Fwd: Rocket Man: Dyson on Von Braun

[rich]

here is the full text article.


Rocket Man

By Freeman Dyson
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
by Michael J. Neufeld
Knopf/Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 587 pp., $35.00

 In the summer of 1944, the population of London was accustomed to the
loud rumbling of a buzz bomb flying overhead, the abrupt silence when
the engine stopped and the bomb began its descent to earth, the
anxious seconds of waiting for the explosion. Buzz bombs, otherwise
known as V-1s, were simple pilotless airplanes, launched from sites
along the French and Dutch coasts. As the summer ended and our armies
drove the Germans out of France, the buzz bombs stopped coming. [They
were replaced by a much less disturbing instrument of murder, the V-2
rockets launched from more distant sites in western Holland. The V-2
was not nerve-wracking like the buzz bomb. When a V-2 came down, we
heard the explosion first and the supersonic scream of the descending
rocket afterward. As soon as we heard the explosion, we knew that it
had missed us. The buzz bombs and the V-2 rockets killed a few
thousand people in London, but they hardly disrupted our civilian
activities and had no effect at all!
on the
war that was then raging in France and in Poland. The rockets had even
less effect than the buzz bombs.

To me at that time the V-2 rockets were a cause for joy and wonder. I
was a civilian scientist analyzing the causes of bomber losses for the
Royal Air Force Bomber Command. I knew that the main cause of our
bomber losses was German fighters, and I knew that the Germans were
desperately short of fighters. If the Germans had had five times as
many fighters, they could have stopped us from flying over Germany,
and that would have made it much harder for us to invade their country
and finish the war. I knew that the buzz bomb was a cheap and simple
device but the V-2 was complicated and expensive. Each V-2 cost the
Germans at least as much in skilled labor and materials as a modern
fighter aircraft. It was incomprehensible to me that the Germans had
chosen to put their limited resources into militarily useless rockets
instead of crucially needed fighters. Each time I heard a V-2 explode,
I counted it as one German fighter thrown away and ten fewer of our
bombers downed. It seemed that some unknown benefactor in Germany was
unilaterally disarming the German air force for our benefit. I had no
idea then who the benefactor might be. We now know his name. It was
Wernher von Braun.

Michael J. Neufeld's Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War is a
meticulously researched and technically accurate biography of von
Braun. He was not intentionally working for Germany's enemies in 1944.
He was at that time a patriotic German, working for the Fatherland,
producing V-2 rockets for the German army. It was not his fault that
V-2 rockets were not what the Germans needed for defending the
Fatherland. He was our benefactor only by accident. Von Braun's
primary purpose, from the time he began rocket experiments as an
amateur at the age of eighteen until the end of his life, was
interplanetary space travel.


In 1932 he was recruited by the German army to develop rockets for
military missiles. The army gave him what he wanted: steady funding
and freedom to experiment. He pushed hard to develop a rocket that
could fly into space, not caring whether or not the army had a
reasonable military mission for it. The result of his pushing was the
V-2, the first long-range ballistic missile, capable of delivering a
one-ton explosive payload with very poor accuracy to a range of two
hundred miles. When the V-2 made its first successful flight in
October 1942, this was a big step toward von Braun's dream of walking
on Mars. It should have been obvious to German military and political
leaders that it was, from a military point of view, an expensive and
useless toy.

How did it happen that Hitler gave his blessing to a crash program to
produce the V-2 i  quantity? Hitler was not a fool. As a foot soldier
in World War I he had survived som  heavy artillery bombardments. Von
Braun demonstrated his plans for the V-2 to Hitler i  person in August
1941, and Hitler reacted with sensible objections. He asked whether
von Brau  had worried about the timing of the explosion, since a
normal artillery shell arriving a  supersonic speed would bury itself
in the ground before exploding and do little damage. Thi  was a
serious problem, and von Braun had to admit that he had not thought
about it. Hitler the  remarked that the V-2 was only an artillery
shell with longer range than usual, and the arm  would need hundreds
of thousands rather than thousands of such shells in order to use the
effectively. Von Braun agreed that this was true

After the session with von Braun, Hitler ordered the army to plan
production of hundreds of thousands of V-2s per year, but not to begin
production until the bird had successfully flown. This decision seemed
harmless at the time, but it played into the hands of the army
rocketeers. The army leaders knew that the notion of producing
hundreds of thousands of V-2s per year was absurd, but they accepted
the order. It gave them authority to spend as much as they wanted on
the program, without any fixed timetable. In August 1941 the war was
going well for Germany. The army had won huge victories in the first
two months of the Russian campaign, France was knocked out of the war,
and America was not yet in. Hitler did not imagine that within three
years he would be fighting a defensive war for the survival of the
Reich. He did not ask whether the V-2 might be a toy that the Reich
could not afford.

