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The Rocket Man

Dennis Piszkiewicz

    In the 1950s, before Walt Disney had the park, he had a TV program on the ABC network called “Disneyland.” I watched it every Sunday night. One Sunday, he introduced a middle-aged man with a German accent named Wernher von Braun. Walt’s guest told America about rockets and space travel. This was not a Mickey Mouse cartoon or a newly discovered fantasy land, but it was fascinating.
    My dad was watching it with me. He said, “Do you know who he is? What he did during The War?”
    I was three years old when World War II ended; and I had no memory of it. Dad said, “He built rockets for Germany.” Dad meant that von Braun was Germany’s head of rocket development and construction, which he seemed to find disgusting, but neither Werner nor Walt said anything about weapons or war.
    “Disneyland” on TV had three one-hour episodes about rockets and space travel. How cool was that?
    These programs from the mid-1950s are available again on YouTube to anyone who searches for the titles:
    “Disneyland — Man in Space,”
    “Disneyland – Man on the Moon,”
    “Disneyland – Mars and Beyond.”
    Germany developed the V-2 rocket as a weapon in World War II. Starting in September 1944, it built about 5,200 V-2s. They had a range of 200 miles, and 3,200 of them were targeted at London, England and Antwerp, Belgium. Each carried one ton of explosives. They blasted huge holes in the ground, destroying buildings and killing an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel.
    After The War, von Braun and hundreds of his German scientists were recruited by the US Army to build rockets. The Soviet Union also recruited German rocket experts for its own program. These programs turned out to be about more than throwing nuclear bombs at their Cold War rivals. In October 1957, the Soviet Union put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the earth, and the international competition for space began.
    On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy addressed the United States Congress on “Urgent National Needs.” He declared: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade [the 1960s] is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

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    Wernher von Braun and his team, still top-heavy with German expatriates, were transferred from the US Army to NASA. They built the Saturn V rocket that accomplished their mission when the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the surface of the Moon and returned to Earth in late 1969, on JFK’s schedule. Von Braun became an American hero for overseeing the designing and building of the rocket ship that went to the moon.

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    During the 1980s and early 1990s I did a lot of business traveling, much of it to Washington, DC. While there, I usually took time to see the sights and visit the museums. My favorite was the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. It had a lot of rockets and used space hardware, including an original, German-built V-2 missile that was impressive in its harmless, museum exhibit way.
    Sometime around the mid-1990s, while driving home from work, waiting for a red traffic signal to turn green, this random question popped into my mind: “Where and how did Germany build all those V-2 rockets it fired at London and Antwerp in the final days of the War, when its industries were being carpet bombed into oblivion by the US Army Air Force?”
    I went to my local public library where I found a book co-authored by von Braun titled History of Rocketry and Space Travel (1966). It identified the place where the V-2 rockets were built. In one lone paragraph it said that the missiles were produced in “the underground Mittelwerk facility, a converted oil depot near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains. Nearly 900 V-2s a month were being produced there near the end of the war.”
    Building rockets in an underground factory made sense, because doing so would give protection from bombers; however von Braun’s History of Rocketry book gave no other significant details.
    I spent more time in the library searching its catalog. I came across a book titled Dora: The Nazi Concentration Camp Where Modern Space Technology Was Born and 30,000 Prisoners Died. “Dora,” with its deceptively innocent feminine name, was written by a Frenchman, Jean Michel, in his native tongue, and published in English translation in 1979. Dora was in Germany’s Harz Mountains, and was populated with male citizens of European countries that had been occupied by Germany. The author survived nearly two years as a prisoner and slave laborer in Dora where inmates were starved and worked to death, in contrast with the death camps where Jews were sent, soon after their arrival, to the gas chambers.
    Michel’s book answered my question of where the V-2 rockets were built and told me more. “Mittelwerk” and “Dora” had the same geographical location. They were two names for the same place, and both were operated by the SS in the same complex of underground tunnels.
    Michel’s book also answered the obvious question from the prisoner-slave laborers’ point of view: Were von Braun and his rocket team involved in the operation of the slave labor camp? Prisoners had seen von Braun and members of his team often at Mittelwerk-Dora; but at the time, they did not know who they were, and they would not know until long after the War ended.
    In 1993 I began to explore original sources. The Freedom of Information Act made available files held by US government agencies. I began writing requests for files on Wernher von Braun and his top associates in Germany who accompanied him to the US after World War II. A month or two after I made my requests, packages began arriving in my mail. Files for von Braun from the FBI and CIA told me next to nothing. Files for his colleagues were not very informative either. However, the US Army delivered many useful documents. Its files from after World War II had been recently declassified after about forty-five years of secrecy.
    I searched hundreds of photocopied pages for useful information. Buried in that heap, I found a one-page document telling me the dirty secrets von Braun and the US Army had kept for a half-century. The document originated with the “Office of Military Government for Germany US” and was dated April 24, 1947. It was a resume of von Braun’s professional, political, and military activities. It said he served in the Luftwaffe (German air force) from 1936 to 1938; he had joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1937; and he became a member of the SS on May 1, 1940. He rose through the ranks of the SS to Sturnbahnfuhrer (equivalent of Major) on June 28, 1943.
    For those who are not familiar with the SS, here are the basic facts: The SS was the paramilitary arm of the German Nazi Party, and it took responsibility for implementation of Nazi ideology. It operated the Gestapo and the death camps. It was the Nazi organization primarily responsible for the Holocaust that killed six million Jews. The SS ran Dora, the slave labor camps where von Braun’s V-2 rockets were built; and it counted von Braun as a member and as an officer.
    As an officer in the SS and a person involved in operation of the Dora-Mittelwerk complex, von Braun could have been the subject of a war crimes trial. Instead, the US Army brought him and his team of hundreds of rocket builders into the US as immigrants. It gave them prime jobs working for the Army and paths to citizenship.
    It seemed as if everybody on both the winning and losing sides of the War was compelled to write their memoirs of it. The Germans left out embarrassing descriptions of von Braun’s relationships with the Nazi government. American biographers tended to overlook von Braun’s involvement in the German war effort and cast him as a rocket scientist who had the misfortune, because of his nationality, of working for the losing side during World War II. I saw an opportunity to write a more complete history, and I generated my own biography titled Wernher von Braun: The Man Who Sold the Moon, which was published in 1998. Because of its significance, I used a photocopy of von Braun’s recently declassified Nazi resume as a frontispiece for my biography of him.

