Dreams of Earth and Sky (6 page)

In 1932 he was recruited by the German army to develop rockets for military missiles. The army gave him what he wanted: steady funding and freedom to experiment. He pushed hard to develop a
rocket that could fly into space, not caring whether or not the army had a reasonable military mission for it. The result of his pushing was the V-2, the first long-range ballistic missile, capable of delivering a one-ton explosive payload with very poor accuracy to a range of two hundred miles. When the V-2 made its first successful flight in October 1942, this was a big step toward von Braun’s dream of walking on Mars. It should have been obvious to German military and political leaders that it was, from a military point of view, an expensive and useless toy.

How did it happen that Hitler gave his blessing to a crash program to produce the V-2 in quantity? Hitler was not a fool. As a foot soldier in World War I he had survived some heavy artillery bombardments. Von Braun demonstrated his plans for the V-2 to Hitler in person in August 1941, and Hitler reacted with sensible objections. He asked whether von Braun had worried about the timing of the explosion, since a normal artillery shell arriving at supersonic speed would bury itself in the ground before exploding and do little damage. This was a serious problem, and von Braun had to admit that he had not thought about it. Hitler then remarked that the V-2 was only an artillery shell with a longer range than usual, and the army would need hundreds of thousands rather than thousands of such shells in order to use them effectively. Von Braun agreed that this was true.

After the session with von Braun, Hitler ordered the army to plan production of hundreds of thousands of V-2s per year, but not to begin production until the bird had successfully flown. This decision seemed harmless at the time, but it played into the hands of the army rocketeers. The army leaders knew that the notion of producing hundreds of thousands of V-2s per year was absurd, but they accepted the order. It gave them authority to spend as much as they wanted on the program, without any fixed timetable. In August 1941 the war was going well for Germany. The army had won huge victories in the
first two months of the Russian campaign, France was knocked out of the war, and America was not yet in. Hitler did not imagine that within three years he would be fighting a defensive war for the survival of the Reich. He did not ask whether the V-2 might be a toy that the Reich could not afford.

In Germany as in other countries, the main factor driving acquisition of weapons was interservice rivalry. The army wanted the V-2 because of rivalry with the Luftwaffe. The German air force was leading the world in high-technology weapons, developing jet aircraft and rocket aircraft and a variety of guided rocket missiles. The army had to have a high-technology project too. The V-2 was a high-technology version of artillery. It gave the army the chance to say to the air force: our rockets are bigger than your rockets.

Although Hitler was nominally a dictator, he was no more successful than political leaders of democratic countries in keeping rivalries between different branches of the military under control. He could fire military leaders, and did so from time to time, but he could not make them do what he wanted. The army leaders, with the help of von Braun, launched a crash program to produce the V-2. They produced a few thousand V-2s altogether, enough to outshine the air force but not enough to be militarily useful. Hitler could not force them to produce as many as he thought necessary, and he could not force them to stop the program and transfer its resources to the air force. The army and the air force continued to operate as independent principalities until the day Hitler died.

Von Braun’s career as a rocket-builder was divided into six periods in which he worked for six different masters. From age eighteen to twenty, he worked as an amateur in Berlin with the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel, a private group of rocket enthusiasts. He was technically the most competent member of the group. In the years 1930 to 1932 he built and successfully launched at
a small airfield near Berlin a series of liquid-fueled rockets. Rockets are of two kinds: solid-fueled and liquid-fueled. Both kinds are driven forward by hot gas escaping from the back when the fuel burns. Solid-fueled rockets are simpler and cheaper. They were used unsuccessfully by the British navy attacking Fort McHenry in 1814, as recorded in the US national anthem. Liquid-fueled rockets fly faster and farther, but are much more complicated and difficult to handle.

From age twenty to twenty-eight von Braun worked as a civilian for the German army. The army acquired a large area of land at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast of Germany, and built facilities there for the large-scale development and testing of rockets. Von Braun’s mother had lived nearby as a child and suggested the place as suitable for her son’s activities. Von Braun’s friend Walter Dornberger, an army major, was in charge of the program. Von Braun served under him as technical director of the Peenemünde establishment.

From age twenty-eight to thirty-three, during the years of World War II, von Braun continued to work at Peenemünde as a civilian for the German army, but he was legally an officer in the SS. This meant that he was under SS discipline. He wore his SS uniform as little as possible, and only on formal occasions. He disliked and distrusted his SS colleagues. But when, toward the end of the war, the SS took over the manufacture of V-2 missiles from the army, he had to do what the SS ordered. During the final weeks of the war, when he was evacuated with the remnants of the Peenemünde staff to the southeast corner of Germany, he was escorted by SS guards to keep him in line.

From age thirty-three to forty-eight he worked for the US Army at El Paso, Texas, and Huntsville, Alabama, as the leader of a large group of German rocket experts. These experts were hastily recruited in 1945 by the US forces occupying Germany to keep them out of Soviet hands, transferred to the United States, and then employed in developing Redstone missiles for the army. From age forty-eight to
sixty, von Braun worked for the newly created NASA, first at Huntsville and later in Washington. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville became the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960, with von Braun in charge of the development of the huge Saturn booster rockets that safely carried twenty-one Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. From age sixty until his death at sixty-five, he worked for Fairchild Industries in Washington. At Fairchild he worked as hard as ever, supervising a variety of technical projects, helping to develop new airplanes and satellites for military and civilian missions.