In Germany as in other countries, the main factor driving acquisition
of weapons was interservice rivalry. The army wanted the V-2 because
of rivalry with the Luftwaffe. The German air force was leading the
world in high-technology weapons, developing jet aircraft and rocket
aircraft and a variety of guided rocket missiles. The army had to have
a high-technology project too. The V-2 was a high-technology version
of artillery. It gave the army the chance to say to the air force, our
rockets are bigger than your rockets.

Although Hitler was nominally a dictator, he was no more successful
than political leaders of democratic countries in keeping rivalries
between different branches of the military under control. He could
fire military leaders, and did so from time to time, but he could not
make them do what he wanted. The army leaders, with the help of von
Braun, launched a crash program to produce the V-2. They produced a
few thousand V-2s altogether, enough to outshine the air force but not
enough to be militarily useful. Hitler could not force them to produce
as many as he thought necessary, and he could not force them to stop
the program and transfer its resources to the air force. The army and
the air force continued to operate as independent principalities until
the day Hitler died.

Von Braun's career as a rocket-builder was divided into six periods in
which he worked fo  six different masters. From age eighteen to
twenty, he worked as an amateur in Berlin wit  the Verein für
Raumschiffahrt, the German Space-Travel Society, a private group of
rocke  enthusiasts. He was technically the most competent member of
the group. In the years 1930–1932 he built and successfully launched
at a small airfield near Berlin a series of liquid-fuele  rockets.
Rockets are of two kinds, solid-fueled and liquid-fueled. Both kinds
are driven forwar  by hot gas escaping from the back when the fuel
burns. Solid-fueled rockets are simpler an  cheaper. They were used
unsuccessfully by the British navy attacking Fort McHenry in 1814, a
recorded in the US national anthem. Liquid-fueled rockets fly faster
and farther, but are muc  more complicated and difficult to handle

>From age twenty to twenty-eight von Braun worked as a civilian for the
German army. The army acquired a large area of land at Peenemünde on
the Baltic coast of Germany, and built facilities there for
large-scale development and testing of rockets. Von Braun's mother had
lived nearby as a child and suggested the place as suitable for her
son's activities. Von Braun's friend Walter Dornberger, an army major,
was in charge of the program. Von Braun served under him as technical
director of the Peenemünde establishment.

>From age twenty-eight to thirty-three, during the years of World War
II, von Braun continued to work at Peenemünde as a civilian for the
German army, but he was legally an officer in the SS. This meant that
he was under SS discipline. He wore his SS uniform as little as
possible, and only on formal occasions. He disliked and distrusted his
SS colleagues. But when, toward the end of the war, the SS took over
the manufacture of V-2 missiles from the army, he had to do what the
SS ordered. During the final weeks of the war, when he was evacuated
with the remnants of the Peenemünde staff to the southeast corner of
Germany, he was escorted by SS guards to keep him in line.

>From age thirty-three to forty-eight he worked for the US army at El
Paso, Texas, and Huntsville, Alabama, as leader of a large group of
German rocket experts. These experts were hastily recruited in 1945 by
the US forces occupying Germany to keep them out of Soviet hands,
transferred to the United States, and then employed in developing
Redstone missiles for the army. From age forty-eight to sixty, von
Braun worked for the newly created NASA, first at Huntsville and later
in Washington. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville became
the NASA Marshall Space-Flight Center in 1960, with von Braun in
charge of the development of the huge Saturn booster rockets that
safely carried twenty-one Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. From
age sixty until his death at sixty-five, he worked for the Fairchild
Industries corporation in Washington. At Fairchild he worked as hard
as ever, supervising a variety of technical projects, helping to
develop new airplanes and satellites!
for mi
litary and civilian missions.

