Wernher von Braun came to America from Germany after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. He went on to play a major role in the Cold War’s Space Race with his expertise of rockets. However, views of von Braun are being reassessed as the terrible role he played in Nazi Germany has come to the fore in recent years. Victor Gamma explains.
Wernher von Braun, with his arm in a cast, shortly after surrendering to US forces in World War II on May 3, 1945.
Icon of a New Age
A visitor to the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian will see on display a slide rule that belonged to famed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. To those familiar with the heady years of the Space Race, the visit is akin to paying homage to a sacred relic, the tangible remains of the heroic new age that dared venture beyond earth. It would indeed be difficult to overestimate von Braun’s importance during the exciting early years of the Space Age. General Samuel C. Phillips, who directed the NASA Apollo Project, and who should know better than anyone how important von Braun’s role was, stated that the moon landing simply would not have been possible without the German-born rocketeer. Yet controversy has swirled around the gifted engineer almost from the moment he became a public figure. To some he is something of a folk hero; a Cold Warrior who kept the free world one step ahead of the Soviet nemesis and a uniquely gifted engineer who got us to the moon. He is at least partly responsible for a phrase heard almost daily regarding the exaggerated difficulty level of a concept, that the subject at hand “is not rocket science.” To others he was a war criminal at worst, at best a willing servant of the devil if it would advance his career; an amoral scientist indifferent to human suffering with a cavalier attitude about Nazi atrocities. But historical controversies, like people in general, are rarely so black and white. As we shall see, the answers are not easy to come by.
The roots of the von Braun debate arose from the ashes of World War II. The Allied nations had known for some time that the Germans had raced far ahead of them in certain technologies, including rocketry. As the victorious side closed in on the Third Reich they naturally wanted to obtain this knowledge for themselves. In a desperate effort to keep ahead of the Soviet Union, the Americans had prepared a special operation to scoop up as much German brainpower and material as possible while it was still available. So successful was the operation, the famous/infamous Operation Paperclip, that within weeks of VE day a large number of highly-skilled German technicians were already laboring in the United States, working with captured V-2 rockets and mountains of rescued blueprints. Having served one of the worst regimes in history, the appropriateness of employing Nazi technicians like von Braun was so questionable that for some time, these engineers, once in the United States, did not officially exist.
Space Crusader
For some time the German ‘wonder team’ worked in relative anonymity and under tight security. As wartime emotions subsided, they were given more freedom and attained a measure of acceptance into American society. One member of the team was not content with mere acceptance. Their leader, von Braun, was a man on a mission, like Magellan before him, and would stop at nothing to achieve the ancient dream of space flight. A natural promoter, he understood the need to garner public support for the very expensive goal of space flight. Dreams of landing on the moon had seized the space-obsessed engineer as a child and he was determined to fulfill those dreams. He began to make a name for himself in the early 1950s as a champion of space exploration. His first breakthrough was a series of articles for the popular Collier's Magazine, which appeared in the early 1950s. He next appeared in a 1955 Walt Disney TV series on space exploration in which he explained the intricacies of space travel. The earnest Braun became a teacher to millions of television viewers about the workings of space flight. Much to his delight, the series was a great success. But it was with the launch of Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958 that the transplanted rocket genius truly rose to national prominence. This, America’s first satellite, marked the launch of America’s ‘Space Age’ and the free world’s answer to the Soviet Sputnik. As such, it was a matter of great national pride. Next month the proud ‘missile man’ was featured on the cover of Time magazine. By the following year such comments in published articles could be found such as this appearing in American Scientist, “Dr Wernhner von Braun, whose name is beginning to replace Einstein’s as a household word…”
But along with the glare of publicity came questions about his past. Thus far his employers, the US Army, with no little help from their star missile expert himself, had managed to keep his Nazi past under wraps. Von Braun, especially once he became head of the Marshall Space Flight Center under NASA, had a genuine concern that too much attention to the sordid details of his war-time work under Hitler might damage the prestige of NASA and hinder this Second Great Age of Exploration. But despite his best efforts, a pushback was perhaps inevitable as the public learned more about this intriguing leader of America’s space effort and what lay behind that German accent.
The compelling von Braun story was soon brought to a popular audience through various media including the big screen. In the 1960 feature I Aim for the Stars the rocketeer, played by Kurt Juergens, is given a largely sympathetic portrayal. This biographical film, which covers the life of von Braun from his early youth up to his work at NASA, is not simply a whitewash, though. A theme throughout the film is the main character’s drive to build space rockets, regardless of the cost. In one scene set during the V-2 launches against London, his apparent indifference to the damage his rockets are causing leads his fiancée to declare, “I love you but you frighten me!” Secondly, after his surrender to the Americans, there is the intermittent hounding he receives from one of the characters; the vengeful and impassioned U.S. Army major William Taggert. Taggert, who had loved ones killed in London due to V-2 attacks, cannot allow the creator of the “Vengeance Weapon” to go unpunished. He accuses von Braun flat out of war crimes. The charges don’t stick, of course, because the German engineer is far too valuable to American interests. He is hastily recruited by the Army to continue working on rockets on behalf of the United States. Many years of proud accomplishments follow, despite Taggert’s harassment until the end of the film.
