Walter Dornberger

Walter Dornberger (b 1895) was a general in the Luftwaffe in World War II and the father of German rocketry. He designed the V2 Rocket, which was used against the Race late in the war touched off by their invasion of Earth in 1942.

Following the war, Dornberger became commander of the Reich Rocket Force. He was not a supporter of the Nazi Party and was especially unhappy with his country's genocide against the Jews. He supported one of his astronauts, Johannes Drucker, when Drucker's wife was accused of having a Jewish grandmother in 1962.

In 1965, Dornberger disagreed with the decision of the new Chancellor, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to provoke a war with the Race by invading Poland. During the short and disastrous war which followed, Dornberger did his duty as a German general as best he could, with no hope of victory.

When Kaltenbrunner was killed, Dornberger assumed the office of Chancellor and ordered the German ambassador to the Soviet Union to ask Soviet General Secretary Vyacheslav Molotov to mediate a peace settlement with the Race. Dornberger's leadership of Germany's postwar reconstruction was skillful in the extreme: he satisfied the Race that Germany was complying with the terms the Race had set while secretly stockpiling atomic bombs and rocket technology. Within a few decades of the war's end Germany was once again able to threaten the Race.

Dornberger also loosened the oppressive policies of his Nazi predecessors, and symbolic of this was his granting of an audience to Jewish militia leader Mordechai Anielewicz.