Tom Lehrer’s musical satire on Wernher von Braun was recorded before the former SS officer’s moonshot programme had put a man on the Moon. Wayne Biddle highlights the grim mismatch between von Braun’s later sunny persona as America’s shepherd to the stars and the earlier life, evoked by Lehrer, of the man who didn’t care tuppence about his victims: “The widows and cripples in old London Town/ Who owe their large [sic] pensions to Wernher von Braun.” Von Braun never pursued him for defamation.
Fifty years later, von Braun still fascinates. In Biddle’s overview: “Germany had pioneered the university-military research partnership that produced chemical weapons and synthetic ammonia during the Great War and von Braun, only 20 years old, was being groomed at top speed to flesh out the generation of youth that Versailles had prevented the Reichswehr from recruiting. As in ages past, his Junker pedigree was as coveted as his facility with equations.”
A street just north of where I live was hit by a V2, which arrived with its one-ton warhead well in advance of its own sonic boom; ah, Vengeance without warning! But V2 civilian casualties in London were in the low thousands, and as many slave labourers died or were killed in their mass production as the rockets themselves managed to slay.
Von Braun should have been on trial at Nuremberg. Instead, he wended his way to White Sands, where he was able to view the after-effects of one of his devices on a six-storey building. He recorded some technical interest but no regret.
After a raid by the RAF on the Peenemünde testing ground, V2 manufacture was moved to an abandoned mine in the Hartz mountains. Von Braun made 15 visits to Dora concentration camp in order to supervise production; Biddle has first-hand testimony of slave workers, one of whom recounts being slapped by von Braun for treading on a delicate rocket part. V2s were fiendishly complex, with almost 40,0000 components, and their exhaust venting and gyroscopic steerage systems gave endless trouble. But von Braun’s calculations on the fluid dynamics of the alcohol/oxygen main rocket and the powerful yet light fuel pumps proved to be an unbeatable combination.
The victorious Americans filled several trainloads with the unfinished rockets, and even cheekily pinched a number of finished V2s earmarked by the British for their own education.
Today, Dora has emerged from behind the Iron Curtain and there is YouTube footage of von Braun with prisoners behind him on an assembly line. There is no doubt, in the words of one camp survivor, that as the evidence stands he was “guilty as hell”. However, like his victims, he is no longer here for questioning.
There were no deathbed confessions nor anything to suggest he lost a night’s sleep over the contradictions in his position. Neither Biddle nor any other biographer has been able to get beneath the carapace of von Braun’s self-belief.
His glamorous appearance reminded girls on his Berlin student course of Lord Alfred Douglas, but if the rich boy used his money to buy favours from either sex, no records remain. The Nazis were a rough bunch; von Braun was effortlessly posh. His Nietzschean aspirations for rockets went over National Socialist heads at first. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about von Braun is that he appears to have got exactly what he wished for, and not been destroyed or driven mad by the events that brought this about.
In 1948, still only in his thirties, von Braun returned to Germany to propose to his 18-year-old first cousin. He was, naturally, accepted. He brought his new wife and his parents back to America, the land of the free, where he sired two aristocratic German-American daughters.
Goebbels came up with the name ‘Vengeance weapon’ – Vergeltungswaffe (thus, the V2) – for the A4 prototype, when the 50ft (15m) test rockets stopped falling sideways off their launch pads and started kissing space, where the gyroscopes came into their own, on their way to Romford and Dalston.
Hitler decided that the A4 would change the course of the war, and demanded that the explosive payload be increased tenfold. These plans, like the fantasy bombarding of New York by V2s carried in submarines, came to nothing as Germany imploded.
It was time for the lordly Raketenmeister to swiftly move on to a new sponsor who could ensure the large payload delivery needed to move Neil Armstrong into lunar gravity.
The Russians encircled Peenemünde and carried off over 20,000 workers to continue development and test firing A4s by the Aral Sea, but the cream of the creative V-team had already positioned themselves in a ski resort on the German and Austrian borders. On 2 May 1945, Werner’s brother Magnus, riding a bicycle with a white handkerchief on the handlebars, made contact with the US army. His opening words, in English, were: “We want to see Ike.” Ike certainly wanted to see them, and von Braun’s vision refined the V2 into the Redstone, and finally made possible that giant step for mankind.
I just wish I could forget about the five workers who were hanged daily at the Harz mine pour encourager les autres.
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