'One of the Third Reich's most fearsome weapons': The daring mission to smuggle a V2 rocket out of Nazi-occupied Poland

In 1977, the BBC looked back at the summer of 1944, when Allied agents spirited away pieces of Hitler's "wonder weapon" – by hiding them in the apartment of a German officer.

On 6 August 1944, the Soviet Union's Red Army reached the village of Blizna, northwest of Rzeszów in Poland, liberating it from Nazi occupation. A remote rural settlement surrounded by agricultural fields and dense pine forest, it might have seemed to be of little military significance. Yet deep craters on the woodland floor, metal debris and fake farmhouses hinted at its secret purpose. 

Before the Nazis had retreated a few days before, Blizna had been the test launch site for a new weapon, one that Adolf Hitler hoped would turn the tide of the war against the Western Allies. Known by the Germans as the Vergeltungswaffe (Vengeance Weapon) 2, the V2 rocket was the world's first modern ballistic weapon. Designed by the engineer Wernher von Braun, with a range of approximately 170 miles (280km) and a warhead weighing one tonne, the rocket's supersonic speed and high flight altitude made it a "wonder weapon", capable of exploding without warning in the cities it targeted.

But in the summer of 1944, parts of the V2 were smuggled from Poland to Britain in one of World War Two's most audacious covert missions.

The Nazis began developing the V2 in 1936. However, British intelligence hadn't been aware of the rocket's existence until early 1943, as experts told the BBC in the 1977 documentary The Secret War. "There'd been a little information before 1939 that the Germans might be developing long-range rockets," said Dr RV Jones, the Chief of Scientific Air Intelligence. "Then we heard nothing more until December 1942, when a new agent, who turned out to be a Danish chemical engineer, told us he'd overheard a conversation in Berlin between two engineers who said that there was a new weapon being developed and tried up on the Baltic coast." 

The turning point came in 1943, when two German generals who had been captured separately were brought to Britain for interrogation – and then allowed to talk alone together, not suspecting that the room was bugged. They debated why the rockets hadn't been used yet, saying that something must have gone wrong because they'd been told more than a year earlier that the weapons would be ready in only a few months. According to Jones, one of them said, "Well, we're somewhere near London, and we've heard no bang, so nothing could have happened." 

As Jones recalled in 1977, "[Intelligence analyst] Charles Frank… was just sitting opposite me, and he suddenly looked up from reading the interrogation report and said, 'Look, we'd better take those rockets seriously.'"

The British discovered the Nazis' secret V2 research centre at Peenemünde, on an island close to the Baltic coast, and bombed it in August 1943. After the air raid, the Nazis moved their testing, training, and launch site for the V2 rocket away from Germany. They chose a location further east in Poland, about 150 miles (240km) south of Warsaw, protected by forest cover. Blizna was........

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