Dark Side of the Moon: Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich and the Space Race

282 Pages·2009·2.89 MB·English

by  Wayne Biddle

Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
1 A Junker’s Life
2 Memories Of Defeat
3 “Highly Technological Romanticism”
4 An Heir Of Credibility
5 Childhood’s End
6 “Fingers In The Pie”
7 Supreme Zeal
8 Grand And Horribly Wrong
9 Depravity
10 “A Psychological Block”
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Photograph Credits
Index
Dark Side of the Moon
WERNHER VON BRAUN, THE THIRD REICH, AND THE
SPACE RACE
Wayne Biddle
Copyright © 2009 by Wayne Biddle
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biddle, Wayne.
Dark side of the moon : Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich, and the
space race / Wayne Biddle.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-05910-6 (hardcover)
1. Von Braun, Wernher, 1912-1977. 2. Rocketry—Germany—Biography.
3. Rocketry—United States—Biography. 4. World War, 1939-1945—Science.
5. Space race—United States—History—20th century.
6. Germany—Politics and government—1933-1945. 7. Cold War. I. Title.
TL781.85.V6B53 2009
629.4092—dc22
[B]
2009015572
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
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FOR JEAN
INTRODUCTION
The saying that “no one is voluntarily wicked nor involuntarily happy” seems
to be partly false and partly true; for no one is involuntarily happy, but
wickedness is voluntary.
—Nicomachean Ethics
T
HE SUBJECT OF moral responsibility has a long history, stretching at least
as far back as the fourth century BC. In Book Three of his Nicomachean
Ethics, Aristotle discussed how to decide whether someone should be praised
or blamed—either way, that is—for an action. Simply put, a person is
morally responsible for something if he was causally responsible for it, if he
was in a position to know that it would come about, if what he did was freely
undertaken, and if he was fully rational. As courts of law demonstrate every
day, real life is infinitely complicated and each segment of this statement has
been masticated by philosophers ever since, but it is fair to say that there is
broad agreement in Western culture that if all four conditions are met, then an
individual is on the spot for better or worse.1
The issue of whether scientists are responsible for the outcomes of their
work has been especially turbid since they became powerful enough during
the last century to alter the landscape. In 1962, the chemist and sociologist
Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) argued in an influential essay called “The
Republic of Science” that the practical results of pure science are often
unforeseen; therefore a scientist may not be liable for what others do with
them. He recalled that in April 1945, he and Bertrand Russell were asked on
a British radio show what applications might arise from Einstein’s E = mc2,
and they both drew a blank.
Laws of nature are morally neutral, everyone agrees. But so-called pure
science—the discovery or extension of fundamental theory—is practiced by
only a small fraction of the profession. The rest take accepted principles and
apply them to carefully defined problems with definite notions about the
solutions, which may or may not have practical outcomes. Most engineers, of
course, are directly involved with applications in the everyday world.
Nonetheless, the separation between scientists and engineers is often
impossible to delineate. Yet the convention that scientists as a group exist in
a stratum detached from and untainted by common sociopolitical forces, and
are thus somehow above reproach, has proved remarkably durable, albeit
weakened by the past half-century of disasters clearly traceable to their
activity.
“Do you think scientists should be blamed for wars? Einstein? He
looked for fundamental truths and his formula was used for an atomic bomb.
Alexander Graham Bell? Military orders that kill thousands are transmitted
over his telephone. Why not blame the bus driver who takes war workers to
their factories? How about movie actors who sing for the U.S.O.?” These
comments may sound philistine today, but they were made six years after the
end of World War II in a respectful article in The New Yorker magazine by a
man then well on his way to becoming one of the era’s most famous and
revered technologists. The German “rocket scientist” Wernher von Braun,
who had played a principal role in creating the V-2 “wonder weapon” for the
Third Reich, had come to America under U.S. Army auspices to continue his
work. What he had really been doing all along was developing the means to
travel into outer space, he claimed time and again. Most of his audience never
doubted it.
Later generations largely forgot about him, as the imperatives of the
Space Age grew quaint. But it is reasonable to posit that no other public
figure of the twentieth century was forgiven so much as Wernher von Braun,
so that he be allowed to pursue his dream. The army gave him a fresh identity
by classifying for decades the most malevolent details of his pre-1945 life.
He needed little else besides more of the incredible good luck that had
propelled him out of Hitler’s Germany into General Eisenhower’s America.
There has been much biographical writing about von Braun over the
