Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War , Michael J. Neufeld , Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007. $35.00 (564 pp.). ISBN 978-0-307-26292-9
The development of spaceflight and the success of harnessing of the atom are the great stories of 20th-century technological and scientific achievement. However, both challenge historians to explain how scientists and engineers could willingly, even fervently, apply their talents to projects of great moral ambiguity. Wernher von Braun (1912–77), whose Saturn 5 moon rocket was an extension of his Nazi V2 design, offers an excellent subject for such study. Michael J. Neufeld, chair of the space history division at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, took up that challenge two decades ago. In scholarly articles, editorial collaborations, and The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (Free Press, 1995), Neufeld examined the undertakings of the German rocketeers, setting them in the context of World War II and the cold war.
However, in Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, Neufeld focuses on the central enigma—the moral compass of his protagonist. He asks what and when von Braun knew about atrocities and slave labor at the underground factory that assembled his machines and how he justified working toward Third Reich goals, then carefully covering incriminating tracks or letting others do it for him. A scholar also of Weimar history, Neufeld argues persuasively that to be Junkers—Prussian aristocrats, as the von Brauns had been since 1573—meant upholding conservative values: tradition, nationalism, and military and public service. In young von Braun’s case, a Junker upbringing combined with genius resulted in a polyglot engineer who played piano and cello beautifully; flew sailplanes, propeller planes, and jets; and revealed his vision of space travel via US congressional testimony, popular US and European magazines, and Walt Disney cartoons.
From a very tender age, von Braun also demonstrated incredible talent for managing large-scale technical projects. At 21 he had completed half of his PhD in physics and been hired by the German army for the “conception, management of buildup … and conduct of experiments” (page 58) that would lead to the A2 rocket two years later. By age 25 he was supervising 350 employees at Peenemünde in northeastern Germany. Because of his inherited wealth and station, Neufeld says, the young von Braun was naive about the realities of politics and economics. Consequently, the university student who welcomed army funding in 1932 was, within a few years, an apolitical yet card-carrying Nazi wunderkind coveted by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Von Braun joined Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), but because of the machinations of the army and Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production, Himmler could control only the V2 slave labor camps, not the design of the rocket or engineering personnel.
By 1942, however, Himmler’s SS was supervising von Braun’s forced-labor assembly workers. For von Braun, Neufeld writes, “the implicit bargain he had made with the Nazi regime had come due. If he wished to have money for rocketry, if he wished to have a career, if he wished even to keep himself out of danger from the apparatus of repression, he had to participate in stoking the fires of hell” (page 162). Von Braun’s V2s killed more of the slave laborers who built them than targeted enemy civilians, notes Neufeld, and, for moral and practical reasons, von Braun would later regret the use of prison workers. Moral growth took time, though, and meanwhile von Braun and his American friends would know enough to keep the bargain a secret.
At the war’s end, von Braun persuaded his Peenemünde group to surrender to the US Army. Only in America, he told his colleagues, could they pursue their dream of space travel. Such adaptability allowed von Braun to also change his rocket and space-station designs for almost anyone who asked—Collier’s magazine, Disney, or the US government—take up new hobbies and change domiciles and his church affiliation as he pleased. That adaptability also kept him, his team, and their dreams alive. By 1960 he was in charge of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the administration’s largest facility, with nearly 7000 civil-service and contract employees. The center produced the Saturn rocket series, which in its 12 years had no catastrophic failures in flight and boosted every Apollo capsule and the Skylab space station.
Neufeld adeptly incorporates engineering detail, describes at greater length than other biographers his protagonist’s complex relationship with the media, and adds to the understanding of cutthroat, interservice rivalries of the armed forces in the US and in Germany. I would request, though, that the book have charts showing the evolution of German and US hardware, the branches of the military or divisions of NASA and the programs they worked on and when, and the rockets that flew and flopped.
The number and quality of sources well support Neufeld’s assertions about von Braun’s actions, motivations, and character, and set the standard for historians of the Nazi period. Thorough evaluation of von Braun as a complex, Faustian figure has been heretofore stymied by sanitized memoirs and biographies written by von Braun himself, friendly journalists, and coworkers. Some authors seem to believe that finding a few documents through the Freedom of Information Act constitutes responsible research that provides a solid basis for making moral accusations. It does not. What does is scholarship through the long haul: patiently seeking out obscure primary sources, sifting through gossip and legend, consulting original-language documents, deciphering technology and tedious detail, and challenging loyal family and friends for full disclosure. The result of such research is present in Von Braun. Neufeld’s biography is a must-read for scholars, students, and anyone interested in aerospace history, Nazi Germany, and the mind, morals, and motivations of the scientist and engineer.