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    After publication of my book, I was invited by the Museum of Flight in Seattle to give a Saturday afternoon lecture on Werner von Braun. It was a good deal for both of us. The museum got a lecturer for the price of a round-trip ticket and a hotel room; I got to sell my books.
    When I finished my lecture, I found myself in the ultimate awkward encounter. During the ritual of autographing copies of my book, a woman appeared with the book in hand. I estimated her to be in her mid-forties. She told me she was Wernher von Braun’s daughter. She said she was born and educated in the US. and was a faculty member at a college in the northwest. She had driven for five hours to get to Seattle. She told me that her father, who died eleven years earlier, did not speak about his life before he came to America; and she came to my lecture to learn about it.
    I am sure she found our meeting as awkward as I did. Minutes earlier, I made the case to her and a large group of strangers, that her father, the all-American hero rocket builder, was also a Nazi war criminal by being a participant in the conspiracy that killed tens of thousands of prisoners at Dora. My offense was compounded by documentation in the copy of my book she had in her hand.
    I wrote something inoffensive like the following in the book she bought: “Your father was a brilliant and complex man. I hope my book adds to your understanding of him.” I followed it with my autograph.

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    Late in 2020, I got a phone call from a woman who introduced herself as a film producer, and she told me that she was interested in buying an option to develop a film based on my biography of von Braun.
    I asked a friend and colleague, who is a retired lawyer and had worked in the movie business, what he thought of the producer’s contract proposal. He generously looked it over and told me that the proposal was mostly boiler plate, the financial offer was on the cheap side, and most options never get turned into movies. He advised me to, “take the money and run.”
    I accepted her offer, cashed her check, and haven’t heard from her since.
    Recently I had the opportunity to see the film-noir classic from 1946, The Stranger, which starred Orson Welles, in the title role. He co-wrote the script and directed the film. Welles played the fictional Nazi war criminal Franz Kindler, the creator of the German death camps and their poison-gas chambers. After the War, Kindler escapes to America, assumes a false identity, and commits a murder to protect his new identity. At the film’s finale, Kindler is pursued by a mob, and he dies in a fatal fall trying to escape. The Stranger debuted the year after Wernher von Braun came to America.
    Movies aren’t always true to reality. Wernher von Braun, despite his Nazi credentials and actions during the War escaped accountability for them because of US government secrecy. He was transformed into an American celebrity and hero with the unwitting help of other American celebrities, like Walt Disney.

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