Two of these German scientists were now readying Hermes for its test launch. One, Wernher Von Braun, had invented this rocket, which was the world’s first ballistic missile, or flying bomb. And the second scientist, Dr. Ernst Steinhoff, had designed the V-2 rocket’s brain. That spring night in 1947, the V-2 lifted up off the pad, rising slowly at first, with Von Braun and Steinhoff watching intently. Hermes consumed more than a thousand pounds of rocket fuel in its first 2.5 seconds as it elevated to fifty feet. The next fifty feet were much easier, as were the hundred feet after that. The rocket gained speed, and the laws of physics kicked in: anything can fly if you make it move fast enough. Hermes was now fully aloft, climbing quickly into the night sky and headed for the upper atmosphere. At least that was the plan. Just a few moments later, the winged missile suddenly and unexpectedly reversed course. Instead of heading north to the uninhabited terrain inside the two-million-square-acre White Sands Proving Ground, the rocket began heading south toward downtown El Paso, Texas.
Dr. Steinhoff was watching the missile’s trajectory through a telescope from an observation post one mile south of the launchpad, and having personally designed the V-2 rocket-guidance controls back when he worked for Adolf Hitler, Dr. Steinhoff was the one best equipped to recognize errors in the test. In the event that Steinhoff detected an errant launch, he would notify Army engineers, who would immediately cut the fuel to the rocket’s motors via remote control, allowing it to crash safely inside the missile range. But Dr. Steinhoff said nothing as the misguided V-2 arced over El Paso and headed for Mexico. Minutes later, the rocket crash-landed into the Tepeyac Cemetery, three miles south of Juárez, a heavily populated city of 120,000. The violent blast shook virtually every building in El Paso and Juárez, terrifying citizens of both cities, who “swamped newspaper offices, police headquarters and radio stations with anxious telephone inquiries.” The missile left a crater that was fifty feet wide and twenty-four feet deep. It was a miracle no one was killed.
Army officials rushed to Juárez to smooth over the event while Mexican soldiers were dispatched to guard the crater’s rim. The mission, the men, and the rocket were all classified top secret; no one could know specific details about any of this. Investigators silenced Mexican officials by cleaning up the large, bowl-shaped cavity and paying for damages. But back at White Sands, reparations were not so easily made. Allegations of sabotage by the German scientists who were in charge of the top secret project overwhelmed the workload of the intelligence officers at White Sands. Attitudes toward the former Third Reich scientists who were now working for the United States tended to fall into two distinct categories at the time. There was the let-bygones-be-bygones approach, an attitude summed up by the Army officer in charge of Operation Paperclip, Bosquet Wev, who stated that to preoccupy oneself with “picayune details” about German scientists’ past actions was “beating a dead Nazi horse.” The logic behind this thinking was that a disbanded Third Reich presented no future harm to America but a burgeoning Soviet military certainly did—and if the Germans were working for us, they couldn’t be working for them.
Others disagreed—including Albert Einstein. Five months before the Juárez crash, Einstein and the newly formed Federation of American Scientists appealed to President Truman: “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous… Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.” For Einstein, making deals with war criminals was undemocratic as well as dangerous.
While the public debate went on, internal investigations began. And the rocket work at White Sands continued. The German scientists had been testing V-2s there for fourteen months, and while investigations of the Juárez rocket crash were under way, three more missiles fired from Test Stand 33 crash-landed outside the restricted facility: one near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and another near Las Cruces, New Mexico. A third went down outside Juárez, Mexico, again. The German scientists blamed the near tragedies on old V-2 components. Seawater had corroded some of the parts during the original boat trip from Germany. But in top secret written reports, Army intelligence officers were building a case that would lay blame on the German scientists. The War Department intelligence unit that kept tabs on the German scientists had designated some of the Germans at the base as “under suspicion of being potential security risks.” When not working, the men were confined to a six-acre section of the base. The officers’ club was off-limits to all the Germans, including the rocket team’s leaders, Steinhoff and Von Braun. It was in this atmosphere of failed tests and mistrust that an extraordinary event happened—one that, at first glance, seemed totally unrelated to the missile launches.