Rubbing
his eyes, Wernher von Braun decided to call it a night. Gathering
and collecting his papers together on his desk into meticulous order,
he looked at his study clock – it was past one o’clock in the
morning– far too late. His wife Maria had already turned in, but
he knew it was pointless. He’d had a several disturbed nights
recently, and felt that tonight would probably end up much the same.
He leaned
back on his chair, sighed and took a moment to look around his study
filled with memorabilia from his long career in rockets. Pictures of
his achievements, of him with world leaders and celebrities, and of
course his beloved model rockets were everywhere. Almost every
rocket he’d worked on was here - they were his legacy. However
there was one that was conspicuous by its absence.
His study
reflected his life now in America – but it was a sanitised version
of his life. Looking around there wasn’t a single reminder to him
or any visitor of his past in Germany so long ago now. No mention of
his A-4 rocket that had made him such a prize to world government.
To him it was always the A-4 rocket, though to Hitler it was the
Vengeance weapon of the German nation, and to many a frightened
European city resident looking to the skies in terror it was the V-2.
Rockets
had been his passion since he was a boy. He remembered all too well
trying to set a speed record by connecting a toy car to a lit
firework back in Berlin when he was twelve. He couldn’t help but
smile looking back at the memories of the panic it’d caused in a
nearby crowd and the trouble with the Police he’d gotten into. It
seemed so innocent now.
But that
passion never died as the young boy became a man, driving him to
study rocket engineering at the University of Berlin. Under the
Weimer Republic which ruled Germany at the time, there was open
research into scientific methods for space flight, but as the madness
of Hitler’s National Socialism took over the country such ideas
were slowly smothered. Rockets were needed by the Fatherland, but
rockets for the military not rockets for space exploration.
With no
other options open to pursue his chosen field, Wernher had made a
deal with the devil - he realised that now - and joined the military
rocket research team at Peenemünde. The country was stuck with Nazi
fever and no one dared antagonise the new masters of Germany. So to
secure his position he became a member of the Nazi party to fit in.
And why not? Everyone else seemed to be doing it. It would only be
years later he would learn the true horror and the deepest shame of
what being a Nazi meant.
It was the
mid-30s, and Germany prepared for a war with Britain and France that
seemed inevitable. The finished technology of the A-4 was still some
way off and not perfected. But the potential – to deliver huge
bomb payloads without need of airplane bombers could reshape the way
air forces worked, render airplanes obsolete within years. Head of
the SS Heinrick Himmler himself wanted to control the technology, to
earn the gratitude of the Fuhrer himself if it were successful, and
took a personal interest in the project.
Wernher
could not stand the man; he was like an opportunistic weasel, always
interfering with the work at Peenemünde. Never the less he was a
weasel with a ruthless reputation, and when Himler offered Wernher an
officers commission in the SS, it was an offer Wernher dared not
refuse. He only wore that uniform the once, on receiving his
commission, but it was once to often for Wernher’s liking and it
still was an unpleasant memory.
As the
inevitable World War began and gathered pace, so did the research at
Peenemünde, and a working version of the A-4 rocket was completed in
1942. A single working rocket would not win the war by itself, it
needed to be mass produced at a factory with adequate power, material
and workers. Peenemünde was not suitable for such a factory, so a
production site was set up far away at Mittelwerk, in an abandoned
mine which was converted into a rocket production facility almost a
mile in length deep underground, utilising a mixture of skilled
German and unskilled slave workers from a nearby concentration camp.
At the
time he had no idea what depravity hid behind the term “slave
workers from a concentration camp” meant. Few in Germany
really did. Hitler had come to power promising to eradicate the
menace of the Jews, and he was true to his word. Should the German
people have expected anything else? And yet for many a card carrying
Nazi it all happened so out of sight and out of mind, it was easy for
many to turn a blind eye and deny responsibility later.
But not
for Wernher, his first visit to Mittelwerk had removed the scales
from his eyes, and he had seen some of the horrors of the Nazi regime
at first hand. His first memory was watching a cart being removed
from the factory floor. It was filled with perhaps a dozen corpses
of Jewish slaves in their telltale-striped uniform. The bodies
inside barely looked human, they looked more like skeletons wrapped
in a last piece of loose fitting flesh, faces grey and sunken
seemingly trapped forever in a silent scream. Wernher felt
physically sick, and the smell, oh my God the smell, and the flies it
would haunt him forever!
The SS
guard who escorted him around the premises spat at the trolley of
corpses as it passed. “Damn Jews!” He cursed as they passed
him, then after taking in Wernher’s pale complexion laughed saying.
“Don’t worry there’s plenty more to work on you precious
rockets.”
