:*''I liked mingling with this circle of non-political young scientists and inventors headed by [[Wernher von Braun]]— twenty-seven years old, purposeful, a man realistically at home in the future. It was extraordinary that so young and untried a team should be allowed to pursue a project costing hundreds of millions of marks and whose realization seemed far away. Under the somewhat paternalistic direction of Colonel Walter Dornberger these young men were able to work unhampered by bureaucratic obstacles and pursue ideas which at times sounded thoroughly [[Utopia]]n. The work, mere glimmerings of which were being sketched out in 1939 also exerted a strange fascination upon me. It was like the planning of a miracle. I was impressed anew by these technicians with their fantastic visions, these mathematical romantics.'' - Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich. | :*''I liked mingling with this circle of non-political young scientists and inventors headed by [[Wernher von Braun]]— twenty-seven years old, purposeful, a man realistically at home in the future. It was extraordinary that so young and untried a team should be allowed to pursue a project costing hundreds of millions of marks and whose realization seemed far away. Under the somewhat paternalistic direction of Colonel Walter Dornberger these young men were able to work unhampered by bureaucratic obstacles and pursue ideas which at times sounded thoroughly [[Utopia]]n. The work, mere glimmerings of which were being sketched out in 1939 also exerted a strange fascination upon me. It was like the planning of a miracle. I was impressed anew by these technicians with their fantastic visions, these mathematical romantics.'' - Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich. |