| Yet as the young Ehricke reached to grasp the torch from those before him, he was confronted by another historic figure who viewed the world quite differently. First, Hitler’s Third Reich drafted Ehricke into manual labor. We don’t know the result of his standing up to a Hitler youth group leader and slapping him in the face. We do know that Ehricke went on to earn a degree in aeronautical engineering at Technical University of Berlin. But postgraduate studies in nuclear physics and celestial mechanics at Friedrich-Wilhelm University were soon interrupted by World War II. |