The man at the scientific center of the V-2 rocket program was a thirty-two-year-old aristocrat and wunderkind-physicist named Wernher von Braun. Von Braun was at Castle Varlar to receive, alongside Dornberger, one of Hitler’s highest and most coveted noncombat decorations, the Knight’s Cross of the War Service Cross. Also receiving the honor were Walther Riedel, the top scientist in the rocket design bureau, and Heinz Kunze, a representative from the Reich’s armaments ministry. These four medals were to be presented by Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production.
Armaments are the aggregate of a nation’s military strength, and as minister of weapons, Speer was in charge of scientific armaments programs for the Third Reich. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931, at the age of twenty-six, and rose to power in the party as Hitler’s architect. In that role he created buildings that symbolized the Reich and represented its ideas and quickly became a favorite, joining Hitler’s inner circle. In February 1942 Hitler made Speer his minister of armaments and war production after the former minister, Fritz Todt, died in a plane crash. By the following month Speer had persuaded Hitler to make all other elements of the German economy second to armaments production, which Hitler did by decree. “Total productivity in armaments increased by 59.6 per cent,” Speer claimed after the war. At the age of thirty-seven, Albert Speer was now responsible for all science and technology programs necessary for waging war. Of the hundreds of weapons projects he was involved in, it was the V-2 that he favored most.
Like von Braun, Speer was from a wealthy, well-respected German family, not quite a baron but someone who wished he was. Speer liked to exchange ideas with youthful, ambitious rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun. He admired “young men able to work unhampered by bureaucratic obstacles and pursue ideas which at times sounded thoroughly utopian.”
As for General Dornberger, the Castle Varlar celebration was a crowning moment of his career. The pomp and power thrilled him, he later recalled. “It was a scene,” Dornberger said after the war—the excitement of the evening, “[t]he blackness of the night.…” At one point during the meal, in between courses, the lights inside the castle were turned off and the grand banquet hall was plunged into darkness. After a moment of anticipatory silence, a tall curtain at the end of the long hall swung open, allowing guests to gaze out across the dark, wintry lawns. “The room suddenly lit [up] with the flickering light of the rocket’s exhaust and [was] shaken by the reverberations of its engines,” remembered Dornberger. Outside, perched atop a mobile rocket-launch pad, the spectacle began. An inferno of burning rocket fuel blasted out the bottom of the V-2, powering the massive rocket into flight, headed toward Belgium. For Dornberger, rocket launches instilled “unbelievable” feelings of pride. Once, during an earlier launch, the general wept with joy.
On this night the excitement focus alternated—from a rocket launch to award decoration, then back to a rocket launch again. After each launch, Speer decorated one of the medal recipients. The crowd clapped and cheered and sipped champagne until the banquet hall was again filled with darkness and the next rocket fired off the castle lawn.
This particular party would end, but the celebrations continued elsewhere. The team returned to Peenemünde, the isolated island facility on the Baltic Coast where the V-weapons had been conceived and originally produced, and on the night of December 16, 1944, a party in the Peenemünde’s officer’s club again honored the men. Von Braun and Dornberger, wearing crisp tuxedos, each with a Knight’s Cross from Hitler dangling around his neck, read telegrams of congratulations to Nazi officials as the group toasted their success with flutes of champagne. In the eyes of the Reich, Hitler’s rocketeers had good reason to celebrate. In Antwerp at 3:20 p.m., a V-2 rocket had smashed into the Rex Cinema, where almost 1,200 people were watching a Gary Cooper film. It was the highest death toll from a single rocket attack during the war—567 casualties.