From Peenemünde to Gorodomlya, the German rocket engineer who designed the conceptual ancestor of the R-7
'If we abandon the old conservative form of the V-2, it may be quite possible to reach nearly two thousand miles. The conical shape is, fundamentally, the only possible solution.' to his wife Irmgard, 1949
A German applied physicist and rocket guidance specialist. At Peenemünde under Wernher von Braun, he developed the V-2's guidance and control systems; in 1944 the Gestapo arrested him for expressing defeatist views about the war. Forcibly relocated to the USSR in 1946, he led over 170 German specialists on Gorodomlya Island, where his team designed the G-4 (conical single-stage) and G-5 (packet of clustered G-4s). These concepts directly shaped Korolev's R-7 ICBM; in 1949 a Soviet commission rated G-4 superior to the rival R-3. After returning to West Germany in 1953, he left rocketry, invented the smart card, and coined the German term 'Informatik.'
Activities and affiliations
- Science and technology · Soviet Union
Career Timeline
- 1939–1945V-2 guidance and control department, Peenemünde Army Research Center
- 1945–1946Head of Büro Gröttrup, Bleicherode (Soviet occupation zone)
- 1946German head of Institut Nordhausen, then General Manager of Zentralwerke
- 1946–1950Head of Branch 1, NII-88, Gorodomlya Island
- 1954–1958Engineer, Standard Elektrik Lorenz, Pforzheim
- 1970–1980Managing director, GAO, Giesecke+Devrient
Related historical events
Rebuilding the German team and the Kapustin Yar trials, 1945–1949
In September 1945 Gröttrup opened the Büro Gröttrup in Bleicherode under Soviet occupation supervision. He drew in able specialists, among them Kurt Magnus, Johannes Hoch, Werner Albring and Waldemar Wolff, to reconstruct the V-2 development documents and improve the gyroscope-based inertial guidance and control system. In February 1946 he became German head of the Institut Nordhausen, and in May 1946 General Manager of the Zentralwerke, which employed more than 5,000 people and resumed V-2 production while also reconstructing the Wasserfall surface-to-air missile. The work was supervised by Korolev and Boris Chertok.
On the night of 22 October 1946, however, Operation Osoaviakhim forcibly moved a selected group of scientists and engineers, with their families, to the USSR, and Gröttrup went on to lead more than 170 German specialists at NII-88 in Podlipki and on Gorodomlya Island. The team's practical contribution continued after the move. From 18 October to 13 November 1947, five A4 rockets built in Germany and six assembled in the USSR were launched at Kapustin Yar; after Gröttrup, Magnus, Hoch and others resolved a gyroscope control problem on site, five launches fully succeeded and two partly succeeded. The team then designed improvements for the R-1, built almost entirely from Soviet materials, and at Ustinov's request worked on follow-on concepts such as G-1, G-2 and G-4, none of which advanced beyond the design stage.