The top Soviet and German rocketeers, Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun, were responsible for some of the greatest innovations in early rocketry. They were fortunate because, as pioneers in an important and complex field, their careers advanced quickly. But both Korolev and von Braun also had the misfortune of working for two of the most dangerous political leaders of the twentieth century.
Though he was a great engineer, Korolev made a poor Communist. During the Soviet dictator Stalin's first purges in the 1930s, Korolev was arrested and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. Prisoners rarely survived their sentences, but Korolev was saved when an old friend and colleague, Andrei Tupolev, who was one of the Soviet's great aircraft designers, was assigned to a top-secret engineering project in Moscow and requested that Korolev be allowed to join his program. Despite the fact that in his new role he was working for Stalin, Korolev always remained openly disdainful of the leader. In fact, he waited until Stalin died in 1953 to join the Communist Party.
Like Korolev before him, Wernher von Braun was also arrested by his government. On March 15, 1944, von Braun was arrested on charges of conspiring to sabotage the A-4 project, a program for developing a rocket weapon that he directed. When von Braun's boss, General Walter Dornberger, learned of the arrest he was outraged and demanded an explanation.
"Do you know," an officer told Dornberger, "that your closest colleagues have stated in company... that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of the rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself, at the whole business of development only to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their objective all along has been space travel?" Dornberger didn't deny anything, but he said that such talk didn't amount to sabotage and that losing von Braun would make the development and deployment of the A-4 rockets impossible. Several days later von Braun was provisionally freed for three months, and eventually the case lapsed.
