 In Nigel Kneale 's 1996 radio serial The Quatermass Memoirs , it is revealed that the Professor was first involved in rocketry experiments in the 1930s , and that his wife died at a young age . The unmade prequel serial Quatermass in the Third Reich , an idea conceived by Kneale in the late 1990s , would have shown Quatermass travelling to Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and becoming involved with Wernher von Braun and the German rocket programme , before helping a young Jewish refugee to escape from the country . According to The Quatermass Memoirs , during World War II Quatermass conducted top secret work for the British war effort , which he subsequently refused ever to discuss . 
