Dreams of Earth and Sky (7 page)

“One month later, the pay-off came, Himmler-style,” von Braun reported in his memoir. Gestapo agents knocked on his door in the middle of the night and took him to a prison cell in Stettin on the Baltic coast in present-day Poland. After a week in the cell, he was given a hearing before three SS officers and formally accused of sabotaging rocket development, making defeatist remarks about the war, and planning to fly to England with all the plans for the V-2. Meanwhile, with the help of the armaments minister Albert Speer, who was a personal friend both of von Braun and of Hitler, Dornberger succeeded in obtaining a piece of paper signed at the Führer’s headquarters, releasing von Braun provisionally for three months. Von Braun sat in jail for only ten days and was not physically abused. Those ten days were of enormous value to him when he came to the United States. Whenever people asked him about his past, he could mention those days as evidence that he had not been a Nazi. He never claimed that he had actively resisted the Nazi regime, but the story
of his imprisonment made him appear to have been a victim of the Nazis rather than an accessory to their crimes.

The second half of Neufeld’s book describes von Braun’s life in America after 1945. He adapted with astonishing speed to the American way of life. In 1946 he became a born-again Christian and joined the congregation of a small Church of the Nazarene in Texas. For several years he worked patiently for the army, refurbishing surplus V-2 rockets that the US had imported from Germany. The army could not give him more interesting work because there was no money for further development of rockets. He quickly understood that in America the money was controlled by Congress and Congress was controlled by public opinion. The money was lacking because the public was not interested in rocketry. So he resolved to go directly to the public.

Whenever he had the chance, first with magazine articles and then with speeches on radio and television, he preached the gospel of rocketry. He spoke not only about unmanned rockets to defend the country but about manned rockets to explore the solar system. It took him only seven years from his arrival in the United States to become world-famous as the chief promoter of space travel. In 1952,
Collier’s
magazine published a flamboyant article with pictures of winged spaceships in orbit and a text, “Crossing the Last Frontier,” by von Braun. In the next year his book
The Mars Project
, with detailed specification of rocket weights and payloads required for a manned exploration of Mars, was published in English and in German. As his fame grew, so did the budgets for the army rocket program at Huntsville.

There were two high points of von Braun’s life in America. In 1958, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and the US Navy Vanguard satellite crashed ignominiously on its launchpad, von Braun’s team at Huntsville successfully put
Explorer 1
, the first American
satellite, into orbit. In 1969, he watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon, carried there by his rockets and fulfilling his dream of the human race moving out of the nursery. Von Braun was unique as an organizer of big projects who could persuade prima donnas to work harmoniously together, and who also understood every detail of the hardware.

After 1969, he remained as busy as ever, but his hopes for going on to Mars faded. Five more Apollo missions reached the moon successfully, and one,
Apollo 13
, was an epic failure from which the crew came home safely. After that, the public was not interested in going further. Budgets rapidly decreased and the Apollo program ended. All that von Braun could do to keep manned rocket missions alive was to promote the Space Shuttle, a reusable ferry vehicle that had originally been the bottom part of his Mars Project. The shuttle was supposed to be cheap and safe, flying frequently with a quick turnaround between missions. When after many delays the shuttle finally flew, it turned out to be neither cheap nor safe nor quick. He was lucky not to live long enough to see how miserably the shuttle would fail.

This book raises three important issues: one historical and two moral. The historical question is whether von Braun’s great achievement, providing the means for twelve men to walk on the moon, made sense. Was it a big step toward the realization of his dream of colonizing the universe, or was it a dead end without any useful consequences? In the short run, the Apollo program was certainly a dead end. As a public program dependent on the taxpayers’ money, it collapsed as soon as the taxpayers lost interest in it. When von Braun moved from NASA to Fairchild Industries in 1972, he was wagering that human adventures in space would in the future be better supported by private investors than by governments. He died of cancer five years later. Now, thirty years after his death, we see a vigorous
growth of privately funded space ventures. If von Braun had lived twenty years longer, he might have pushed us sooner into the era of private launchers. He might even have rescued the Space Shuttle, his orphaned baby, and made it become what he had intended it to be: cheap and safe and quick. In the long run, one way or another, people will again dream of colonizing the universe and will again build spaceships to embark on celestial journeys. When that happens, they will be following in von Braun’s footsteps.

The two moral issues that Neufeld’s book raises are whether von Braun was justified in selling his soul to Himmler and whether the United States was justified in giving sanctuary and honorable employment to von Braun and other members of the Peenemünde team. Some of the other scientists at Peenemünde were guilty of worse offenses than von Braun. The most notorious was Arthur Rudolph, a close friend of von Braun, who had been an enthusiastic Nazi and served as the chief of production at the Mittelwerk factory. Rudolph was far more directly involved than von Braun in the exploitation and abuse of prisoners. After that, Rudolph lived in the United States for thirty-nine years and enjoyed a distinguished career as a rocket engineer. Finally, in 1984, formerly secret documents describing Rudolph’s activities in Germany emerged into the light of day, and he was threatened with a lawsuit challenging his right to American citizenship. Rather than fighting the lawsuit, he renounced his citizenship and returned with his wife to Germany. One of the investigators of the Rudolph case said, “We’re lucky von Braun isn’t alive.” Von Braun had died, full of years and honor, seven years earlier. If von Braun had been alive in 1984, with his public fame and political clout intact, he would have come to the defense of Rudolph and probably won the case.