The
factory floor was indeed a Cathedral to rocketry, like some
underground seventh wonder. Gantries towered high up in the roof,
rockets lay in parts as far as the eye could see in different levels
of completion, and the flashing arc of welding threw out sparks
intermittently, lighting it all like some lair of ancient legend.
But Wernher soon realised his heaven was other peoples hell. For if
the dead were being carted out, then he could see that inside the
living dead toiled in misery in their thousands. Ghoulish, barely
human, these wretches watched and stared at Wernher. It was a stare
like a muffled cry of agony and despair. It was a stare that made
Wernher ashamed to be German, ashamed to be human. It was a stare he
could not return
“Why
doesn’t someone do something for these people?” Wernher had
blurted out to his guard in disbelief at what he was seeing.
“I’d
be careful my friend about that sort of talk – unless you want to
join them.” The SS guard had said coldly, his steel blue eye
fixing Wernher with absolute contempt before he muttered. “Damn
Jew sympathiser.”
That was
the first and last time he raised his voice over the subject, under
the Nazis you were lucky to even get a warning. Fear kept him silent
from then on. Back at Peenemünde, he was asked by his colleagues
how things were going at Mittelwerk – how could he reply truthfully
to that?
The
conspiracy of silence. It haunted Wernher still to this day. To see
wrong on such a grand scale and not speak of it and not challenge it,
was to lose a piece of your humanity. Germany was at war, the
facilities at Peenemünde were targeted and bombed regularly, and he
lost many a friend to such action by the Allies. But he kept moving
courageously on in the face of the enemy, refusing to be defeated or
broken. But in the face of his own country and the administration
that was running it, he felt guilty of the worst kind of cowardice.
It wasn’t
long before he realised how difficult and perilous the tightrope he
walked with the Nazis truly was. Perhaps his SS Guard at Mittelwerk
had reported him to his superiors, but he’d caught the attention of
the Gestapo and one day they came for him, bundling him away in the
dead of night. Two weeks he’d been trapped in that vile cell in
March 1944, not knowing if tomorrow he’d face torture, slave labour
or a firing squad. He’d heard that if you had really displeased
Hitler, you were garrotted by piano wire, and your execution filmed
for the Fuhrer’s pleasure. It was an unpleasant thought.
Luckily
for Wernher, the A-4 rocket program had stalled without him, and
Hitler himself had called for Wernher release and immunity from
prosecution for now “so long as he was indispensable”. The
command had a chilling ring to it.
8th
September 1944 – a dark day for Wernher, tinged with shame. The
first A-4 rockets were launched in anger; one at Paris, two at
London. The A-4 was now indeed Hitlers Vengeance weapon, raining
destruction on far off cities. To Wernher it was the worst day of
his life. His work and dreams had become the tools to kill
indiscriminately.
The weapon
was never as reliable or effective as hoped by the Nazi elite, but it
was well named Vengeance. It could not hope to bring victory to the
Nazis, just help them in their final death throes to inflict more
misery upon the peoples of Europe. The Allied forces who had
advanced ever closer since the Normany Landings of June 1944, were
unhindered by the attacks, and the Russians were closing in on the
East unchecked. It was only the innocent who suffered.
It surely
seemed only a matter of time before Germany fell, though all talk of
defeat had to be conducted in the most intimate of circles. Even in
it’s death throes, the Nazi order was something to be feared –
defeatism was a crime punishable by a brutal death as a warning to
others. The SS “guarded” the Peenemünde rocket team, moving
them back as the Russians slowly advanced into Germany.
Wernher
learned that his guard’s orders from the Fuhrer himself were to
kill them all rather than see them captured by the Allies. Wernher
felt like there should be outrage at such a set of orders; after all
his team’s loyalty to the Fatherland, it seemed so unfair, so
barbaric. But with shame he conceded why should he be so surprised?
What had he done with his outrage after seeing the slaves of
Mittelwerk. Had he helped a single one of them? Why should he
expect that he deserved any better fate?
Knowing
they could rely on no-one else, his team secretly planned it’s
defection to the Americans. The Russians were much closer, but
surrender to them was unthinkable – Russia had been ravaged by the
Nazis, and rumour was that the Red Army was inflicting a brutal
revenge on German prisoners as they closed in on Berlin. Somehow the
plan had worked – the SS had spread the team out fearing losing
them all in bombing raids, but leaving them relatively lightly
guarded. His team secretly slipped their rabid SS guard dogs in the
dead of night – not easy considering Wernher had suffered a
compound fracture to his arm weeks before, and was not at his most
mobile – and they handed themselves over to the first American
column they came to. Within a month of the end of the war, Wernher,
his team, their plans and material were being shipped out to America.
There were
high hopes with war over that the era of space flight rocketry would
be ushered in. But there was no such change in direction, rockets
were still in the military arena. The A-4 rockets were to be rebuilt
and test firing continued to reproduce the technology for their new
American masters. Thankfully this time without the slave labour and
the human targets.
