Hitler Signs for V-2: The Rocket Age Begins

Adolf Hitler signed the order to develop the V-2 rocket as a weapon on December 22, 1942, authorizing the mass production of the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The decision transformed a research program at the Peenemunde Army Research Center on the Baltic coast into an industrial weapons project that would cost billions of Reichsmarks and thousands of lives. The V-2, designed by a team led by Wernher von Braun, was a liquid-fueled rocket that could deliver a one-ton warhead to a target 200 miles away at speeds exceeding 3,500 miles per hour. It traveled faster than sound, meaning its victims heard the explosion before they heard the rocket coming. There was no defense against it. The first V-2 was launched against Paris on September 8, 1944, and against London the same day. Over the next seven months, approximately 3,000 V-2s were fired, primarily at London and Antwerp. In London, V-2 strikes killed over 2,700 people. The worst single incident was a direct hit on a Woolworths store in New Cross on November 25, 1944, which killed 168. The rockets were built at the Mittelwerk underground factory in the Harz Mountains using slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. An estimated 20,000 prisoners died during construction of the factory and production of the rockets, far more than the number of people killed by the rockets themselves. Conditions in the tunnels were among the worst in the entire camp system. After the war, the United States and the Soviet Union competed to capture V-2 technology and personnel. Operation Paperclip brought von Braun and over a hundred German rocket scientists to the United States, where they became the core of the American space program. Von Braun led the development of the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Soviet scientists used captured V-2s as the basis for the R-7, the rocket that launched Sputnik. The ballistic missile age that began with Hitler's 1942 order produced both the space race and the intercontinental nuclear weapons that defined the Cold War.