Wernher von Braun

• 1. Introduction

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  Wernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose brilliance was matched only by the moral questions that would follow him for the rest of his life. He joined the Nazi Party, rose through the ranks of the SS, and oversaw a rocket factory where tens of thousands labored as slaves under the most brutal conditions imaginable. Then, after the war, the United States quietly brought him and roughly 1,600 other German scientists to American soil, and he became the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon. How does a man travel that distance, morally and literally? What did he know, and what did he choose to ignore? And what does it mean that the country which destroyed the Nazi regime also sheltered one of its most decorated engineers?

• 2. A Boyhood Built for the Stars

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  His mother gave him a telescope after his Confirmation, and that single gift altered the direction of his life. Before rockets, though, there was music. The young von Braun took lessons from the composer Paul Hindemith, played Beethoven and Bach from memory, and at one point wanted to become a composer himself. The few pieces he left behind are said to be reminiscent of Hindemith's style.

  At boarding school at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar, he was a poor student in physics and mathematics. That changed when he obtained a copy of Hermann Oberth's 1923 book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, "By Rocket into Planetary Space." The book ignited something in him. When his parents moved him to a school on the North Sea island of Spiekeroog in 1928, he threw himself into the subjects he had previously neglected, purely to pursue rocket engineering.

  That same year, a public craze known as the Raketenrummel or "Rocket Rumble," driven in part by Fritz von Opel and Max Valier, swept through Germany. Von Braun attended one of the Opel-RAK rocket car demonstrations and was so electrified that he fastened the largest fireworks rockets he could buy to a toy wagon, launching it into a crowded street. Local police took him in for questioning before releasing him to his father. The incident was a small but telling preview of the determination he would bring to the rest of his career.

  By 1930 he was studying at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, where he joined the Spaceflight Society and worked alongside Willy Ley on liquid-fueled rocket motor tests. He graduated with a diploma in mechanical engineering in the spring of 1932. Already convinced that existing engineering technology could not reach space on its own, he enrolled for doctoral studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin and earned his doctorate in physics in 1934.

• 3. The Bargain with the Regime

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  According to historian Norman Davies, von Braun's path into rocket science in Germany was partly enabled by what Davies called a "curious oversight" in the Treaty of Versailles, which had not listed rocketry among the weapons forbidden to Germany. That loophole allowed the German Army to fund him, and from 1932 onward it did exactly that.

  His actual doctoral thesis, titled "Construction, Theoretical, and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket" and dated the 16th of April 1934, detailed the design of the A2 rocket. The German army kept it classified until 1960. The public version of the thesis, submitted under a different title, covered only what the army was willing to let universities see. By the end of 1934, his group had successfully launched two A2 rockets to heights of 2.2 and 3.5 kilometers.

  He applied for membership in the Nazi Party on the 12th of November 1937, and was issued membership number 5,738,692. Michael J. Neufeld, a historian and chief of the Space History Division at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, documented that von Braun later signed an affidavit claiming he had been pressured to join in 1939, giving an incorrect year. Neufeld noted there is no evidence that von Braun did more than pay his monthly dues, though photographs show him wearing the party's swastika pin in his lapel. His FBI file later found no political activity beyond what was needed to protect his career.

  The SS was a separate matter. He joined an SS horseback riding school in November 1933 and left the following year. Then in 1940, an SS colonel arrived at his office and conveyed that Heinrich Himmler personally wanted von Braun to join the SS. Von Braun consulted his military superior, Walter Dornberger, who told him flatly that he had no alternative if he wanted to continue their work. He joined and was given the rank of Untersturmführer, membership number 185,068. He was promoted three more times, reaching the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer in June 1943. In 2002, a former SS officer at Peenemünde told the BBC that von Braun had regularly worn the SS uniform to official meetings, contradicting von Braun's own claim that he had worn it only once.

  His arrest by the Gestapo in March 1944 is one of the stranger episodes of his wartime years. A young female dentist who was an SS spy had reported that von Braun and two colleagues expressed regret one evening that they were working on a weapon rather than a spaceship, and doubted Germany would win the war. Himmler branded them communist sympathizers and ordered them detained. Von Braun was held for two weeks in a Gestapo cell in Stettin without being told the charges. Ultimately Albert Speer, the Reichsminister for Munitions, persuaded Hitler to have him released on the grounds that the V-2 program could not function without him.

• 4. The V-2 and Its Cost in Lives

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  On the 3rd of October 1942, the first successful launch of the A-4 rocket took place. On the 20th of June 1944, a V-2 variant designated MW 18014 crossed the Kármán line, making it the first artificial object to reach space. Adolf Hitler had ordered production of the weapon on the 22nd of December 1942, and the first combat launch toward England followed on the 7th of September 1944, only 21 months after the project had been officially commissioned.

