The Parallel Universe

These two histories are is as close as we can get to that period of time when the TICOM and ALSOS teams were out hoovering up all the German secret weapons they could find before borders would be frozen on allied territories. Short version: The Americans got there first, hoovered the fastest, and were quite piggish with their haul.


http://www.ticomarchive.com/home/singit-in-ww-ii

https://www.v2rocket.com/start/chapters/backfire.html

The Russians were trying to muscle into the scuffle as well. As Dornberger in Operation Backfire tells it:

“The Russians sent one of my former engineers to me when I was with the Americans, who told me he had an offer to make on behalf of the Russians. We were to go back to Peenemünde and it would be rebuilt, along with a parallel factory in Russia, and they offered to pay us double what the Americans were offering us. We also could move our families with us, etc. We turned it down flat. Afterward, in the town Witzenhausen, they tried to kidnap our leading men such as Dr. Wernher von Braun. They appeared at night as British soldiers in uniforms; I guess they didn’t realize it was the American zone. Somehow they had obtained a proper pass, but the Americans quickly realized what was happening and sent them away. That’s how those Russians operated, real kidnapping, they had no scruples at all.”

"Twigsnapper" had said that he was pulled off Townsend's security team at the direction of Howard Campaign who did not want a Brit guarding an American. Perhaps it was this last incident which inflamed Campaign's distrust of soldiers in British Uniforms. At the very least we see how aggressive the Russians were willing to be in the pursuit of German scientists.

But however the rocketman pool was divvied up at the end, there was not one among the diaspora who did not carry with him the certain idea that, given powerful enough rockets. space exploration was within humankind's "easy" reach.