, the very last thing I’d ever do is damage my Silver Bird. You know that.”
My Silver Bird. This wasn’t the first time von Braun had heard Eugen Sanger refer to the spacecraft as if it were his personal possession. On the other hand, he couldn’t be blamed for doing so. As much as von Braun hated to admit it, the fact of the matter was that Silver Bird was a more ambitious—indeed, more imaginative—design for spaceflight than the multistage rockets von Braun and the other former VfR scientists had been pursuing. It would never reach the Moon, of course, but later versions might be able to lift into orbit the components of a lunar spacecraft, perhaps even ships for a Mars expedition. Sanger himself saw Silver Bird as the prototype of an intercontinental transport, one capable of carrying passengers from one side of the world to the other in only a couple of hours. Although von Braun was still irate that the A-4 had been canceled just as it was on the eve of success, he was forced to acknowledge that Silbervogel was superior technology…
If it worked. And if its maiden flight was a success, its birth would be marked by the violent deaths of thousands of American civilians.
Not for the first time, von Braun wondered if Sanger had forgotten this or even cared. But then, hadn’t he himself chosen to accept the same willful ignorance?
By then, they’d reached the top of the slope. The tunnels lay ahead, giant stone-lined shafts cut straight into the living rock. They slowly approached the tunnel on the left, following the railroad tracks that prisoners were hammering into place. From the tunnel came the echoing sounds of the work going on within: sledgehammers pounding away at granite, the hissing roar of acetylene torches, the occasional clang of iron beams being dropped.
Von Braun was just about to follow Sanger into the tunnel when something caught his eye: a raised wooden platform erected just outside, with three tall posts shaped like upside-down L’s rising behind them. It wasn’t until he saw a coarse hemp rope tied into a noose dangling from one of the posts that he realized what they were.
From the corner of his eye, he saw that Sanger was watching him. “How often has that been used?” he whispered.
“Four times,” Sanger whispered back, his face carefully neutral. And then he added, “That is, four times yesterday.”
Nausea swept through his stomach. Von Braun hastily looked away. A soldier stood nearby, submachine gun cradled in his arms. The guard seemed to be closely observing him, watchful for any sign of emotions that, in turn, might betray disloyalty to the Fatherland. Von Braun pretended not to notice as he let Sanger lead him into the tunnel.
Before the war, the two tunnels had been intended to allow passenger and freight trains to pass beneath the Kohnstein range. Work had stopped on them a couple of years ago; now they were being enlarged to serve as an underground hangar for Silver Bird and its launch sled. The pounding noise came from the far end of the tunnel, where slaves broke granite beneath the flickering light of oil lamps. The air they breathed was heavy with rock dust, their hands were swollen and bloody, and they sweated like animals. Not far away, their companions slept uneasily upon four-tier bunk beds that were little more than storage shelves for human beings; anyone who had a blanket was fortunate. No one dared speak in the presence of the guards or even try to rest. There was only one form of punishment; if you were lucky, it came swiftly as a bullet to the brain, and if you weren’t so lucky, you slowly choked to death at the end of a rope.
Silver Bird lay within a cradle that rested upon the flatbed train car that had carried it down from Peenemünde. It took up most of this end of the tunnel, with each wingtip just a couple of meters short of touching the walls. The craft was clearly complete; workmen on scaffolds were welding the last titanium plates to its fuselage, while technicians standing beside open service panels beneath the wings were rigging the control surfaces. As von Braun strolled past the spacecraft, he noticed his reflection, distorted yet distinct, upon the sleek surface of the lower hull.
At least Silver Bird was living up to its description. What remained to be seen was whether it would actually fly. It bothered him to no end that there would be no test flights before it was sent on its mission, but the High Command was adamantly opposed to anything that might prematurely reveal the existence of Germany’s secret weapon. So all tests were being done on the ground, under conditions of maximum secrecy.