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 laborers 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.

SHAME

In many countries, the site would be a focus for national celebration but Peenemuende's sober Historical Technical Information Centre battles even to secure public funding.

"In Germany, we cannot have the same attitude towards our technical history as in Britain or the United States because of the historical associations," said Muehldorfer-Vogt, pointing to a fierce row over a school name to illustrate his point.

Plans to name the school in Saxony after Klaus Riedel, a top Peenemuende scientist, sparked outrage this year. Critics said it was wrong to celebrate a man who made weapons for the Nazis.

"That row illuminates the contradictions of our legacy," said the director, who argues Peenemunde's historical burden was one reason, alongside mammoth costs, for Germany to bind its modern space research into European projects.

Even a recent media buzz over space -- sparked by Germany's major role in the installation of Europe's Columbus space laboratory at the International Space Station -- overlooked the country's early contribution.

"Public interest in the future of aerospace has grown recently but I see no clear trend looking back," said Lutz Richter of the German Aerospace Centre, whose Web site barely mentions Peenemuende.