Of course
there were many questions asked of him and his staff. Were they
still Nazis? How involved had they been in the slave camp at
Mittelwerk? Had they any idea how many thousands of slaves had died
there? Why had he accepted a rank in the SS? How do you explain the
madness of those years to someone who doesn’t know what it’s like
to fear his own Government, who doesn’t know what it’s like to
have to censor every word you utter in case the secret police or an
informer are listening? He’d been around America enough to notice
that those who most violently accused him of being a Nazi didn’t
notice segregation and prejudice in their own country. He’d seen
the signs saying “No Coloreds” and “White Only” – Wernher
dared not mention that the root of so much evil in his own country
had started with similar signs saying “Not For Jews”.
Despite
the accusations which seemed never far away, it seemed that in
America as with Nazi Germeny, he would be immune to prosecution “so
long as he was indespensible”. The new direction of his work soon
became clear – the war had brought into being two weapons of
awesome potential – the German A-4 rocket, and the American atomic
bomb. The American Pentagon wanted them in one package, an atomic
weapon capable of being fired from hundreds of miles away. The
result was the Redstone rockets, the lovechild of the geniuses of
Oppenheimer and von Braun. It would be the world’s first ballistic
nuclear missile and certainly not it’s last.
With the
Redstone rocket a success, Wernher had hoped to get rocketry back on
course for his dream of space exploration, but it met once again with
nothing more than frustration - his project was ordered to restrict
themselves with respect to it’s space aspirations. The Government
wanted to put a satellite into space using American technology from
American engineers, and launched Project Vanguard, not wanting to be
seen by the American people as still dependant on Nazi know-how.
Wernher’s
participation in the space travel may well have never happened had it
not been for the events of 4th October 1957, and he had a
Russian to thank for it all. That was the day that Russia launched
what would be known as the Space Race by sending the world’s first
satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. There was an uproar about it,
everyone wanting to know how the Russians had beaten the Americans
into space.
It
transpired that America hadn’t been the only one to find plans and
potential in Germany’s A-4 rockets after the war, and von Braun’s
work had been reverse engineered and refined by a Russian whose
identity was revealed only as “the Chief Designer”. Wernher
admired the Chief Designer’s obvious genius, and feel envious of
the support the man must have from the Russian government. Was it to
much to hope that they were kindred spirits sharing the same passion
and goal, but separated by the iron curtain between their chosen
countries?
Wernher
felt frustration as he could only watch as America tried to save face
by launching it’s first satellite from a Vanguard rocket – the
rocket blew up on the launch pad in front of a live TV audience. It
was a humiliation for the country, and the President eager to save
face soon turned to Wernher and his team. It was the opportunity
Wernher had waited eagerly his whole life for, and he did not
disappoint.
On 31st
January 1958, his Explorer 1, a modification of his Redstone rocket,
blasted successfully into orbit, and America finally entered it’s
reply to the Space Race. It was a poor response, the satellite
barely a quarter of the size of the Russians. But the competition
was now underway. It sent shock waves through to country, and the
Government soon decided to coordinate the nations efforts under a
single organisation, and NASA - the National Aeronautic and Space
Administration - was formed. Having provided America with the space
flight success it so yearned for, Wernher and his team now had now
earned his place at the heart of America’s fledgling organisation.
The Space
Race. It was all about being first - first satellite in space, first
animal in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first
manned spacewalk – Russia seemed to claim it all in what seemed a
juggernaut
of one success after another, with America coming second best.
It
frustrated the American people to always come runner-up, but it was a
more personal grievance to Wernher. His team and America had the
lead in rocketry after the war, but the time had been whittled away
on other projects.
He’d
felt at times as watched and mistrusted by his adopted country as he
had ever felt back in Germany, though thankfully there was no Gestapo
to answer to here. He had been repeatedly hounded by some quarters
about his past - he knew what some were saying about him. He’d
heard people curse him as “that Kraut, “that Nazi”, “that
murderer”. Some even said to his face people like him should have
been hung with the other Nazis at Nuremberg.
He’d not
dared retaliate or justify himself to many who had spoken thus to him
– how can you open a dialogue with such people and their
prejudices? How could you explain the madness of living under the
Nazis to anyone who hadn’t been there? It was easy to read a
newspaper report, and sit in your chair in America, and say you’d
have behaved differently. No newspaper report or book or film could
ready you for the daily routine of living under the terror of the
Nazis. Perhaps that’s why he tried to keep as much of his old team
together, because to them you didn’t have to explain yourself, they
knew, they accepted, and they moved on – they were perhaps closer
than any family given the trials they’d experienced together.
