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Sofie

Wewelsburg,Germany

December 1944

It was supposed to be the most important evening in Jürgen’s career, but the work never stopped. Lydia and I spent a leisurely afternoon pampering ourselves, while Karl and Jürgen threw their tuxedos on and disappeared for meetings in some corner of the vast Castle Varlar. I hadn’t seen him since, but I wasn’t anxious. This event couldn’t start without Jürgen, the guest of honor.

Lydia was by my side as I paused in the doorway to the dining hall, taking in the opulent scene. Most of those in the room were men in SS uniforms or tuxedos. Only a handful of women were permitted to attend.

Lydia was wearing yet another dirndl-style dress—a more formal version with puffed sleeves and elaborate embroidery on the skirt. I was wearing the finest outfit I’d ever owned—finer than my wedding dress. A designer at theDeutsches Modeamtfashioned the suit in cream silk, elevated by thousands of tiny pearls and crystal beads.

I was pretending to be excited, but I felt nothing more than a sense of simmering anxiety. I was always anxious around senior Nazis.

I’d been particularly concerned for Jürgen since the rocket program moved to the site they called Mittelwerk in the wake of a British bombing raid on Peenemünde, in the summer of 1943. The move had been unimaginably complex—the entire rocketry operation shifted more than six hundred kilometers across Germany into the tunnels of a supposedly air raid–proof gypsum mine, beneath a huge hill called the Kohnstein. Jürgen and Karl and their staff were tasked with reconstructing the research programandestablishing a factory to mass-produce the rockets in those mines, and they were given just a few short months to do it.

I tried to call him most days, but his phone usually went unanswered. I’d taken the children to see him several times, only to spend the entire weekend at Jürgen’s villa in the nearby town of Nordhausen, waiting for a break in his work schedule that never came. At some point, I’d started to learn more about my husband’s life through Karl, via Lydia, than from him directly.

He was busy, but that wasn’t why he avoided my calls. He was stressed, but that wasn’t why he didn’t make time to see me and the children. Jürgen was withdrawing from us, and it was time to force a confrontation.

Lydia and I approached the host at the door, and he greeted us warmly as we introduced ourselves. After checking a seating chart, he led the way to our tables.

“You’re here, Mrs.zuSchiller,” he said politely, holding out a chair for Lydia at a table near the back of the room.

“Hello, Mrs. zu Schiller,” Aldo Radtke said, smiling warmly at her from his own seat, a few chairs down from Lydia. “And Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes. Congratulations.” A decade after that dinner party at Lydia’s house, Aldo was no longer fresh-faced and anxious, but he still seemed sweet. He was a key member of Jürgen’s team, one of only a handful of colleagues who was invited to join us that evening.

“Hello, Aldo.” I smiled, nodding at him. “Thank you.”

But Lydia seemed confused. She looked from Aldo to her seat, her expression darkening when the waiter indicated I should follow him to another table.

“You are a guest of honor, Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes. You have a reserved seat at the front.”

Lydia was not a woman accustomed to sharing the spotlight, and that night, she was watching someone else bask in it. I gave her an apologetic shrug, and she forced a smile and nodded, as if permitting me to go to my own seat.

The head table was set just in front of a heavy red velvet curtain, facing the rest of the room like a bridal table. Trails of ivy hung along the front, and bright arrangements of winter flowers were set between pairs of seats—lily of the valley and pansies and coral bells. The sweet scent rising from the arrangements reminded me of Adele’s garden.

I took my seat alone, feeling awkward and on display, and finished a glass of champagne before Jürgen joined me. There were strands of silver along his hairline now, new lines around his eyes, and his tuxedo hung on his gaunt frame. Every time I’d seen him that year, he looked more beaten down. Now, as he sat and shuffled his chair closer to the table, there was barely disguised distress in his gaze.

“What is it?” I whispered.

He turned toward me and whispered heavily, “I’ve been invited to join the SS.” I pulled away and stared at him, forcing a smile.Invitedseemed the wrong word for that sentence, because it suggested there was an option to decline. “Karl too.”

But Otto took the seat beside me then, and Helene soon took the seat on his other side. We exchanged pleasantries as my heart raced, and my stomach churned so much I couldn’t tolerate more than a bite or two of the elaborate meal.

Was this just a ceremonial appointment—a uniform and title, and that was it? Or would Jürgen be forced to participate in still more activities that went against his values? He obviously knew enough to be worried, but he was so much better at playing the game than I was. He laughed and he joked and sipped champagne and ate his food as if he hadn’t a care in the world. But I saw the strain in the lines around his lips and the tense set of his shoulders. I heard the brittleness beneath his chuckles.

I felt the sweat on his palm when I reached to take his hand. Jürgen was scared, and that was more than enough to make me scared too.

The proceedings began in earnest after the dessert plates were cleared. Otto was honored first—called to a podium in the corner of the room by another senior SS official, who gushed praise at his commitment to the Nazi cause and his “genius” oversight of the rocket program, then slipped a red, blue, and white ribbon over his head. TheRitterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzessat heavy and bold at his collarbone. The Knight’s Cross was the highest award in all of Nazi Germany—rarely offered, highly revered. As Otto returned to his seat, the lights dimmed. The heavy velvet curtain behind us drew back. Those of us at the head table awkwardly shuffled around to face a large window overlooking a moonlit lawn.

A crackling anticipation filled the air and a hush swept over the room. A flare burst to life on the lawn, and then came a roar so loud it made my ears ache. Red and blue fire spilled from beneath an enormous rocket, and after some seconds, the missile rose, smooth and steady. There were gasps of delight and cheers, then riotous applause as the rocket disappeared from view.

It might have been going anywhere—into orbit, into space, to the moon. It might have been taking man to new heights, expanding our understanding of the universe and the galaxy—extending our knowledge about our world and ourselves. But that rocket wasn’t a space exploration device—it was a warhead, destined for some unsuspecting village or city...some innocent family in their home, just as Jürgen had once feared. His rockets, now public knowledge, were renamedVergeltungswaffe 2, Retribution Weapon 2, part of the set of Nazi “vengeance weapons” that were supposed to turn the tide of the war. Since September, over three thousand V-2 rockets had been launched, mostly against Belgium and London. Each was almost fifty feet high and weighed thirty thousand pounds. My head ached if I thought about the scale and size of the operation.

Jürgen was the next to receive his medal, and when he was invited to the podium, I watched him closely. He had been quiet and pensive by my side until they called his name. He played the role so well, he momentarily looked like a different man as he stood—a stony, cruel version of the man I’d loved for my entire adult life.

He barked the victory salute back at the official, his gaze firm and his muscles tense. But once he’d returned to his seat beside me, and when the lights in that room went down and the curtain again opened, the burst of flame from another rocket lit up over the lawn. I dragged my eyes from the rocket so that I could watch Jürgen’s reaction to it.