Institut RABE (Missile Construction and Development in Bleicherode, Raketenbau und Entwicklung) was a group of German engineers founded by the Soviets to recreate the A-4 flight control system.
It was created in July 1945 in Bleicherode when the Red Army took over Thuringia as part of the Soviet occupation zone.
It originally consisted of 12 Germans under Major Boris Chertok and Lieutenant Colonel Aleksey Mikhaylovich Isayev.
This mission had to be kept secret, as the American-occupied territory of Hesse and Bavaria was not far away from Lehesten, the testing site for rocket engines.
[2] By the end of August 1945, the institute had settled into their headquarters (the former mansion of Wernher von Braun) but it lacked deeper knowledge of the Peenemünde developments because the US Army had seized a group of 450 specialists in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, among them von Braun's core group, and forced other specialists from Thuringia to the US Occupation Zone as part of the Operation Overcast.