Free Agent
Wernher von Braun’s journey from Nazi scientist to U.S. hero.
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
By Michael J. Neufeld
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Knopf; 608 pages; $35.
The story of Wernher von Braun (pronounced “brown”) is the curious adventure of a German-turned-American hero who transformed fantasies of outer-space voyage into realities. However, that story is framed by the often blurred boundaries of good and evil. Despised by some as the Nazi engineer primarily responsible for the V-2 rockets that killed 7,000—mostly in London and Antwerp near the end of World War II—von Braun followed whatever route was available to fulfill his childhood aspirations of space flight. He had dreamed of men one day flying to the Moon and finally realized his ambitions with the development of the Saturn V rocket that launched astronauts into lunar orbit in 1968.
Searching for von Braun’s soul, which is embedded in a history haunted by the Third Reich, author Michael Neufeld has penned a brutally honest, in-depth biography. It chronicles the life of a pioneering rocketeer and one-time Nazi SS officer who became an icon by seducing the American public (thanks to Walt Disney) with notions of space exploration.
Von Braun’s harshest critics insist that he was guilty of war crimes, not only for his primary role in creating the V-2 ballistic missile that intimidated Europe but also because he used prisoners of war laboring in deplorable conditions to build the weapons. More than 20,000 POWs enslaved indirectly under von Braun died at the Mittelwerk rocket facility and its Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. The underground rocket factory where prisoners lived and worked was a maze of cold, damp, and poorly lit tunnels infested with excrement, lice, and fleas. Prisoners wore rags, and toilets were large metal oil drums cut in half and never cleaned. Disease and malnourishment were rampant, and POWs dropped dead at a rate of 20 per day.
To his defenders, von Braun is a victim of Adolf Hitler’s oppressive authority, a serf of sorts who had no options other than to bow to the Führer’s commands. According to Neufeld, von Braun’s own words in a 1950 New Yorker profile reveal the engineer’s mercenary nature. One afternoon, during a gathering of his amateur rocket club in the early 1930s, a black sedan drove up carrying three German military personnel who made von Braun’s group an offer they could not refuse. Von Braun recalls: “They were in mufti [civilian clothes], but mufti or not, it was the Army . . . That was the beginning. The Versailles Treaty [which disarmed Germany after World War I] hadn’t placed any restrictions on rockets, and the Army was desperate to get back on its feet. We didn’t care much about that, one way or the other, but we needed money, and the Army seemed willing to help us. In 1932, the idea of war seemed to us an absurdity. The Nazis weren’t yet in power. We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild. We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.”
Von Braun claimed no knowledge of the Nazi extermination of Jews. In the 1960s, he told his good friend, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey), “I never knew what was happening in the concentration camps. But I suspected it, and in my position I could have found out. I didn’t and I despise myself for it.” Commenting on the confession to Clarke, Neufeld is skeptical about von Braun’s defense: “Knowing what we know now about his direct encounter with SS prisoners starting in mid-1943, the first sentence of his statement could be interpreted as a bald-faced lie.” Quoting historian Ian Kershaw, Neufeld adds, “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but was paved with indifference.”
In his sworn affidavit to the U.S. Army in 1947, von Braun said that he was forced to join the National Socialist Party in 1939. In actuality, he had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, though he was no doubt pressured to do so.
Later in life, von Braun often bolstered his claim that he was not a true Nazi by telling of his and a few associates’ arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. The rocket engineer was a “heavy social drinker.” One night he and his intoxicated comrades had talked loudly at a party about the war not going well, wishing that their rocket development could be used to build spaceships instead of weapons. They were arrested within days. Problems that delayed final production of the V-2 had prompted speculation that perhaps von Braun had actually been arrested for suspected sabotage. There was even some talk that he and the others might be executed. They were freed after a couple of weeks, because Hitler desperately needed them to finish the V-2. Von Braun knew he had to produce a successful rocket quickly or else, which forced him to place an order for more POW slave labor at the Mittelwerk. (Peenemünde had been the first principal rocket factory before it was bombed by the British in 1943.)