  The weapon's full name, Vergeltungswaffe 2, meant "Retaliation Weapon 2." Doug Millard of the Science Museum in London described it as "a quantum leap of technological change," but noted it was "hugely expensive in terms of lives." The numbers in the source make the imbalance stark: roughly 12,000 people died building the rockets, while approximately 9,000 were killed by them as weapons.

  SS General Hans Kammler, who had overseen the construction of several concentration camps including Auschwitz, conceived the idea of using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers in the rocket program. Arthur Rudolph, the chief engineer of the V-2 factory, endorsed the plan in April 1943 when a labor shortage developed. Von Braun admitted visiting the Mittelwerk plant on many occasions and described the conditions there as "repulsive," but said he had never personally witnessed deaths or beatings. He denied ever visiting the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where 20,000 died from illness, beatings, hangings, and intolerable conditions.

  Several prisoners gave accounts that directly contradicted von Braun. Guy Morand, a French resistance fighter held at Dora, testified in 1995 that von Braun ordered a prisoner flogged after an apparent sabotage attempt. Robert Cazabonne, another French prisoner, stated that von Braun stood by while prisoners were hanged from cranes. Former Buchenwald inmate Adam Cabala provided written testimony that von Braun passed close enough to corpses piled near the ambulance shed that he was almost touching them, and never protested. When asked whether von Braun could have objected to the treatment, his colleague Konrad Dannenberg told a newspaper: "If he had done it, in my opinion, he would have been shot on the spot."

  Von Braun used Robert Goddard's published research in the development of the A-series rockets. Goddard himself, examining parts of a V-2 that had crashed in Sweden and reached an American laboratory, reportedly recognized components he had invented and understood that his work had been turned into a weapon. Von Braun publicly disputed that he had directly used Goddard's patents, and this was independently confirmed; but he also said, "I have very deep and sincere regret for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides."

• 5. Surrender, Secrets, and Paperclip

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  In early 1945, with the Soviet Army roughly 160 kilometers from Peenemünde, von Braun gathered his planning staff and put the question to them directly: to whom should they surrender, and how? The answer was unanimous. They wanted the Americans.

  Kammler ordered the engineering team relocated to central Germany. A conflicting army order told them to fight. Von Braun chose to treat Kammler's order as the cover story for a defection, fabricating documents to move 500 affiliates to the area around Mittelwerk. He also ordered the V-2 blueprints hidden in an abandoned iron mine in the Harz mountains near Goslar, fearing the SS would destroy them. U.S. Army personnel recovered 14 tons of V-2 documents from that hiding place by the 15th of May 1945.

  In March 1945, while traveling on an official trip, von Braun's driver fell asleep at the wheel. The resulting car accident left von Braun with a complicated fracture of his left arm and shoulder. He insisted his arm be set in a cast so he could leave the hospital, but the bones had to be rebroken and realigned a month later after healing incorrectly.

  On the 2nd of May 1945, his brother Magnus cycled up to an American private from the U.S. 44th Infantry Division and called out in broken English: "My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender." After the surrender, Wernher von Braun said publicly that the decision to go west was "a moral decision more than anything else," explaining that he and his team wanted their work entrusted to people "guided by the Bible."

  Von Braun had been at the top of what the Americans called the Black List, their roster of German scientists and engineers targeted for immediate interrogation. He was briefly held at the Dustbin interrogation center at Kransberg Castle, then recruited under the program initially called Operation Overcast, later renamed Operation Paperclip. British intelligence also interviewed him in depth, and the specific information they obtained was kept secret from the Americans and from other allies. On the 20th of June 1945, U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. approved the transfer of von Braun and his specialists to the United States, one of his last acts in office.

• 6. America's Reluctant Rocket Man

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  The first seven German technicians arrived in the United States on the 20th of September 1945, landing at New Castle Army Air Field just south of Wilmington, Delaware, then traveling by boat to Fort Strong in Boston Harbor. Von Braun and his remaining staff were eventually sent to Fort Bliss, a large Army installation just north of El Paso, Texas.

  Life there was a strange kind of captivity. The Germans were not permitted to leave without a military escort, and they took to calling themselves "PoPs" - "Prisoners of Peace." Funding was thin. Von Braun remarked that at Peenemünde "we had been coddled, here you were counting pennies." He had once commanded thousands of engineers; now he answered to a 26-year-old Army major named Jim Hamill, who held only an undergraduate degree in engineering and addressed von Braun by his first name. Every proposal for new rocket work was dismissed.

