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so high, he and Dornberger had carefully scripted their cinematographic pitch. Liftoff and flight footage had been seamlessly spliced so that the Führer could more easily envision formations of unstoppable rockets hurtling at five times the speed of sound toward defenseless enemy targets. The Führer’s questions had been anticipated and answers prepared in advance. Von Braun had dressed carefully for the occasion, making sure to wear his Nazi Party pin on the lapel of one of the somber suits he favored whenever meeting high officials. He had joined the party in 1937, not out of any great conviction for the Nazi cause but because it seemed like the right move for an ambitious young man dependent on state funding. Expediency, rather than ideology, had also apparently figured in his somewhat more reluctant decision in 1940 to accept Heinrich Himmler’s invitation of induction into the SS, the Nazi Party’s most fanatical killer corps. Von Braun had contemplated declining the offer. But he had been promoting rockets ever since he was sixteen—in department store booths, amateur newsletters, with the military—and he had long learned that every good pitchman covered all the angles, took every advantage that presented itself. SS membership would stand him in good stead with Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany.

Von Braun had also learned, like any seasoned salesman, when to back off and stay silent. The carefully edited images of the V-2 spoke for themselves. Hitler watched the launch footage, visibly fascinated. He had entered the conference room looking shockingly “unhealthy and hunched-over,” Dornberger later recalled, but at the earth-shaking sight of flames roaring from the charging missiles, the Fuhrer suddenly grew animated, more like his old, firebrand self. At one point, after an especially stirring shot, he leaped from his seat, gesticulating wildly, and demanded that immense ten-ton warheads be immediately placed on each V-2. “A strange, fanatical light flared up in Hitler’s eyes,” Dornberger recalled, terrified to have to explain that the V-2 could carry only a single ton of high explosives. “But what I want is annihilation, annihilating effect!” the Führer screamed.

Hitler was sold. Von Braun got his funding and a top-priority classification. Enough money would eventually be pumped into V-2 production to build the equivalent of sixteen thousand fighter planes that might have changed the course of the war or at least prolonged it. The development of a Nazi atomic bomb would also be curtailed to finance the manufacture of the costly V-2s, which, in the end, claimed a few thousand casualties and had minimal impact on Allied resistance. As Winston Churchill would note, von Braun had helped persuade Hitler to bet the Reich on the wrong weapon. But in 1943, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross and the honorary title of professor, Nazi Germany’s highest academic distinction. “The Führer was amazed at von Braun’s youth,” the historian Michael Neufeld observed, “and so impressed by his talent that he made a point of signing the document himself.” Himmler, intuitively attuned to Hitler’s wild flights of fancy, conferred the rank of SS major on the wunderkind whose rockets would surely win the war. “Von Braun,” Neufeld concluded, “essentially made a pact with the Devil.”

• • •

As fate would have it, the first American to debrief von Braun after the war was Richard Porter, the GE executive and future member of the Stewart Committee, who was then on loan to Army Ordnance due to his technical background. At that meeting in Germany, von Braun presented a twenty-page memorandum spelling out his potential value to the U.S. military and apparently left a lasting negative impression on Porter. Something about the way von Braun had seamlessly staged his own defection before the fighting had even ended, or perhaps the images of the corpses and skeletal slave laborers found at the young rocket chief’s subterranean V-2 factory, must have rubbed Porter the wrong way. (Von Braun’s biographer Erik Bergaust makes the point that Porter