Peenemünde, where it all began with space travel.

Where scientists developed the V2 rocket for the Nazis, which was used as a weapon - but actually they wanted to explore space.

This is how the legend goes: The 120 people from Peenemünde around Wernher von Braun, who then explained to the Americans about space travel after the war and without whom there would never have been a moon landing.

And the Soviets didn't get the engineers from the front row.

But at least the one from the second, and so its space program was also owed to the achievements from Peenemünde.

Peenemünde, birthplace of space travel

On July 10th, Manuela Schwesig, Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, announced that efforts would be made to ensure that the former Peenemünde Army Research Center is declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. She told Norddeutscher Rundfunk: "On the one hand, Peenemünde stands for technological pioneering work, and is inextricably linked to the inhumane ideology of the Nazi system."

Furthermore, says Schwesig, Peenemünde could close a gap on the World Heritage list as a historical-technical testimony of the 20th century, since there are so far no World Heritage sites that deal with the causes of wars and the history of space travel.

On request, the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Ministry of Culture announced that they would want to submit Peenemünde in the technical cities / technical ensemble category and that the relevant comments would be internal, but that they would provide the responsible conference of ministers of education with an elaborated reason for this by October 31, why Peenemünde has to become a World Heritage Site.

Missiles as weapons were forbidden

Unfortunately it is not true that Peenemünde was the place where space travel was born. For that, Peenemünde should have been about space travel. But when the German missile program took shape in 1930 at the Heereswaffenamt test system, according to Erich Schneider, employee of the leading department 1, ballistics and ammunition, it was only a matter of finding “a replacement for the heavy artillery and air force prohibited by the Versailles Treaty”. This replacement had to be so easy to manufacture that it could not be detected by the Allied arms controls. In this context, there is a persistent rumor that Germany developed missiles because they were not mentioned in the Versailles Treaty and were therefore not forbidden. This is wrong. Would it be rightone could have continued to use heavy artillery, which is not mentioned in the contract. Missiles as weapons were banned, which is why German missile development, especially in its early days, had to take place under great secrecy.

Gunpowder rockets have long been used in sea rescue, and the Heereswaffenamt used them to develop models that could carry grenades. At the same time one turned to the development of liquid rockets, i.e. rockets that were operated with liquid fuels such as alcohol and oxygen. They expected an enormous range from them, the dream of every artilleryman. The so-called Paris guns of the Krupp company fired 130 kilometers; however, the gun already weighed 140 tons.

First the Berlin company Heylandt, specializing in industrial gas utilization, was commissioned with development work; Heylandt engineers Walter Riedel and Arthur Rudolph moved to the Army Weapons Office in 1934 so that they developed liquid rockets there under Wernher von Braun's leadership. First they worked in Kummersdorf near Berlin; But when it became clear that the development site was too small and the air force also showed interest in rocket propulsion for aircraft, the army and air force decided to set up the Peenemünde test site. In May 1937 the first developers moved from Kummersdorf to Peenemünde. It quickly became apparent that the cooperation between the army and the air force was not working; it was canceled as early as 1938. From then on, the site was called the Peenemünde Army Research Center.