The central concern of this book is the third period of von Braun's
life, the five years durin  World War II in which he realized his
dream of shooting rockets into space and accepted  position of
responsibility in the SS. The SS was the most criminal part of the
Hitler regime  directly responsible for the administration of the
concentration camps in which millions o  prisoners were either
murdered, starved to death, or used as slave laborers. Von Braun knew
a  first hand the dark side of the SS. After the Peenemünde complex
was seriously damaged by a  RAF bombing attack in 1943, the SS took
over the production of V-2 rockets, and the mai  production line was
moved to an underground fac-tory called Mittelwerk that would be saf
from air attacks. Mittelwerk was conveniently located near the Dora
concentration camp and th  town of Nordhausen in central Germany. Dora
prisoners became a large part of the workforc  at Mittelwerk, with SS
guards to control them. Thousands of priso!
ners we
re confined in th  tunnels where they worked under horrible conditions
and slept on straw or bare rock. A larg  number of them died of hunger
and disease. A smaller number were publicly hanged fo  disobedience or
alleged acts of sabotage

The boss at Mittelwerk was an SS general called Hans Kammler whom von
Braun feared and hated. Von Braun was not responsible for running the
operations. He was only a technical adviser. But he visited Mittelwerk
many times to supervise the production process and improve the quality
of the output. The facts about von Braun's activities at Mittelwerk
and his SS membership were first revealed in a book, Geheimnis von
Huntsville (The Secret of Huntsville), by Julius Mader, published in
East Berlin in 1963. This book was not translated into English and
attracted little attention in the US, being dismissed as Communist
propaganda. A later book, Dora by Jean Michel, originally written in
French but published in English in 1979, reported the same facts and
attracted much more attention. The book under review contains nothing
essentially new, but adds many details that the author found in
unpublished papers by von Braun and others. Von Braun must have been
well aware of the atrocities!
being
committed in the tunnels, even if he avoided personal contact with the
prisoners.

Von Braun was never interested in Nazi ideology. He belonged to the
old aristocratic class of Prussian nobility who owned big estates in
Pomerania or Silesia, now annexed by Poland, or in East Prussia, now
annexed by Russia. His father's estate was in Silesia, his mother's in
Pomerania. These were the people who ruled Prussia for hundreds of
years and ruled Germany from 1871 to 1918. They were for the most part
highly educated and capable administrators, conscientious public
servants, and social snobs, having more in common with their
aristocratic cousins in other European countries than with the common
people of Germany. They despised the socialist riffraff who came to
power in 1918 and established the Weimar Republic.

They despised equally the Nazi riff-raff who destroyed the republic in
1933 and gave supreme power to Hitler. But they respected Hitler as an
effective leader who brought order and prosperity to Germany after the
chaos and misery of the Weimar years. Hitler was, after all, more
nationalist than socialist. He did not threaten their social position
or their estates. Most of them served him willingly as leader of
Germany, while continuing to despise the Nazis as social and
intellectual inferiors.

Wernher's father was a typical member of the Prussian nobility. He
spoke three languages fluently and his wife spoke six. His three sons
grew up in Berlin, in an atmosphere of wealth and privilege. Born in
1912, Wernher was sent to a private boarding school in Ettersburg
Castle near Weimar with high intellectual standards and high fees. His
friends there were boys of his own class. At school he became obsessed
with rockets. He read the classic text, The Rocket into Interplanetary
Space, published by the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth in 1923. He
decided that his mission in life was to bring Oberth's dreams to
reality. At age thirteen he made a good start by studying the
mathematics that he needed in order to understand Oberth's equations.
At age sixteen he became a member of the German Space-Travel Society.
At age eighteen, when he graduated from school, he was proficient
enough in the theory and practice of rocketry to become the society's
chief experimenter.

Von Braun did not hesitate to accept the job of military rocket
developer that the army offered to him in 1932. Hitler was not yet in
power, and the army was a conservative institution. It was interested
in unmanned missiles rather than manned spaceships, but the same
rockets that would drive missiles could later be used to drive
spaceships. He found the army rocket people congenial. They were
unpolitical like himself, good at working together on difficult
technical problems and staying out of the limelight. When Hitler
became chancellor in 1933, nothing much changed for von Braun. The
army remained unpolitical, and the budget for rocketry continued to
grow.

