[gentle music] Given that this is arguably one of the most complex puzzles ever, and as we know from the title of your book, Stealing Hitler's Rockets, what is the turning point that goes from, "This is a puzzle we can't solve," to, "We're gonna go out and steal a rocket"?

So one day in the spring of 1944, the villagers at Sanniki, I, I mean, it's hard to know exactly what happens, but some of them hear a big squelch, essentially.

Let's call it a big squelch.

And the River Bug is, is a major river in Poland, and it's surrounded, like lots of rivers, by a lot of marshland.

And one day a rocket goes nyeow [imitates explosion] and basically belly lands into a marsh, and the locals discover it, and there is basically an intact V2 rocket, okay? And it's sitting there steaming away, whatever it is, ticking over, and of course the Polish resistance are contacted very, very quickly and, and they're thinking, "Right, we've got the whole thing.

We've got a rocket.

It's, it's right there." And what's happening is that the Germans know where the rockets roughly land, and so at the, at the same time as the Polish resistance looking for the rockets, you also have the German army running around trying to find bits and recover scraps.

Can you tell us about it?

The

V2 rocket was one hell of a piece of kit.

I mean, that makes it sound a little bit anodyne.

I mean, remind me, when did man first do powered flight? Well, 19...

11? 11, 5, 9, 11, right? Maybe a bit earlier.

But within, you know, less than 40 years of that, you have got a ballistic missile that goes into space It travels at five times the speed of sound.

And you can fire it not across continents, but you can fire it across countries.

It is

One made not by trained agents landing from U-boats, but by former soldiers, collaborators, and lesser-known Nazi affiliates looking to disappear into new lives.

The US government takes the whole idea of Nazi infiltration on American soil very seriously, and it was the job of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to keep an eye on Nazi sympathizers mount counter espionage operations, arrest spies, bring them to trial.

You know, some of these guys either go to prison or they're executed, you know.

Now it's well known that a lot of Nazis after the war escaped to places like Argentina, the Middle East, and places like that.

What also happened to a lot of Nazis, not senior Nazis, but more junior kind of Nazis or people involved in war crimes at a level of being a, a soldier rather than as a Nazi bigwig, a lot of them flee to the United States and Canada after the war under false identities or with forged documents.

And for decades, many of these men live completely blameless lives in America.

They start whole new lives, you know, with American wives and American children, and their dirty little secret is the fact that perhaps in Belarus in 1943, they helped shoot a load of Jews.

Because while investigators were digging through archives and unmasking fugitives who had slipped into American suburbs, a very different operation was unfolding inside the U.S. government, one that wasn't hunting former Nazis, but recruiting them.

[laughs]

...

in, in the heat of, of, of, of a crash or an explosion.

So what, what the British are very keen to do and have, and there is a massive war going on within the British m- scientific, military, governmental establishment between those who think that these rockets don't really exist, or if they did, they're too big, blah, blah, blah.

And you have a man called R.V. Jones who, you know, was one of the technical s- scientific officers saying, no, they, th- he wrote a book called, you know, My Secret War.

The, the, it, it was, h- he was adamant that they did exist, and Lord Cherwell thought they didn't.

And what was needed was, well, we really need to get hold of one of these rockets.

Mm-hmm.