During his surrender to U.S. Allies in 1945, von Braun exhibited the same charisma, self-confidence, and luminary quality that would later charm the American public. He and his fellow engineers were hiding out in a ski resort in the mountains on the German-Austrian border at war’s end, trying to decide what to do. Two days after Hitler’s suicide, they drove to an Allied-occupied Austrian town to turn themselves in, where von Braun boasted to his captors that he was the “founder and guiding spirit” of the Peenemünde rocket facility, all the while acting like a dignitary.
“One member of the 44th [Infantry Division, to which von Braun surrendered] later said that ‘[von Braun] treated our soldiers with the affable condescension of a visiting congressman,’” writes Neufeld, adding that von Braun posed “for endless pictures with individual GIs, in which he beamed, shook hands, pointed inquiringly at [American soldiers’] medals and otherwise conducted himself as a celebrity rather than a prisoner.” Von Braun even bragged to a reporter for the Beachhead News “that if he had been given two more years, the V-2 bomb he invented could have won the war for Germany.”
The publication of space exploration articles in the early 1950s by von Braun for Collier’s magazine (illustrated with futuristic renderings of rockets) caught the public’s attention. This led Walt Disney to ask von Braun in 1954 to appear on Disney’s ABC network television show “Man in Space.” The rocketeer’s narration of a segment in 1955 was the first time that America heard his voice. Von Braun and a couple of German rocket engineers were prominently featured in the series, but the show’s producers questioned if it was wise for the program to be dominated by German accents. “The Disney crew had in fact discussed whether it was a problem that all three experts were German. But their very accents fit an American cliché of scientific gravity, and as for the Nazi issue, Walt Disney was the quintessential conservative, Midwestern middle American and seems to have given it little thought.”
One month after the first broadcast of “Man in Space,” von Braun legally became an American citizen in Birmingham, along with a hundred of his German colleagues and their spouses. Von Braun told the press gathered for the occasion, “This is the happiest and most significant day of my life . . . Somehow we sensed that the secret of rocketry should only get into the hands of people who read the Bible.” However, to his parents he reported, “It was a terrible circus, with film crews, television, press people and the usual misquotations.”
Profiles in Time and the West German equivalent Der Spiegel did not mention von Braun’s Nazi party membership. Reporters did not have a clue. Instead, a film about his life that von Braun agreed to participate in began the unraveling of his past. I Aim at the Stars began filming in 1959. Von Braun was paid $24,000, and Columbia Pictures kicked in another $25,000 plus 7% of the net profits. With his newfound wealth, he traded in his American car for a Mercedes-Benz. The movie was initially predicated on the image of von Braun as “a space dreamer persecuted by the Nazis and given a second chance by the United States,” though the script was later changed to portray him more accurately as striking a Faustian bargain to go into space. Still, the film was considered a whitewash job. Ironically, the screenwriter was a 1933 refugee from the Nazis who introduced fiction into the script to make the story palatable for an American audience.
At the Munich premier of the film, three unarmed tactical nuclear missiles were on display in front of the theater. U.S. military brass attended in full uniform. Ban-the-bomb demonstrators were also on hand. At a press conference, von Braun answered British critics of his American success: “I have very deep and sincere regret for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides . . . A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help win that war.” The film was panned and poorly attended. Antwerp, which suffered more V-2 rocket hits than London, banned the movie. Comic Mort Sahl coined the greatest putdown of von Braun’s career when he quipped that I Aim at the Stars should have been subtitled But Sometimes I Hit London.
A year after NASA was created, in 1958, von Braun was appointed chief of the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, and was no longer working for the army. Pressure was applied by NASA on von Braun to hire more black engineers and technicians, but many were reluctant to move to Alabama at that time. Von Braun did not appear eager to get involved when Governor George Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door to prevent a black student from registering at the University of Alabama, yet he publicly condemned segregation when a black MSFC employee enrolled without incident at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Not long afterward, Governor Wallace visited MSFC and witnessed a rocket test. Von Braun addressed an audience that included the governor, and stressed that it was imperative that Alabama move on from its segregationist past. After the speech, he chatted with Wallace and asked the governor if he wanted to be the first person on the Moon. Wallace replied, “Well, better not. You fellows might not bring me back.” &
