John Le Carré knew how to spot a good story. So it was of no surprise that the novelist and specialist of Cold War plots found inspiration in that of Lutz Kayser, whose unusual adventures had appeared in the press.
Kayser, a German, was born under Nazi rule into a middle class, semi-aristocratic family in the industrial city of Stuttgart in 1939, months before the start of WWII. As a young child, he experienced the allied bombing raids on his home city, prompting his first fascination with flying machines.
He became an aerospace engineer, and in the 1970s and 1980s what some considered was his crazy ambition became of concern to the United States and the Soviet Union, but also to France and even his own compatriots; this was his project, at a time when Elon Musk was still in short trousers, to establish the first-ever private company for the launching of low-cost, satellite-carrying rockets. But he endeavoured to do so through collaborative deals with the unsavoury African leaders that were Zaire’s autocrat president Mobutu Sese Seko and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, whose interests in such a venture were not limited to the civil domain.
In the end, John Le Carré gave up on his idea of pursuing a plot based on the activities of Kayser. But the German’s story is now the subject of a book published last month in France, Projet Wotan (The Wotan Project), by Joëlle Stolz. A former journalist with French daily Le Monde, Stolz (who runs a blog on Mediapart) met Kayser in the second half of the 1990s in Libya, where he lived with his last wife, Susanne – “Susie” – Schillegger, who had once worked as his secretary. At the time, the couple were seeking payment owed to them by the Gaddafi regime.
In the entrance hall of their house situated in a residential district of Tripoli hung a portrait of Gaddafi, alongside a copy of a letter that Adolf Hitler had once written to Lutz Kayser’s father, Ludwig. “The text is unimportant, but the Libyans love the signature,” explains Stolz. A few years later, the French journalist met the couple again, this time on the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where they had decided to see their days out. In their home there, on their private property of Bikendrik Island, hung a painting by Hitler, placed between others by Matisse and Gauguin. Kayser died there in 2017 at the age of 78. His widow continues to live on the island.
In Projet Wotan, Stolz recounts the career trajectory of Kayser, who inherited the scientific knowledge behind the Nazi regime’s infamous V2 rockets – the “V” standing for Vergeltung, meaning vengeance – which were first fired at England from mainland Europe in 1944.
When, in 1975, Kayser founded his company OTRAG (an acronym in German for “orbital transport and rockets”), part-funded by the West German authorities, the brochure setting out the objectives of the firm was prefaced by Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus. Von Braun, promoted in 1943 as a Commander of the SS, was one of the directors of the Wehrmacht’s wartime ballistic research services which culminated with the V2 ballistic missiles, while Debus was also both a member of the SS and a key figure in the development of the V-weapons.
Because of their leading knowledge in such technology, both men were recruited by the US immediately after the war, along with other German scientists, to work on ballistic missile and space rocket programmes. The Soviet Union was the new enemy, and the Cold War had begun.
Meanwhile, Kayser, details Stolz in her book, had no understanding of geopolitics. He was driven by a desire for revenge. Why should the Americans, the Soviets and the French be the only ones capable of sending rockets into space? Like Elon Musk today, he thought he had found the least costly way of doing so, once arguing that as satellites would become cheaper, the NASA’s approach “will be like transporting bags of cement in a Rolls-Royce”.
Kayser looked for those who could offer him facilities and virgin land. Those he found were the two corrupt African dictators, first Mobuto Sese Seko, then Gaddafi, whose deep pockets were filled by the riches made from minerals and fossil fuels. But in both cases, the projects ended in failure, brought on by pressure from both the US and the Soviet Union and his abandonment by West Germany and France, but also by his poor appraisal of the geopolitical stakes. He became a pawn in a planetary game of power.
He also fell victim to the power games within the Gaddafi regime. Despite this, explains Stolz, he remained in admiration of the Libyan dictator, who was lynched by rebel militiamen after the collapse of his regime in 2011. “I was very sad the way he was murdered,” Kayser commented.
From their Marshall Islands home, Kayser and his wife would observe the yachts of the partying super-rich, a social elite which includes those who have made their fortune in the digital revolution and who are fascinated, like Kayser, in the adventure of space; individuals who are so wealthy they can launch themselves with few constraints, unlike Kayser, into the conquest of space, and not without also prompting concerns.
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- Projet Wotan, espions, jet set, anciens nazis et dictateurs by Joëlle Stolz is published in France by Seuil, priced 21 euros.
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The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse