A kind of Faustian shadow may be discerned in—or
imposed on—the fascinating career of Wernher von Braun: A man so possessed of a
vision, of an intellectual hunger, that any accommodation may be justified in
its pursuit.
—Washington Star editorial, 20 June 1977
The announcement of von Braun’s death produced an outpouring
of obituaries, appreciations, and editorials. President Carter released a
statement: “To millions of Americans, Wernher von Braun’s name was inextricably
linked to our exploration of space and to the creative application of
technology. Not just the people of our nation, but all the people of the world
have profited from his work. We will continue to profit from his example.” The
U.S. media’s tone was similar; obituaries hewed closely to his quasi-official
biography and, with a couple of exceptions, celebrated his life as a space
visionary who had pursued his boyhood dream and helped put America on the Moon.
Most remarkably, his Nazi Party membership was almost never mentioned, and the
Mittelwerk and his SS status not at all.
The British stories were a bit more pointed, at least the
ones in the London tabloid press, noting the “terror” inflicted on civilians by
his V-2s, along with von Braun’s decisive contribution to exploring space. Only
the Daily Mail mentioned “the starving slave workers of the rocket factories”
in passing. The leading West German papers mirrored the American ones,
producing appreciations and hero worship; one limited exception was the
left-wing Frankfurter Rundschau, which brought up the Mittelwerk and the moral
issues of building long-range missiles but largely as asides. As for East
Germany, its official press printed only a one-paragraph item announcing his
death. Around 1970 the Communist state had given up its campaign against von
Braun, primarily because of a general retreat from the tactic of smearing
ex-Nazis in the West, but also presumably because, outside the East Bloc and
Dora survivor groups in the West, its campaign had failed to make an impression
and had become increasingly irrelevant after the Moon landing.
In Washington his friends and admirers wanted the public celebration of his life denied them by the quick burial. They organized a memorial service at the National Cathedral, an Episcopalian church, on the twenty-second. The West German ambassador brought an official wreath from his government and read scriptural passages; Ernst Stuhlinger, former NASA Administrator James Fletcher, and National Air and Space Museum director Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut, eulogized him in soaring rhetoric. Quoting the Hebrew prophet Joel Fletcher called von Braun one of the “few men [who] arise in each century who ‘see visions’ and ‘dream dreams’ that give hope and spiritual nourishment to us all….Such men cling to this vision despite all efforts to destroy it.”
Still, Wernher von Braun did not entirely escape posthumous
moral critiques—in the U.S. capital’s two major newspapers, of all places. A
Washington Star editorial explicitly opened with the Faustian bargain, but
after making that pointed statement, the editorial writer waffled. The
Washington Post began its editorial with a variant of the old Mort Sahl gibe
about aiming for the stars but sometimes hitting London. It followed with: “For
most Americans, and others, it has never been possible to hear mention of the
name of Wernher von Braun, space pioneer, without thinking, uncomfortably, of
Wernher von Braun, rocket builder by appointment to Adolf Hitler.” Friends
wrote letters in protest. But the Star printed only one missive supporting von
Braun and two attacking him; one correspondent declared him “unambiguously a
Nazi and a war criminal.”
The totality of responses to von Braun’s death accurately
mirrored his bifurcated reputation. The media, major books, and government
institutions continued to offer the heroic Cold War biography. Many, however,
mostly on the left, disliked or even hated him but had little on which to base
their critique but the official account of his Nazi years and the satires of
Sahl and Lehrer. That situation finally began to change, at least in the
English-speaking world, with the 1979 publication of French Resistance fighter
Jean Michel’s memoir, Dora, in translation. It shed light on the still
virtually unknown horrors of the V-2 program.
Michel’s book was less important for its direct effects than
for the U.S. government investigation it almost accidentally launched. Early in
1980 a Harvard Law student in his final year, Eli M. Rosenbaum, came upon the
work in a Cambridge bookstore. The previous summer he had interned at the new
Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the U.S. Department of Justice, which
had been set up by congressional amendment in 1979 to discover and deport
former war criminals in the United States. Days later Rosenbaum found another
new book, The Rocket Team, by Fred Ordway and an MSFC writer, Mitchell Sharpe,
an insider history of the von Braun group that had been under way for years.
That book, which had received much more press attention than Michel’s Dora, had
a chapter on V-2 production that in hindsight reads like an apologia but at the
time offered new information. When Rosenbaum went back to OSI full-time as a
lawyer in the fall of 1980, he got permission to pursue the subject, in spite
of skepticism from Deputy Director Neal Sher that any of the old Paperclip
cases were worth pursuing. What did succeed was the case against Arthur
Rudolph, whom Rosenbaum and Sher interrogated in 1982 and 1983, using
classified documents from army security files, plus the records of the 1947
Nordhausen trial. These brought to light Rudolph’s early Nazi enthusiasm and
his role as the Mittelwerk’s production chief. In the end the former Saturn V
project director, worried that he might forfeit his civil service pension if he
lost a court battle over his immigration, reluctantly signed a voluntary
agreement with OSI to go back to Germany and renounce his U.S. citizenship. He
departed with his wife for Hamburg in March 1984. In October the Justice
Department issued its press release, provoking front-page stories around the
world.
