Launch of Apollo 4 with Saturn V main booster from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on November 9, 1967. NASA tested the first Saturn V rockets with all live stages and a complete spacecraft, and called the first Saturn V launch Apollo 4.
 

Apollo von Braun

By Mark Walker
American Scientist, May-June 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
By Michael J. Neufeld
Knopf, 603 pages

Wernher von Braun is an iconic figure of the 20th century, someone who built deadly missiles for Hitler and the Saturn V rockets that sent Americans to the Moon. Michael Neufeld's long-awaited biography steers a course between the extremes of demonization and hagiography.

Von Braun, who grew up during the Weimar Republic, was a brilliant student from a politically influential family. He was a member of a group of amateur rocket enthusiasts who dreamed of someday reaching space.

In 1937, the German army and air force opened Peenemünde, a large center for research and development on the north coast of Germany, and von Braun moved his rocket group there. The Peenemünde project was a well-funded effort to develop rockets and other advanced weapons.
 

By 1943, Goebbels and others were calling for qualitatively superior "wonder weapons" that would overcome Germany's quantitative inferiority. This set the stage for the successful launch on October 3, 1942, of the A4 rocket. The A4 was later referred to as the V2, or Vengeance Weapon 2, and used to bomb London.
 

To hurry the A4 into production, the SS moved into a network of underground tunnels and forced concentration-camp inmates to work under inhuman conditions making the missiles. Von Braun was thus brought "face-to-face with the apparatus of oppression, slavery, and murder at the heart of the government for which he so energetically labored."
 

Von Braun's involvement with National Socialism, and with the SS in particular, culminated in his arrest by the Gestapo in March of 1944 on suspicion of treason. He was accused of being more concerned with reaching the stars than with developing a weapon of war. But this episode had more to do with the politics of the Nazi regime than with what von Braun did or did not do or say.

From the end of the war to the end of his life, von Braun used his arrest to argue that he had been a victim of the Nazis rather than an accomplice or fellow traveler. Neufeld turns this apologia on its head. The SS had a "fat file" on von Braun, but they did not accuse him of objecting to how the prisoners were treated.

Von Braun and many of his associates surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war and were brought to the United States because of their technical expertise. Von Braun underwent a religious conversion that appears to have been deeply felt. He used religion "to pacify his own conscience," says Neufeld.

Working for the U.S. Army, von Braun recreated the "arsenal system" of in-house research and development that he had used at Peenemünde. In his work for the military, he built up and managed an engineering effort to produce reliable rockets — to carry nuclear weapons first, then satellites and eventually people.

In the public sphere, von Braun popularized bold visions of interplanetary travel and the militarization of space, first through magazine articles, then in a Walt Disney television series. Above all, von Braun relentlessly campaigned for ever more governmental support for spaceflight.
 

The shock of the Soviet satellite Sputnik gave von Braun's Army team the opportunity to beat out their Air Force rivals by putting up the first U.S. satellite. But it was President John F. Kennedy's decision to race the Soviets to the Moon that finally provided von Braun with the chance to realize his dream.

Neufeld makes it clear that von Braun's true genius was as a manager of very large, complex and challenging science and engineering projects. Others had conceived and built rockets, but von Braun made them work.
 

The last years of von Braun's life were frustrating. The political will to invest immense resources in space travel dissolved after the Apollo missions.

A thread that runs through the portion of the book covering von Braun's time in the United States is that his connection to concentration-camp slave labor never drew widespread attention. After his death, the connection became well known and tarnished his legacy.

Wernher von Braun was one of the most important men of his time. Neufeld calls him as "a twentieth-century Faust," someone who succumbed to "the temptation to work with an evil regime in return for the resources to carry out the research closest to one's heart." This book will become the definitive biography.
 

Mark Walker is John Bigelow Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY.
 

Vengeance Weapon 2

1937 — Military research installation set up at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast

1942 — First successful V2 flights

1943 — Mittelwerk AG set up to accelerate V2 development

1943 August — Peenemünde site destroyed by Allied bombers. The Germans selected a new underground location for rocket production in the Hartz mountains near Nordhausen. Skilled prisoners arrived from Buchenwald to form a new subcamp called Dora.

1943 December — Start of V2 production

1944 October — Subcamp became independent and named Mittelbau

1945 — Number of prisoners grew to about 40 000

1945 April — Mittelbau evacuated. A number of experts and staff, including Wernher von Braun, left for Bayern. Most of the prisoners were sent on death marches to Bergen-Belsen and Sachsenhausen. The camp was liberated on April 11.
 

Countdown to Apollo

1945 September — First successful flight of U.S. Corporal missile

1947 June — Go to develop Bumper, to consist of Corporal as second stage mated to V2 as first stage

1950 July — Bumper 8 first Army missile launched at Cape Canaveral

1954 — Corporal issued to U.S. Army

1955 — Corporal supplied to British Army

1961 April 12 — Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth

1961 May 5 — Mercury-Redstone Freedom 7 made the first U.S. manned suborbital flight, launched from Cape Canaveral and piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard.

1967 November 9 — Launch of Saturn V / Apollo 4 from Cape Canaveral — image

1969 July 16 — Apollo 11 mission to land two men on the lunar surface and return them safely to Earth. The spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral and carried a crew of three: Mission Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. The mission was a success.
 

AR  Can such a glorious mission as Apollo justify using slave labor from Nazi death camps? Surely not, but Apollo was the highlight of my youth. Wernher, I dub thee Apollo. May God forgive thy sins.