Peenemünde and the total war
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The era of the pioneers and the dream of peace

Jules Verne’s novel, From the Earth to the Moon (1865), revived the dream of interplanetary travel.

Several theoreticians, isolated and with no financial resources, founded a new science, astronautics, at the end of the 19th century and in the first quarter of the 20th:

the Russe Tsiolkovski,
the French Esnault-Pelterie,
the American Goddard
and the German Oberth.

All established the theoretical possibility of travelling through space thanks to jet-propelled rockets.

Frontispiece of Jules Verne’s book, From the Earth to the Moon (1865).

Cover of the German review Die Rakete – The rocket (1927). The title is prophetic: it evokes a spaceship orbiting the Earth in an hour and a half.

It was in Germany, during the few prosperous years of the Weimar Republic, that the rocket enthusiasts were most numerous and most active.

Using the new products and materials discovered in the second industrial revolution (aluminium, liquid oxygen, etc.), they endeavoured to move from theory on to practice by experimenting with small rocket-engines, starting in 1930.

Among these passionate enthusiasts, one figure quickly stood out, that of Wernher von Braun (born in 1912), a young student with a great talent for mathematics and physics. However, these groups of enthusiasts, who had no support either from the universities, or from the major industrial groups, were swept away by the economic crisis.