Neufeld condemns von Braun for his collaboration with the SS, and condemns the US government for covering up the evidence of his
collaboration. Here I beg to differ with the author. War is an inherently immoral activity. Even the best of wars involves crimes and atrocities, and every citizen who takes part in war is to some extent collaborating with criminals. I should here declare my own interest in this debate. In my work for the RAF Bomber Command, I was collaborating with people who planned the destruction of Dresden in February 1945, a notorious calamity in which many thousands of innocent civilians were burned to death. If we had lost the war, those responsible might have been condemned as war criminals, and I might have been found guilty of collaborating with them.

After this declaration of personal involvement, let me state my conclusion. In my opinion, the moral imperative at the end of every war is reconciliation. Without reconciliation there can be no real peace. Reconciliation means amnesty. It is allowable to execute the worst war criminals, with or without a legal trial, provided that this is done quickly, while the passions of war are still raging. After the executions are done, there should be no more hunting for criminals and collaborators. In order to make a lasting peace, we must learn to live with our enemies and forgive their crimes. Amnesty means that we are all equal before the law. Amnesty is not easy and not fair, but it is a moral necessity, because the alternative is an unending cycle of hatred and revenge. South Africa has set us a good example, showing how it can be done.

In the end, I admire von Braun for using his God-given talents to achieve his visions, even when this required him to make a pact with the devil. He bent Hitler and Himmler to his purposes more than they bent him to theirs. And I admire the United States Army for giving him a second chance to pursue his dreams. In the end, the amnesty given to him by the United States did far more than a strict accounting of his misdeeds could have done to redeem his soul and to fulfill his destiny.

Note added in 2014: This review provoked a record number of eloquent and moving responses from people outraged by my friendly portrayal of von Braun. Here is an extract from one of them:

In response to a letter from Leo Blitz in Berkeley, whose mother survived the concentration camp at Stutthof, I wrote:

GROWING UP AS
a child in England, I absorbed at an early age the notion that different countries had different skills. The Germans had Bach and Beethoven, the Spanish had Velázquez and El Greco, the French had Monet and Gauguin, and we had Newton and Darwin. Science was the thing the English were good at. This notion was reinforced when I began to read children’s books of that period, glorifying the achievements of our national heroes, Faraday and Maxwell and Rutherford.

Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealander who had discovered the atomic nucleus and created the science that came to be called nuclear physics, was then at the height of his fame. Although he had immigrated from New Zealand, Rutherford became more English than the English. He spoke for England in a famous statement contrasting the continental European style with the English style in science: “they play games with their symbols, but we, in the Cavendish, turn out the real solid facts of Nature.” The French and Germans were doing calculations with the abstract mathematical equations of quantum theory, while Rutherford was banging one nucleus against another and transmuting nitrogen into oxygen. English children learned to be proud of Rutherford, just as we were proud of our military heroes
Nelson and Wellington, who had beaten Napoleon. Patriotic pride of this sort is in some ways healthy. It encourages children to be ambitious and to tackle big problems. But it is harmful when it leads them to believe that they have a natural right to rule the world.

I still remember some of the patriotic poems that I had to learn by heart and recite as a seven-year-old:

The battle that Nelson fought in the harbor of Copenhagen was especially famous because his commanding officer put up a flag signal ordering him to cease fire. Nelson pointed his telescope at the flag signal and looked through it with his blind eye. Since he did not see the flag, he continued the battle and won a glorious victory. But even a seven-year-old understands that Nelson’s defeat of the Danes at Copenhagen was not as glorious as his defeat of the French fleet at Trafalgar four years later. Even a seven-year-old may feel some sympathy for the defeated Danes, and may question whether Nelson’s undoubted bravery and brilliance gave him the right to bombard their homes. I recently visited a tavern in Copenhagen where the tourist is proudly informed that this is one of the few buildings along the waterfront that were not demolished by Nelson’s guns. The collateral damage resulting from his victory is not forgotten.

John Gribbin’s book
The Fellowship
belongs to the harmless kind of patriotic literature.
*
It is a portrait gallery displaying a group of
remarkable characters who made important contributions to the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. Each of the biographies is dramatic. Those characters lived through turbulent times, and their personal lives were as exciting as their ideas. Almost all of them are English. Gribbin is not writing a history of science but only a history of a particular institution, the Royal Society of London. “The Fellowship” means the group of men who founded the society in 1660 and devoted their time and energy to its activities. Although they were English, their aims and purposes were international, and they welcomed distinguished scholars from many countries as fellows of the society. From the beginning, one of the main activities of the society was the exchange of information and the improvement of contact between England and the rest of the world. The founding of the society was not the beginning of modern science, but it was a unique event with great consequences, well worth studying in detail. Gribbin’s book gives a lively and readable account of it.