“We’re lucky von Braun isn’t alive,” the OSI investigators
had said among themselves, as he might have been able to call the conservative
Ronald Reagan White House and have the investigation quashed. (One might
equally say that he was lucky not to be alive to endure what would follow.) Not
only was Rudolph his good friend, it would have been obvious that the
investigation could lead back to him. And indeed it did. The case opened the
door to all the damaging information that von Braun and NASA had worked to
contain in the 1960s. Investigative journalists armed with the Freedom of
Information Act ferreted out new documents and wrote sensational narratives.
Among the things that emerged in 1985, as a result of journalist Linda Hunt’s
work, were von Braun’s SS and party record, his explanations to the War
Department, and the bureaucratic battle over his security reports and
immigration in 1947–49. His posthumous reputation was greatly damaged.
In the aftermath the anti–von Braun camp shifted from
picturing him as a pure opportunist to picturing him as an opportunistic Nazi
war criminal. His defenders too were forced to grapple with these disturbing
revelations about his past. Nonetheless many in the latter community still say
that “he only wanted to go into space,” obviating the moral compromises he made
en route. Driven by a hunger for exploration, adventure, and fame, von Braun
certainly was single-minded in his space ambitions, but like Goethe’s Dr.
Faust, he made a bargain with the devil to carry out vast engineering projects,
rationalizing them as being for the greater good of mankind.
All evidence suggests, however, that he was not even aware
that he had made such a bargain until rather late in the war. His conservative
nationalist upbringing and inclination toward apolitical opportunism made it
easy to work for the Nazi regime, which asked for little at first beyond
keeping quiet. Gradually, through seduction and pressure, he was drawn deeper
into the system. In the end he had to accept the brutal exploitation of
concentration camp laborers, and he had to play his part in administering that
exploitation, implicating him in crimes against humanity. However much, like
Goethe’s Faust, he divorced himself from personal responsibility, after he
toured the Mittelwerk tunnels in late 1943 he could have had no illusions about
what that meant for the prisoners. His Gestapo arrest a few months later was
the final straw; he finally and belatedly understood that he was “aiding an
evil regime.”
Having survived the end of the Third Reich by both cunning
and luck, von Braun was fortunate that the United States was happy to take him,
motivated by equally amoral considerations of the national good. But the early
promise of a technologically superior America proved somewhat illusory for him,
as the populace was more interested in demobilizing after World War II. What
money there was would go to military missile development, and even that was
limited before the Korean War. Despite von Braun’s influential efforts to sell
spaceflight in the 1950s, it was not until after Sputnik—that is, after he
already had been in the rocket business for a quarter century—that he had any
money to build space hardware.
Before then the true foundation of his career had not been
space but rather the interest of nation-states in the revolutionary strategic
potential of the ballistic missile. What he had to offer was not his space
plans but rather his “indisputable genius” for the management of huge military-industrial
engineering projects. As a designer of nuts-and-bolts rocket technology, he was
no better than many others, but as a manager he had few peers. He had a vision
of how to build a giant engineering organization for producing such a radical
new technology.
Without him, it is hard to imagine that the German army’s
liquid-fuel rocket project would ever have succeeded in producing the V-2.
Although the V-2 was a profound military failure, that vehicle paved the way
for the intercontinental ballistic missile, which when combined with a nuclear
warhead finally lived up to the expectations German Army Ordnance had placed on
rocketry. Von Braun’s “baby” went on to influence missile technology in the
United States, the USSR, France, Britain, and China, accelerating the arrival
of the ICBM and the space launch vehicle by perhaps a decade. Nothing von Braun
did in his life was ever as influential as that.
Nonetheless, he still managed to produce three more
fundamental contributions as a U.S. immigrant and citizen: making spaceflight a
reality to the public, leading the team that launched the first American
satellite in 1958, and managing the development of the gigantic launch vehicles
that sent humans to the Moon. The Saturns were his masterworks; astonishingly,
not one failed catastrophically in flight.
The sum total of his accomplishments makes von Braun the
most influential rocket engineer and spaceflight advocate of the twentieth
century. Others—above all Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Goddard—proved that
spaceflight was technically feasible. Goddard went further, developing the
world’s first liquid-fuel rocket, but he was a poor engineer and one
constitutionally unsuited to leading a larger group. It fell to the second
generation of rocket and space enthusiasts—chief among them being von Braun and
Korolev—to realize the founders’ vision by serving their governments as
engineering managers in the development of ballistic missiles, then by selling
those governments on the idea of spaceflight. In terms of firsts, Korolev’s
achievements undoubtedly exceeded von Braun’s. His team launched the world’s
first ICBM, the first satellite, the first object to escape the Earth, the
first object to hit the Moon, and the first man and the first woman in space.
But his postwar accomplishments were founded on German technology: by Stalin’s
order, he started over in 1945–46 by copying the V-2.
Five hundred years from now humans may remember little of
the twentieth century except for the nuclear bomb, industrialized mass murder,
the discovery of global warming, the emergence of computer networks, the
achievement of powered flight, and the first steps into space. Assuming that we
do not ruin the Earth through our environmental impact, actually leaving the
cradle of all terrestrial life to establish a foothold in space may, in
evolutionary terms, rank among the most important. In those terms, at least,
Wernher von Braun deserves to be remembered as one of the seminal engineers and
scientists of the twentieth century. His life is, simultaneously, a symbol of
the temptations of engineers and scientists in that century and beyond: the
temptation to work on weapons of mass destruction in the name of duty to one’s
nation, the temptation to work with an evil regime in return for the resources
to carry out the research closest to one’s heart. He truly was a
twentieth-century Faust.