From Satire to Scholarship
The von Braun controversy even found its way into popular music culture. In 1965, satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer sang:
Gather 'round while I sing to you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Nazi, Schmazi!" says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.
The album featuring this track peaked at #18 on the Billboard Top 100 in early 1966. Lehrer went on to say in a 2003 interview: "The idea that Wernher von Braun was a hero didn't make me angry so much as, well, it was just so silly. It was one thing to hire him, OK, but to make him a hero, which a lot of people did ... he may have helped us land on the moon a few years earlier than we did, but who cares?" These voices, though, were but the buzz of an annoying mosquito compared to the general ovation von Braun received. The general public and the grade-school population were given no reason to mistrust America’s leading missile expert. A far-less critical view appeared in the year following Lehrer's album, 1967. A flattering book titled simply Werhner von Braun, part of a school-book biography series on great personalities in history, was published on the rocketeer which compared him to such luminaries as Sir Francis Drake, Columbus, Pizarro, and Da Gama. In this book the precocious rocket engineer is given a ‘clean’ war record. He is depicted as being a distant and reluctant participant of the Hitler regime, more often at odds with it as not. Von Braun and his entire team is described as only focusing on rockets as weapons because they were forced to, when they would much rather have been concentrating on space exploration. Atrocities inflicted on the laborers who built the rockets are absent. This book found its way into Middle and High Schools all over the country. During von Braun’s heyday with NASA and afterwards, honors from a grateful nation continued to be showered on him, which did not end after his premature death in 1977. Posthumous recognition continued, the von Braun name came to adorn civic centers, schools and even a moon crater.
The first serious effort to ‘expose’ von Braun originated in East Germany in the 1960s. This met little acceptance in the West as an obvious attempt to undermine American’s threat to win the Space Race and tarnish the West’s reputation. Indeed, it was only years after von Braun’s death in 1977 that the storm broke and the full story of the links between slave labor and rocket production, as well as von Braun’s relations to it, surfaced. In the 1980s the Justice Department began to investigate the past careers of many German technicians who had worked on the space program. By the 1990s, with the patriotic fervor of the Space Race and the Cold War fading, a reassessment of the rocket genius gathered force. One fruit of this new scholarship was the work of premier von Braun scholar Michael J. Neufeld’s 2007 book, Wernher von Braun, Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. Neufeld’s portrait cast the hero of the Moon landing in a more balanced light with an honest assessment, giving credit where due but also leveling criticism where deserved. By that time the flood tide of revisionism had led to such comments as this: “Now the question is whether NASA — as well as the Smithsonian Institution, which sponsors an annual von Braun lecture — should continue to perpetuate the myth that Wernher was in effect a jolly fellow, well met, who was interested only in his singular dedication and contribution to space flight, politics be damned. Or should they act responsibly, bite the bullet, revise von Braun's biography, rename the lecture and concede that the pioneering space flight genius committed monstrous sins?” Such thinking had led at least one school in Germany named after the famed leader of the Apollo Project to change its name.
Voices of Protest
David Salz, survivor of both Auschwitz and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps, traveled to Friedberg, Germany in 2012 to persuade the Gymnasium to “do all we can to make his name disappear from the school.” Mr. Salz shared a horrific account of the suffering endured by those at the camp. “A word from Braun would have been enough to improve the conditions,” claimed Salz. “What he did was not human, he wanted to build the miracle weapon for the final victory.” Despite reducing some of his audience to tears, the school board narrowly decided to keep the name - until 2014 - with the condition that “a differentiated discussion” take place regarding the eponymous rocket pioneer. The Bavarian Ministry of Culture stated: “Although he served the inhuman war aims of the Third Reich,” he was also “an outstanding scientist” who worked in the USA and helped to realize the dream of landing on the moon.” Not content with this set back, those determined to change the name resorted to political pressure. After further votes and discussion from stakeholders, “In order to avert damage to the school and district” as seen in the “incomprehension and injury” among victims of the Nazis, the Wernher von Braun Gymnasium in Friedburg, named after the rocket pioneer in 1979, reverted back to its original name, Staatliches Gymnasium Friedberg in 2014.
There were even some residents of Huntsville, Alabama, the headquarters of the Marshall Space Flight Center and von Braun’s home for many years, who felt compelled to speak on the matter. Normally Alabamians swell with pride at their famous former resident, but some do not share the feeling: "I think it is shameful that a man who created powerful bombs for the Nazis which were used to kill innocent civilians is idolized in our small Alabama town. Certainly he was a brilliant man who totally changed the trajectory of the American space industry. But, when we as a society choose to focus solely on the good things he achieved we do a disservice to the enslaved Jews who built the rockets he designed, and the innocent men, women and children of England who felt the wrath of those weapons," said one.
Now, read part 2 on the evidence on whether von Braun was a dangerous Nazi here.