The central concern of Neufeld’s book is the third period of von Braun’s life, the five years during World War II in which he realized his dream of shooting rockets into space and accepted a position of responsibility in the SS. The SS was the most criminal part of the Hitler regime, directly responsible for the administration of the concentration camps in which millions of prisoners were either murdered, starved to death, or used as slave laborers. Von Braun knew at first hand the dark side of the SS. After the Peenemünde complex was seriously damaged by an RAF bombing attack in 1943, the SS took over the production of V-2 rockets, and the main production line was moved to an underground factory called Mittelwerk that would be safe from air attacks. Mittelwerk was conveniently located near the Dora concentration camp and the town of Nordhausen in central Germany. Dora prisoners became a large part of the workforce at Mittelwerk, with SS guards to control them. Thousands of prisoners were confined in the tunnels where they worked under horrible conditions and slept on straw or bare rock. A large number of them died of hunger and disease. A smaller number were publicly hanged for disobedience or alleged acts of sabotage.

The boss at Mittelwerk was an SS general called Hans Kammler whom von Braun feared and hated. Von Braun was not responsible
for running the operations. He was only a technical adviser. But he visited Mittelwerk many times to supervise the production process and improve the quality of the output. The facts about von Braun’s activities at Mittelwerk and his SS membership were first revealed in a book,
Geheimnis von Huntsville
(The Secret of Huntsville), by Julius Mader, published in East Berlin in 1963. This book was not translated into English and attracted little attention in the US, being dismissed as Communist propaganda. A later book,
Dora
by Jean Michel, originally written in French but published in English in 1979, reported the same facts and attracted much more attention. Neufeld’s book contains nothing essentially new but adds many details that the author found in unpublished papers by von Braun and others. Von Braun must have been well aware of the atrocities being committed in the tunnels, even if he avoided personal contact with the prisoners.

Von Braun was never interested in Nazi ideology. He belonged to the old aristocratic class of the Prussian nobility who owned big estates in Pomerania or Silesia, now annexed by Poland, or in East Prussia, now annexed by Russia. His father’s estate was in Silesia, his mother’s in Pomerania. These were the people who ruled Prussia for hundreds of years and ruled Germany from 1871 to 1918. They were for the most part highly educated and capable administrators, conscientious public servants, and social snobs, having more in common with their aristocratic cousins in other European countries than with the common people of Germany. They despised the socialist riffraff who came to power in 1918 and established the Weimar Republic.

They despised equally the Nazi riffraff who destroyed the republic in 1933 and gave supreme power to Hitler. But they respected Hitler as an effective leader who brought order and prosperity to Germany after the chaos and misery of the Weimar years. Hitler was, after all, more nationalist than socialist. He did not threaten their social position or their estates. Most of them served him willingly as the leader
of Germany, while continuing to despise the Nazis as social and intellectual inferiors.

Wernher’s father was a typical member of the Prussian nobility. He spoke three languages fluently and his wife spoke six. His three sons grew up in Berlin, in an atmosphere of wealth and privilege. Born in 1912, Wernher was sent to a private boarding school in Ettersburg Castle near Weimar with high intellectual standards and high fees. His friends there were boys of his own class. At school he became obsessed with rockets. He read the classic text
The Rocket into Interplanetary Space
, published by the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth in 1923. He decided that his mission in life was to bring Oberth’s dreams to reality. At age thirteen he made a good start by studying the mathematics that he needed in order to understand Oberth’s equations. At age sixteen he became a member of the Society for Space Travel. At age eighteen, when he graduated from school, he was proficient enough in the theory and practice of rocketry to become the society’s chief experimenter.

Von Braun did not hesitate to accept the job of military rocket developer that the army offered to him in 1932. Hitler was not yet in power, and the army was a conservative institution. It was interested in unmanned missiles rather than manned spaceships, but the same rockets that would drive missiles could later be used to drive spaceships. He found the army rocket people congenial. They were unpolitical like himself, good at working together on difficult technical problems and staying out of the limelight. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, nothing much changed for von Braun. The army remained unpolitical, and the budget for rocketry continued to grow.

Change came in 1939 when Germany went to war, the army rockets were no longer technical toys but real weapons, and the SS tried to take over the program. The decisive moral choice for von Braun came in 1940, when he was asked by the army to become an SS officer.
He did not want to have anything to do with the SS, so he went to his superior officer, Dornberger, for advice. Dornberger told him there were only two alternatives: either he must accept the SS commission or he could no longer work with the army. This had been decided at a higher level in the government. Von Braun would not abandon the army project to which he had devoted eight years of his life, so he said yes to the SS.

One of his friends in the project expressed dismay when he appeared in an SS uniform. Von Braun told him unhappily, “
Es geht nicht anders
” (“There is no other way”). There was another way that von Braun might have taken: to give up his dreams of rocketry and volunteer for service to his country as a soldier or an airman. He was a trained pilot and loved flying, so he might have enlisted in the Luftwaffe and served the fatherland by shooting down RAF bombers. But his dislike of the SS was not strong enough to make that other way seem reasonable.

On February 21, 1944, came von Braun’s moment of partial redemption, when he stood firm against the devil to whom he had sold his soul. He was unexpectedly summoned to a private meeting with Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS and the second-most-powerful man in Germany. By this time the V-2 was supposed to be ready for operational use against England but was delayed by technical problems. Himmler invited him to stop working for the army and move over to the SS, bringing the entire rocket program with him. Von Braun reported the conversation in a memoir written six years later.
†
Himmler said:

Von Braun politely declined the invitation. According to his memoir, he ventured to compare the V-2 with “a little flower that needs sunshine, fertile soil, and some gardener’s tending.” He told Himmler that “by pouring a big jet of liquid manure on that little flower, in order to have it grow faster, he might kill it.” His reason for refusing the invitation was probably concern for the welfare of his beloved rockets rather than concern for the welfare of the Dora prisoners. Still it took courage to refuse an invitation from Himmler. It took even more courage to compare the help offered by the chief of the SS to a load of shit.