Stealing Hitler's Rocket

This is the incredible story of how one of Adolf Hitler’s top secret V2 rockets was stolen by the Poles and smuggled to Britain in the most extraordinary operation of the Second World War. More extraordinary still, it is a story that is utterly neglected.

The V2 rocket was part of Adolf Hitler’s plan to break British morale. The world’s first rocket delivered warhead, the VI, had killed thousands of British people before allied forces captured its launch sites and halted the weapon in its tracks. What they weren’t ready for was a new and more terrifying rocket appearing seemingly out of thin air – this one as tall as a four-storey building and using highly advanced technology. Powered by a rocket engine burning a mix of alcohol-water and liquid oxygen, the V2 blasted its way to the edge of space, before falling back to Earth at supersonic speed and killing thirty thousand people. This was the threat of Hitler’s terror made devastatingly real.

But Winston Churchill’s intelligence chiefs had known of the weapon weeks before it first struck the mainland, and British operatives hatched a plan with Polish resistance forces to smuggle one of these rockets out from underneath Hitler’s nose. In Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, Guy Walters reveals the true extent of the secret and life-threatening operation undertaken by the allies and the Polish underground movement that changed the course of history forever.