- PEENEMUENDE (Reuters) - Engineers
crouching in a bunker at Testing Site Seven at Peenemuende Rocket Command
October 3, 1942 cheered as the V-2 rocket blasted off. The space age had
begun, but so too had a complicated moral puzzle.
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- ``This place was heaven and hell. It shows the whole
moral ambiguity of technology,'' says Dirk Zache, director of a new museum
at the controversial site.
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- The black and white rocket thrusting into space from
the small town in northeast Germany was the first step in a process which
would result in the marvel of a man walking on the moon.
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- Yet the same process rained death on the cities of London
and Antwerp during World War Two.
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- ``The engineers said they only wanted to go to the moon.
But the real goal here at Peenemuende was to carry one ton of high explosive
to London,'' says Zache, a 37-year-old historian.
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- Zache is busy expanding the museum, which is situated
in the rocket research facility's power station and opened in March. The
next section, dealing with post-war rocket technology, is due to open in
August.
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- ``Here you can study Nazism in miniature. Peenemuende
was built to bear witness to the ideology of National Socialism. Moral
ambivalence is everywhere. The technicians had a conductor, who played
Mozart's Coronation Symphony in the evenings in the Luftwaffe hall,'' says
Zache.
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- The head scientist was Wernher von Braun, who was the
most famous of 100 Peenemuende engineers taken to Huntsville, Alabama,
after the end of the war to work on the U.S. space program which led to
the first moon shot in 1969.
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- ``Science contains no moral dimension in itself,'' von
Braun once said, but Zache strongly disagrees.
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- ``The big question for us here is how to communicate
the horror,'' he says.
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- BIRTHPLACE OF SPACE TRAVEL
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- Standing at Testing Site Seven, which today is a closed-off,
isolated swamp on the Baltic coast strewn with concrete, it is hard to
imagine how space travel could have begun here among the tangled trees
and missile parts.
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- Insects smash into the van window as we approach the
site and our inspection of the rubble at the birthplace of the space age
is done at high speed as flies and mosquitoes swarm around.
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- ``I've seen astronauts from NASA and British journalists
stand here with tears in their eyes. This is where it all started,'' Zache
says.
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- Peenemuende was built to carry out Hitler's dream of
building a rocket powerful enough to bomb targets in Britain, Holland and
Belgium, without endangering aircraft and crew.
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- Many of the buildings were designed by Hitler's favorite
architect Albert Speer, and propaganda minister Josef Goebbels said the
rockets should avenge the bombings of Dresden, Pforzheim and Darmstadt.
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- While the scientists referred to the rockets as the Fi103
and the A-4, Goebbels milked the development for propaganda value, calling
them ``Vergeltungs'' (Revenge) rockets. The V-1 and the V-2 were born.
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- V-1 rockets, were the first generation of flying bombs
developed at the site. The squat, often unreliable weapons were nicknamed
doodlebugs after the sputtering sound they made. The next generation, called
V-2s, looked more like the rockets familiar to us from the space race.
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- ``These rockets were silent. The only time you heard
a V-2 was when it exploded,'' says Zache.
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- POTATO SCHNAPPS FOR FUEL
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- The rockets were fueled by potato alcohol and oxygen
and it took 30 tons of potatoes to power the rocket for one minute.
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- The two varieties of missile killed nearly 9,000 people
in Britain and nearly 6,500 in Belgium during the war.
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- Peenemuende was a hive of activity in its heyday, before
a major RAF bombing raid in 1943, the biggest British mission of the war,
destroyed large sections of the facility.
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- The rockets were tested there until 1945 and fired at
Britain from launch pads on the French coast.
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- Researchers have found evidence that tests were carried
out to fire rockets from submarines, while a chilling speech by the camp
commandant, Walter Dornberger, shows where the rockets were headed next.
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- ``The crowning of our work will be the American machine,
a two-stage rocket which will cover the distance between Germany and the
United States in around 30 minutes,'' Dornberger wrote in a speech for
a visit by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
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- The first plans for the U.S. rocket landed on Dornberger's
desk in 1943 and the museum contains exhibits of fantasy cartoons from
the era, showing Brooklyn in flames.
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- The rockets were built by slaves and forced laborers
in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in the Harz mountains. Around
25,000 slaves died in the construction process.
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- EARLIER MUSEUM SEEN AS UNCRITICAL
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- After the war, the Russians took over and soon the East
German airforce was flying Mig fighters out of Peenemuende.
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- Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the
site was taken over by the German army. An initial museum was set up by
a former East German air force officer celebrating the development of the
rocket but it was slammed for its uncritical approach to the facility's
past.
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- The seeds of the current museum began after a dispute
in 1992 about how best to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the beginning
of space travel.
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- ``England, Holland and France said you can't celebrate
the dawn of space travel when the rockets had fallen on their heads,''
says Zache.
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- In 1994, a plan to set up a space travel theme park on
the site alarmed historians and the regional and federal government became
involved. Soon moves were afoot to set up the current museum.
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- Kurt Borntraeger, an officer in Peenemuende during the
war, is a regular visitor to the site.
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- ``You can't say it was all bad. Look at the technical
achievements. I'm still proud of what we did in incredible circumstances,''
says Borntraeger, who came to Peenemuende after time on the Eastern Front.
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- ``I built a prisoner of war camp for Soviet prisoners.
We had to prod them with bayonets to make them work hard to build defenses,
but when the bombings came we didn't lose a single POW,'' says the now
elderly officer.
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- Rocket science and missile technology remain contentious
issues, as seen by the dispute over experiments to develop President Bush's
national missile defense system.
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- Standing in the somber final room in the Peenemuende
exhibition, Zache points to the sole exhibit: a pile of rocks and stones
which he says stands as a fitting testament to the days when the technicians
ruled at Peenemuende.
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- ``At the end of the day, all that's left is rubble.''
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