  A December 1946 magazine article exposed the team's presence in the country and drew criticism from Albert Einstein and John Dingell. Requests to improve living conditions at Fort Bliss, such as laying linoleum over cracked wood flooring, were rejected. Meanwhile, von Braun wrote that he found it hard to develop a "genuine emotional attachment" to his new surroundings.

  In 1946, while attending church in El Paso, he underwent a religious conversion to Evangelical Christianity. He later described the experience in a religious magazine, writing that he had expected to find an American church that was "just a country club" and instead found a small building in the Texas sun full of people forming a "live, vibrant community." Historian Michael J. Neufeld suggested the conversion was motivated in part by a need "to pacify his own conscience." University of Southampton scholar Kendrick Oliver wrote that von Braun was likely moved by a desire to find a new direction after "the moral chaos of his service for the Third Reich."

  In 1950, with the Korean War underway, his team was transferred to Huntsville, Alabama. From 1952 to 1956 he led Army rocket development at Redstone Arsenal, producing the Redstone rocket, which was used for the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the United States. He personally witnessed that launch and detonation. Out of Redstone work grew the Jupiter-C, a modified variant that formed the basis for the Juno I rocket, which successfully launched Explorer 1, the West's first satellite, on the 31st of January 1958.

• 7. Selling Space to the Public

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  Even while directing military missile programs, von Braun was simultaneously working to popularize human spaceflight. A 1950 headline in The Huntsville Times, "Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon," was one early signal of those ambitions.

  In 1952, he published his concept of a crewed space station in a series of articles in Collier's Weekly magazine, under the banner "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" The series was illustrated by the space artist Chesley Bonestell. The station von Braun envisioned was a toroid structure with a diameter of 250 feet, spinning in a 1,075-mile orbit to generate artificial gravity and allowing observation of essentially every point on Earth at least once daily. The design traced a lineage back to a 1929 book by Herman Potočnik. More than a decade later, the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey drew heavily on that design.

  His vision for a crewed lunar expedition was vast: 50 astronauts traveling in three spacecraft, each 49 meters long and 33 meters in diameter, driven by 30 rocket engines apiece. Astronauts would establish a lunar base in the Sinus Roris region and mount a 400-kilometer surface expedition to the crater Harpalus and the Mare Imbrium foothills.

  He also wrote a science fiction novel about a crewed Mars mission, set in the year 1980. Eighteen publishers rejected the manuscript. Small portions appeared in magazines, but the complete work, titled Project Mars: A Technical Tale, did not appear as a printed book until December 2006.

  His collaboration with Walt Disney brought the ideas to the widest audience yet. He served as a technical director on a series of television films about space exploration. The first, Man in Space, aired on the 9th of March 1955 and drew 40 million viewers. The series ran from 1955 to 1957.

• 8. Saturn V and the Moon

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  NASA was established by law on the 29th of July 1958. Two years later, the agency absorbed von Braun's team from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and he became the first director of the newly opened Marshall Space Flight Center on the 1st of July 1960.

  Early results were not encouraging. On the 21st of November 1960, the first uncrewed Mercury-Redstone rocket rose exactly four inches from the launch pad, settled back down, and activated its escape system. The failure was traced to a power plug with one prong shorter than the other. A replacement test flew successfully in March 1961, but von Braun's insistence on that extra test delayed the U.S. crewed space program. The Soviet Union put the first human in space the following month. Three weeks after that, on the 5th of May, von Braun's team launched Alan Shepard, aboard Freedom 7.

  His engineering philosophy throughout this period was deliberately conservative. He built in ample safety factors and redundant structure, leading colleagues to joke that Marshall Space Flight Center resembled the "Chicago Bridge and Iron Works." That caution proved its value when a fifth engine was added to the Saturn C-4 design. A large structural crossbeam that von Braun had included absorbed the extra thrust without modification, producing the Saturn V.

  His dream became reality on the 16th of July 1969, when a Saturn V launched the crew of Apollo 11. Over the course of the program, Saturn V rockets carried six teams of astronauts to the surface of the Moon. Apollo program director Sam Phillips later said that without von Braun's contribution, he did not believe the United States would have reached the Moon at all.

  Von Braun held the director's role at Marshall until the 27th of January 1970. He then moved to NASA headquarters in Washington as Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning, and retired from NASA on the 26th of May 1972, frustrated by budget cuts and by what he saw as the collapse of public support for continued human presence in space. In 1973, a routine physical examination revealed kidney cancer. He died on the 16th of June 1977 of pancreatic cancer in Alexandria, Virginia, at age 65. His gravestone at Ivy Hill Cemetery cites Psalm 19:1.