Outside, on Castle Varlar’s grounds, the snow-covered fields were also being readied. For centuries the castle had been a monastery, its broad lawns used as sacred spaces for Benedictine monks to stroll about and consider God. Now, in the frigid December cold, army technicians made last-minute adjustments to the metal platforms of portable rocket-launch pads. On each sat a missile called the V-2.
The giant V-2 rocket was the most advanced flying weapon ever created. It was 46 feet long, carried a warhead filled with up to 2,000 pounds of explosives in its nose cone, and could travel a distance of 190 miles at speeds up to five times the speed of sound. Its earlier version, the V-1 flying bomb, had been raining terror down on cities across northern Europe since the first one hit London, on June 13, 1944. The V-2 rocket was faster and more fearsome. No Allied fighter aircraft could shoot down the V-2 from the sky, both because of the altitude at which it traveled and the speed of its descent. The specter of it crashing down into population centers, annihilating whoever or whatever happened to be there, was terrifying. “The reverberations from each [V-2] rocket explosion spread up to 20 miles,” the Christian Science Monitor reported. The V-weapons bred fear. Since the start of the war, Hitler had boasted about fearsome “hitherto unknown, unique weapons” that would render his enemies defenseless. Over time, and with the aid of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, references to these mysterious weapons had been consolidated in a singular, terrifying catchphrase: Nazi wonder weapons, or Wunderwaffe. Now, throughout the summer and fall of 1944, the V-weapons made the threat a reality. That the Nazis had unfurled a wonder weapon of such power and potential this late in the war made many across Europe terrified about what else Hitler might have. Plans to evacuate one million civilians from London’s city center were put in place as British intelligence officers predicted that a next generation of V-weapons might carry deadly chemical or biological weapons in the nose cone. England issued 4.3 million gas masks to its city dwellers and told people to pray.
Major General Walter Dornberger was the man in charge of the rocket programs for the German army’s weapons department. Dornberger was small, bald on top, and when he appeared in photographs alongside Himmler he often wore a long, shin-length leather coat to match the Reichsführer-SS. He was a career soldier—this was his second world war. He was also a talented engineer. Dornberger held four patents in rocket development and a degree in engineering from the Institute of Technology in Berlin. He was one of four honored guests at the Castle Varlar party. Later, he recalled the scene. “Around the castle in the dark forest were the launching positions of V-2 troops in [our] operation against Antwerp.” It had been Dornberger’s idea to set up mobile launch pads, as opposed to firing V-2s from fortified bases in the Reich-controlled part of France—a wise idea, considering Allied forces had been pushing across the continent toward Germany since the Normandy landings in June.
Antwerp was Belgium’s bustling, northernmost port city, located just 137 miles away from the V-2 launch pads at Castle Varlar. For a thousand years it had been a strategic city in Western Europe, conquered and liberated more than a dozen times. In this war Belgium had suffered terrible losses under four long years of brutal Nazi rule. Three months prior, on September 4, 1944, the Allies liberated Antwerp. There was joy in the streets when the British Eleventh Armored Division rolled into town. Since then, American and British forces had been relying heavily on the Port of Antwerp to bring in men and matériel to support fighting on the western front and also to prepare for the surge into Germany. Now, in the second week of December 1944, Hitler intended to reclaim Antwerp. The Führer and his inner circle were preparing to launch their last, still secret counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest, and for this the German army needed Antwerp shut down. The job fell to the V-2. The party at Castle Varlar was to be a night of warfare and celebration, with one 42,000-pound liquid-fueled rocket being fired off at the enemy after the next, while the guests honored four of the men who had been instrumental in building the wonder weapon for the Reich.