years. Because of government secrecy and popular disinclination, most of it
was uncritical until long after he died (of cancer) in 1977. As the archives
opened up and cold war restrictions on traveling in eastern Germany relaxed,
a few journalists and historians performed the investigative toil of
straightening out a record that had been warped by public relations men and
pervasive sycophancy.
My own entry into this fray came about because I was one of
innumerable members of the postwar baby boom generation who enjoyed
von Braun as an inspirational narrator on Walt Disney’s television shows
about space travel during the mid-1950s. Young boys, especially, built
models and read science fiction and believed that “mankind” would explore
the solar system in our lifetime. It is ironic that von Braun had a similar
boyhood in the 1920s and managed to transfer it directly into our brains. Also
like many of my age, the political atmosphere ten years later led me to
wonder skeptically how a Nazi weapons builder could become an American
hero. Yes, he played a central role in sending astronauts to the moon, but, by
contrast, LBJ would never be forgiven for Vietnam, so why was this man let
off the hook? Or so the thinking went.
The question was not merely an artifact of a credulous childhood, but a
window into a core phenomenon of American technology and culture. Von
Braun moved so seamlessly from Peenemünde, Pomerania, to Huntsville,
Alabama, because millions of people wanted him to, because the secrecy and
some of the obsessions of the Third Reich were not entirely different from
those of postwar America. They wanted to believe in his prophecies, his
genius, and his goodness, no matter what. This is why his life remained of
interest to me, not because of the exciting hardware he produced, which like
all hardware is ultimately trivial when divorced from its social and political
context.
My goal for this book was to bring von Braun truthfully through the first
thirty-three years of his life in Germany to America in 1945 and then tell how
he blended into the late-1940s and 1950s. That was when the torquing of his
persona took place, which I believe to be one of the central conundrums of
that weird time of anti-Communist hysteria and progress worship. After
Sputnik, I let his story go, because then he became all about hardware, so to
speak. Other writers have brought him almost day-by-day through Project
Apollo into the 1970s, but I find that the story gets fetishistic then and of
interest mostly to buffs.
After all these years, historians still tend to divide into two factions:
those who cheer von Braun as a space pioneer and those who condemn him
as a Nazi. The fact that he was both has not brought the two sides together,
but it is probably impossible to both cheer and condemn in this case and not
sound stupid. He was able to thrive and his success needs to be explained. An
article I wrote about this for the op-ed page of The New York Times in 1992
—when officials of the German government and aerospace industry were
planning to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the V-2’s first successful
launch (they changed their minds)—was illustrated with a cartoon of von
Braun in jack boots and swastika armband, his arm raised in a Nazi salute
that ended in an Apollo capsule heading for the moon. Op-ed contributors are
not consulted about illustrations, and as soon as I saw it in the paper, I was
dismayed; I knew that, as a journalist, some people who were part of his life
would now never talk to me. Other people who were also part of his life, but
who had been ignored or afraid to talk ever since leaving the slave camp
called Dora where V-2s were constructed, made themselves available. The
cartoon was dead-on, actually, and I have come to be fond of it.
In April 1995, I attended the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Dora’s
liberation in Nordhausen, Germany. When I first saw the camp and the
underground tunnels of the V-2 factory that it had supplied with forced
laborers (some 20,000 of whom died in the process), the obvious fact that
they were a single entity, inseparable one from the other, froze me in my
tracks in more ways than one. The shock of grasping the size of the distortion
perpetrated by von Braun and his American apologists, who either covered
up the place’s horrors or maintained that being involved with the V-2 was
different from being involved with the slaves—that science was above
society, in largest terms—was so strong that trying to convey the nature of
the falsehood suddenly seemed futile. Who would believe this without seeing
it? Germans might cover it up to save their necks, but why would Americans
help them?
One falls back on Aristotle. But the way out of this bind ultimately came
from the people most damaged by the camp. On that raw gray Thuringian
spring day, as the old French Resistance fighters—who had been imprisoned
by the SS at Dora, worked in the brutal tunnels, and somehow survived—
climbed down the steps of a tour bus that had brought them back to the
camp’s drab entrance for commemoration ceremonies, children of the current
citizens of Nordhausen silently handed each of them a white rosebud. I shall
never forget the men’s faces as they struggled to appreciate the gift. They all
held onto the roses. There is something going on here that is bigger than
flying to the moon, I thought to myself.