Change came in 1939 when Germany went to war, the army rockets were no
longer technica  toys but real weapons, and the SS tried to take over
the program. The decisive moral choic  for von Braun came in 1940,
when he was asked by the army to become an SS officer. He did no  want
to have anything to do with the SS, so he went to his superior
officer, Walter Dornberger  for advice. Dornberger told him there were
only two alternatives. Either he must accept the S  commission or he
could no longer work with the army. This had been decided at a higher
level i  the government. Von Braun would not abandon the army project
to which he had devoted eigh  years of his life, so he said yes to the
SS

One of his friends in the project expressed dismay when he appeared in
an SS uniform. Von Braun told him unhappily, "Es geht nicht anders,"
"There is no other way." There was another way that von Braun might
have taken: to give up his dreams of rocketry and volunteer for
service to his country as a soldier or an airman. He was a trained
pilot and loved flying, so he might have enlisted in the Luftwaffe and
served the Fatherland by shooting down RAF bombers. But his dislike of
the SS was not strong enough to make that other way seem reasonable.

On February 21, 1944, came von Braun's moment of partial redemption,
when he stood firm against the devil to whom he had sold his soul. He
was unexpectedly summoned to a private meeting with Heinrich Himmler,
the chief of the SS and the second-most-powerful man in Germany. By
this time the V-2 was supposed to be ready for operational use against
England but was delayed by technical problems. Himmler invited him to
stop working for the army and move over to the SS, bringing the entire
rocket program with him. Von Braun reported the conversation in a
memoir written six years later.[*] Himmler said:

Why don't you come to us? You know that the Führer's door is open to
me at any time, don't you? I shall be in a much better position to
help you lick the remaining difficulties than that clumsy Army
machine!
Von Braun politely declined the invitation. According to his memoir,
he ventured to compare the V-2 with "a little flower that needs
sunshine, fertile soil, and some gardener's tending." He told Himmler
that "by pouring a big jet of liquid manure on that little flower, in
order to have it grow faster, he might kill it." His reason for
refusing the invitation was probably concern for the welfare of his
beloved rockets rather than concern for the welfare of the Dora
prisoners. Still it took courage to refuse an invitation from Himmler.
It took even more courage to compare the help offered by the chief of
the SS to a load of shit.

"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 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 c
laimed 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. H  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. Fo  several
years he worked patiently for the army, refurbishing surplus V-2
rockets that the US ha  imported from Germany. The army could not give
him more interesting work because there wa  no money for further
development of rockets. He quickly understood that in America th
money was controlled by Congress and Congress was controlled by public
opinion. The mone  was lacking because the public was not interested
in rocketry. So he resolved to go directly t  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 launch-pad, 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 historica  question is whether von Braun's great achievement,
providing the means for twelve men t  walk on the moon, made sense.
Was it a big step toward the realization of his dream o  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 taxpayers  money, it collapsed as soon as
the taxpayers lost interest in it. When von Braun moved fro  NASA to
Fairchild Industries in 1972, he was wagering that human adventures in
space would i  future be better supported by private investors than by
governments. He died of cancer fiv  years later. Now, thirty years
after his death, we see a vigorous growth of privately funded spac
ventures. If von Braun had lived twenty years longer, he might have
pushed us sooner into th  era of private space ventures. He might even
have rescued the Space Sh!
uttle,
his orphane  baby, and made it become what he had intended it to be,
cheap and safe and quick. In the lon  run, one way or another, people
will again dream of colonizing the universe and will again buil
spaceships to embark on celestial journeys. When that happens, they
will be following in vo  Braun's footsteps

The two moral issues that the 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 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 citize!
nship a
nd 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.

The author of this book condemns von Braun for his collaboration with
the SS, and condemns the United States 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.

Notes
[*] The original version of the 1950 memoir was unpublished, and is
now in the von Braun papers at Huntsville. A revised version was
published with the title "Reminiscences of German Rocketry" in Journal
of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 15 (1956), pp. 125–145.
The memoir is historically unreliable, written for an American or
British audience long after the event. No independent report of the
conversation with Himmler exists.