In 1912, Oberth began the study of medicine in
Munich, Germany, but at the outbreak of World War I, he was drafted into the
Imperial German Army, assigned to an infantry battalion, and sent to the
Eastern Front against Russia. In 1915, Oberth was moved into a medical unit at a hospital in
Sighișoara (German Schäßburg, Hungarian Segesvár), Transylvania, in
Austria-Hungary (today Romania).
[8] There he found the spare time to conduct a series of experiments concerning
weightlessness, and later resumed his rocketry designs. By 1917, he showed designs of a missile using liquid propellant with a range of 180 miles to
Hermann von Stein, the
Prussian Minister of War.