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His audience, back in July 1943, had been considerably smaller, consisting of just four men: Third Reich armaments minister Albert Speer, Werhmacht missile chief Walter Dornberger, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Adolf Hitler. The screening had taken place at Hitler’s East Prussian bunker, Wolfsschanze, in the very same concrete-lined conference room where a year later the one-armed Count Claus von Stauffenberg would detonate a briefcase bomb in a failed attempt on the Führer’s life. Von Braun and Dornberger had come to the Wolf’s Lair to tout the V-2’s advances and to ensure that Hitler gave the missile a top-priority classification, which would guarantee the timely delivery of scarce supplies like sheet metal. Anticipating the Führer’s fondness for theatrics, von Braun had prepared visual aids: cutaway models and film that had been shot using several cameras simultaneously to capture the V-2’s flight from every dramatic vantage point. A great deal of effort had gone into the production, which had been filmed by a professional crew, using the newest color negatives. But then there was a great deal at stake. Hitler was far from sold on the V-2, which he had never seen in action. As an old artillery man, he tended to think of the missile as a giant cannon shell and clearly didn’t understand the new technology. And he had had one of his infamous “prophetic” dreams, in which the rocket had failed. That, more than anything, had soured him on V-2 production. But von Braun and Dornberger had several things going for them. The Luftwaffe was losing the air war, and it had become clear that Field Marshal Hermann Goring’s Junkers would not be able to bomb Britain into submission. If Hitler approved the V-2 as an alternative, it would open the floodgates for hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks in funding and would keep the other weapons programs under Speer’s supervision from snatching up valuable component parts. But first, the Führer needed to be sold on the merits of the missile.

After several anxious hours of waiting, the Führer arrived for the appointed interview, and the projector was finally set up. Von Braun and Dornberger quickly stubbed out their cigarettes—Hitler abhorred smoking—and the film started rolling. Von Braun provided running commentary, illustrating improvements on the V-2’s thrust, guidance mechanisms, and accuracy. This was his fourth encounter with the German leader, whom he had first met as a twenty-two-year-old engineer in 1934, shortly after Hitler’s National Socialists had seized power. At the time, von Braun and Dornberger, then a young army captain, had just begun the Wehrmacht’s embryonic missile program. It offered an intriguing loophole around the onerous restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, which had barred any German buildup of conventional weapons. Missiles, as a completely new technology, had been not included in the list of banned armaments, and the German army had surreptitiously begun scouring amateur rocketry clubs for recruits. Few rocket enthusiasts had wanted to submit to military rigors, but even as a teenager von Braun had realized that only government agencies had the kind of financial resources to make his rocket dreams come true. He had signed on with Dornberger in 1932, the year before Hitler’s ascendancy, while he was still a university student. In 1934, Hitler “seemed a pretty dowdy type,” von Braun later recalled. But as the country’s new leader, he held the national purse strings. “Our main concern,” von Braun elaborated, “was how to get the most out of the Golden Calf.”

A decade later, the Führer was still not convinced that rockets were Nazi Germany’s salvation, despite the vast sums that had been spent on research and development. For von Braun, the July 1943 meeting was especially critical. The war was beginning to take its economic toll on the Third Reich. Money and materials were becoming scarce. Slave laborers were in short supply. Cuts would have to be made. And so with the stakes