Germans shun space race legacy

By Madeline Chambers

PEENEMUENDE, Germany (Reuters) - Few Germans know the global space race started on a remote and sandy island off the Baltic coast, an unremarkable place with wide open skies and a carpet of pine trees.

But it was at the Peenemuende testing site in 1942 that a team of engineers under Wernher von Braun laid the foundations for sending man to the moon and the Cold War missile race. They were testing the world's first long-range ballistic missiles for the Nazis.

Germans don't celebrate the site because of the moral ambiguity at the heart of one of the last century's most significant technological breakthroughs.

The rockets, called "Vengeance Weapon 2" or "V2s", were designed to give Hitler military superiority with a stealthy weapon that could devastate enemy cities without putting a crew in danger.

"This place was both heaven and hell," said Christian Muehldorfer-Vogt, director of an exhibition in the testing site's power station, a monumental brown-brick building in the flat land on the island of Usedom which borders Poland.

V2s and their precursors, called V1s or "doodlebugs", are believed to have killed some 15,000 people in Britain and Belgium in World War Two. About 20,000 slave labourers died building them.

For some, Peenemuende opened the chapter of space travel as the weapons tested there were prototypes of all later booster rockets. For others, it is where the most terrible weapons of the age were developed.

It was here that the charismatic von Braun, subsequently the brains behind the U.S. space programme, made his "pact with the devil", as Muehldorfer-Vogt describes it, and cooperated with Hitler's Nazis to pursue his dream of sending a man to the moon.