Helmut Gröttrup

Helmut Gröttrup's father Johann Gröttrup (1881 – 1940) was a mechanical engineer.

He worked full-time at the Bund der technischen Angestellten und Beamten (Butab), a federation for technical staff and officials of the social democratic trade union in Berlin.

His mother Thérèse Gröttrup (1894 – 1981), born Elsen, was active in the peace movement.

Helmut Gröttrup (12 February 1916 – 4 July 1981) was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of the smart card.

During World War II, he worked in the German V-2 rocket program under Wernher von Braun.

Johann Gröttrup lost his job in 1933 when the Nazi Party came into power.

From 1935 to 1939 Helmut Gröttrup studied applied physics at the Technical University of Berlin and made his thesis with professor Hans Geiger, the co-inventor of the Geiger counter.

He also worked for Manfred von Ardenne's research laboratory Forschungslaboratorium für Elektronenphysik.

From December 1939, Helmut Gröttrup worked in the German V-2 rocket program at the Peenemünde Army Research Center with Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun.

In December 1940, he was made department head under Ernst Steinhoff for developing remote guidance and control systems.

Since October 1943 Gröttrup had been under SD surveillance.

A report stated that he, his wife Irmgard, Wernher von Braun, and his colleague Klaus Riedel were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening that they were not working on a spaceship and that they felt the war was not going well; this was considered a "defeatist" attitude.

A young female dentist who was an SS spy reported their comments.

Combined with Himmler's false charges that they were communist sympathizers and had attempted to sabotage the V-2 program, the Gestapo detained them on March 21, 1944, and took them to a Gestapo cell in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), where they were held for two weeks without knowing the charges against them.

Walter Dornberger and major Hans Georg Klamroth, representative of counterintelligence at Peenemünde, obtained their conditional release so that the V-2 program could continue.

After World War II, Gröttrup refused to join Wernher von Braun who contracted US missile development together with 120 high-level specialists from Peenemünde.

This was because family members had to stay in Germany.

Instead, in September 1945, Gröttrup decided to work for the reconstruction and manufacturing of the V-2 rockets as head of the Büro Gröttrup in Bleicherode in Thuringia within the Soviet Occupation Zone.

Although most of the rocket specialists were retained by the US in West Germany he was able to attract outstanding scientists for work in Bleicherode, among them Kurt Magnus, Werner Albring, Johannes Hoch, Waldemar Wolff to reconstruct the development documents of the V-2 rocket and improve the control system based on gyroscope for the inertial navigation system.

From 1946 to 1950 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for the Soviet rocketry program under Sergei Korolev.

In March 1946, he was appointed German head of Institut Nordhausen and, in May 1946, General Manager of the Zentralwerke which occupied more than 5,000 employees for the manufacturing of the V-2 rockets and included suppliers of the earlier Mittelwerk, V-2 test sites and Institut Berlin for the reconstruction of the Wasserfall surface-to-air missile.

Gröttrup worked under the supervision of Sergei Korolev and Boris Chertok who reported to the Soviet military government of Maj. Gen. Lev Gaidukov and Dmitry Ustinov, the Minister of Armaments.

During the night on 22 October 1946, a selected group of around 200 German scientists and engineers - plus equipment - from the Zentralwerke were unexpectedly and forcibly (at gunpoint) moved to the USSR as part of Operation Osoaviakhim by 92 trains with more than 2,300 German specialists including other domains of German technology.

From 1946 until September 1950, Gröttrup headed the more than 170 German specialists working in Podlipki in the north east section of Moscow as part of Korolev's NII-88 and in Branch 1 of NII-88 on Gorodomlya Island in Lake Seliger.

The German team was indirectly overseen by Sergei Korolev, the "chief designer" of the Soviet rocketry program.

In 1947-48, Gröttrup and his team helped Korolev with the R-1 project, a recreation of the V-2 missile using Russian manufacturing and materials.

At Kapustin Yar, he helped Korolev supervise the launching of 20 rebuilt V-2 rockets and analyzing failure causes.

In October 1947 they succeeded for the first time.

As a reality check on Korolev's missile proposals, official Dmitriy Ustinov asked Gröttrup and his small team to design several improved missile systems, including the R-10 (G-1), R-12 (G-2), the R-14 (G-4), and the R-15 (G-5) which was similar to the A9/A10 long range missile von Braun designed during the war.

None of these projects went beyond the design stage.

However, the theoretical work of the German scientists proposed improved solutions due to lack of material, and new ideas significantly contributed to the later success of Soviet space program.

Some ideas were incorporated in the R-2 and R-5 missile systems.

In September 1950, Gröttrup was discharged as head of the German team because he refused to continue work on other Soviet projects, and was replaced by Johannes Hoch and later Waldemar Wolff.

For secrecy reasons, German specialists were not allowed to work on important missile technologies after 1951, but they were kept in the USSR for a 1.5 year "cooling off" period so they could not give timely information to British Intelligence or American Intelligence.

The majority of the Gorodomlya group was released in June 1952.

After returning to West Germany in December 1953, he developed data processing systems, contributed to early commercial applications of computer science and coined the German term "Informatik".

The launcher for Sputnik 1's orbital flight in October 1957 was based on R-7 Semyorka with a bundling (packeting) of a total of 20 engines with conical rocket bodies, as already proposed by the German scientists in 1949 in Gorodomlja.

For political reasons, however, the contributions made by the German collective of rocket scientists to Soviet missile development have long been considered insignificant by the public in East and West.

In 1967 Gröttrup invented the smart card as a "forgery-proof key" for secure identification and access control (ID card) or storage of a secure key, also including inductive coupling for near-field communication (NFC).

From 1970 he headed a start-up division of Giesecke+Devrient for the development of banknote processing systems and machine-readable security features.