[.ca] Dr. Space: The Life of Werner Von Braun (ISBN 1591149266)

From Nazi to Nasa ...:
Wernher von Braun (March 23 1912 - June 16 1977) is a two-sided problem for any writer. First, we know, he developed as a NASA-genius the Redstone rocket that placed Alan Shepard in suborbital flight in May 1961. Then he produced the great Saturn rockets that so successfully launched the U.S. manned flights to the Moon. But on the other hand over 5,000 of his V-2s were fired on Britain (V-2 for "Vergeltungswaffe 2", meaning "retaliation weapon 2"; a name invented by Josef Goebbels). These Nazi-rockets killed 2,724 people and badly injured 6,000. Moreover he was a major in the Nazi SS and one of Hitler's elite. Von Braun supervised the rocket's construction at the Nazis' Mittelwerk factory, which used slave labor from the nearby Dora concentration camp. In a letter to Mittelwerk's production manager, von Braun tells how he himself went to the notorious Buchenwald camp to arrange for the transport of more prisoners to Mittelwerk. At least 700 of them later died there. Survivors of the "hell of DORA" reported of burning corpse mountains, torture and for deterrence hanged prisoners at cranes. Dutch Sources report of 20.000 dead ones. Many slaves were murdered to eliminate any oral historical record of this new strange technology and the Nazi cruelties. Therefore von Braun also was a war criminal, and there must be a discussion of his culpability. The book of Dennis Piskiewicz tries to satisfy both sides of view. Not as satirical as the songwriter and verse-maker Tom Lehrer rhymed 1965 for a BBC television show: "'Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun". Maybe there are character-similarities (and friendly helping connections) between von Braun and Hitler's architect and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer. Fragment of those ingenious conqueror characters (compare with the Howard Hughes Story THE AVIATOR) often are human abysses like success greed, manipulative individual set-ups like triumphing and all controlling volitions (von Braun adored Nietzsche), a drive to achieve goals at almost any price, pathological jealous (remember Eisenhower's personal dislike of the German rocket team). On the other hand: 118 German rocket scientists were brought from Hitler's Third Reich together with von Braun to the USA as part of a military operation called Project Paperclip (helping sift through the Pennemuende documents). Later on von Braun became the director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville. He developed the Redstone (used for the Persian Gulf War), Jupiter-C (first satellite, Explorer), Juno and Pershing missiles; he received a mandate to build the giant Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans 1969 to the Moon: Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins. The above mentioned Tom Lehrer criticized: "What is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon?" Von Braun diabolically used his rhetorical abilities to set the US senate in fear of the Soviet Union; that blowed up the financing of his rocket-budgets and the Cold War hysteria as well. Once von Braun answered (with regard to the Nazi-system): it has been important, how the golden cow would be milked most successfully. Now, he didn't change his behaviour-patterns in the USA. Very ironically W.v.B. commented: "There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further." Therefore it is not astonishing, that the last line of Pinzkiewicz's book is: "Sadly, because of his complicity with the Nazi cause, he also sold his soul to reach that goal." One of his visions von Braun never realized: to evacuate a mankind's elite (of course American) to the Mars (to protect them against an eventually nuclear war). Nevertheless his rocket programs (in Germany and the United States as well) ate up scare resources that could have been better invested in other types of social responsibility and political care.