With the V2, Hitler had told von Braun: 'We will force England to her knees.' It had been a mistaken investment, von Braun later concluded. Some say that 20,000 people died producing V-weapons at Mittelwerk Michel put the figure at 30,000. Just under 3,000 civilians were killed by V2s in southern England (and more than 6,000 by V1s) before the last V2 hit Orpington, in London, on 27 March 1945. The first V2s hit Paris, Antwerp and Chiswick, in west London, in early September 1944. Some 5,789 V2s would be produced (and sometimes sabotaged) between August 1943 and liberation by the US 3rd armoured division in April 1945. 'Compared with Dora,' a new arrival told Jean Michel, a French Dora inmate in September 1944, 'Auschwitz was easy.' Mittelwerk's workers comprised 60,000 largely Soviet, Polish and Jewish slave labourers from the adjacent Dora camp complex.

The civilian director of V2 production was Arthur Rudolph, who would become the co-ordinator of the US programme which, in 1969, delivered Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. In 1943 an RAF attack on Peene- mГјnde focused production of the V2 and V1 to Mittelwerk (central works), an underground factory, near Nordhausen on the southern border of the Harz mountains and hell on, or rather under, earth. But then, recalled the scientist, the Wehrmacht 'was the only rich uncle with enough money to pay for the things we wanted to do'. The 'V' was for Vergeltungswaffe, vengeance weapon, and the V2 (the world's first ballistic missile), like the V1 - ancestor of the cruise missile - never had any other practical purpose, as Dannenberg would have well known. And, as he said a decade ago, it was 'clear that it would be used by the military'.

It provided what Dannenberg saw as the outstanding launch of his life. On 3 October 1942, the V2 was successfully tested, and, reaching a height of 53 miles, brushed the edge of space. There he worked on propulsion for the V2 rocket, and from 1943 on production drawings. Five years earlier Dannenberg had been transferred from the Wehrmacht to the PeenemГјnde missile centre on the Baltic sea island of Usedom. As for their colleagues left behind, many ended up working for the Soviet rocket programme. As a survivor, Dannenberg, who has died aged 96, had been one of the last of more than 100 rocket scientists, led by the father of the US moon landing Wernher von Braun, who were despatched by the US Operation Paperclip from ruined Germany, via Le Havre, to the security of Fort Bliss, Texas, in November 1945.ДЄlbert Einstein was among those who protested to the Truman administration about the Germans' arrival. As a wartime rocket engineer, Dannenberg was one of those employees of the Nazis whose efforts were illuminated by what Winston Churchill called, in May 1940, the 'lights of perverted science'. As a postwar scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), Konrad Dannenberg was honoured for his work on propulsion systems for the US 1969 moon landing.

Konrad dannenberg