There was
never any doubt about the ultimate prize in the Space Race – to be
the first to get a man on the Moon. But the road to the Moon was a
path lined with tragedy, the Gods of Rocketry seemed to always demand
their blood sacrifices. The chief advocate of the Moon program,
President Kennedy was assassinated, and the Apollo program he’d
instigated continued as his legacy to his country. Meanwhile over in
Russia, his opposite number, the “Chief Designer” Sergey
Pavlovich Korolyov, died from complications due to overwork, leaving
no clear successor to his legacy. And with his loss, the lack of his
genius and vision, Russia’s race to the Moon stalled.
Wernher
had met many great and famous people – leaders, politicians, film
stars. But he’d never met, Korolyov, his opposite number. Wernher
often wondered about that. He’d been allowed to read a security
file on the “Chief Designer” after his death. A Ukrainian by
birth, Korolyov had originally been an aircraft designer rather than
a rocket scientist. He’d also been a victim of Stalin’s Purges,
spending six months in slave labour camp in Siberia which caused him
health problems for the rest of his life. He was only “released”
from there because Russia needed his expertise to design new
aircraft, as the war between Russian and Germany gathered pace. At
the war’s end, he was hand picked to inspect and evaluate what
little the Americans had left of the A-4 technology at Mittelwerk
when the Russian army had taken ownership of the facilities.
There was
so much Wernher could identify with this man, like an echo of his own
life. Living under a Nazi or a Communist regime, it all seemed
equally brutal. Would Wernher and Korolyov have been able to
understand and respect wach other, what they had suffered for their
persuit of space? Would they have been friends or distrustful rivals
if they’d met? Wernher hoped inside that as engineers with the
same dream there would have been respect and (dare he even think the
word) comradeship. But of course he would never know. However when
the history of the Space Race was written, Wernher mused, the name
“von Braun” would always be mentioned next to the name
“Korolyov”. Wernher smiled at that, geography and politics might
have kept them apart, but history would put them together.
Even
without the Russians out of the race for the Moon, the timeline for
Apollo though was ambitious, too ambitious, and it meant many corners
were being cut in an attempt to meet deadlines. The schedule was
exhausting for everyone – long hours, working at the weekend, there
seemed no break from it. For Wernher it was a tiring schedule –
not since his days in Peenemünde had Wernher consistently had to put
in such long hours, and it was all too clear to him, that he wasn’t
as young as he once was. It was little wonder overwork had it’s
hand in the death of Korolyov.
The Apollo
program; from the mighty Saturn V rocket which would be the most
powerful rocket ever launched to the Apollo capsule which would take
the astronauts from the Earth to the Moon and back, it was all new
technology. An order of magnitude more advanced and complex than
anything NASA had launched thus far. Everything was being rushed –
mistakes and miscommunication happened in any project, but with
Apollo, they were going unnoticed in the breakneck pace to try to
deliver. The inevitable catastrophe happened in January 1967 - the
launchpad fire of Apollo 1 in a routine test, American astronauts
"Gus" Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, all dead.
Wernher
had known death all too well during the war, it was something you
almost became blinkered to when it was going on all around you. But
this was something different, something avoidable. Was it avoidable
though? There was a hush silence and whispered introspection amongst
those involved with the program. Everyone had been working at such
great pace, in an attempt to reach the Kennedy’s milestone of
landing on the Moon by the end of the decade. But it took a tragedy
like this to pull people back and realise the mistakes they’d
compounded in their haste. Would a lone voice of reason have been
listened to before then?
NASA after
the Apollo 1 tragedy did not fare well, it’s whole manned mission
stalled in the repercussions of that disaster. It had been a
sobering lesson. The causes of the accident were rigorously
scrutinised, everyone took part in the investigation. Everything was
examined and redesigned, checked and double checked. Piece by piece,
each mission element was tested and flown. With lives on the line,
there could be no more mistakes. The next manned mission, Apollo 7,
went flawlessly.
It paid
off for America, and on 21st July 1969 – in an event
watched world-wide - Neil Armstrong step from the Apollo 11 lunar
landscape onto the surface of another world. Man had landed on the
Moon – it was indeed a giant leap for mankind. Telegrams of
congratulation came from around from the globe. The day was a mixed
one for Wernher, he’d reached his dreams of going into space, but
in a way knew this would be the beginning of the end.
Despite
the monumental achievement, the public soon lost interest in landing
on the Moon. The Apollo Project was rescaled, with three of the
planned landings cancelled. America had won the Space Race by
reaching the Moon first, but seemed little interested in continuing
now National Pride had been satisfied.
Wernher
fought hard to try to keep the momentum of the Space Race alive, but
it was in vain. The Russians without their genius Chief Designer had
given up on the race to the Moon, and without the competition,
America seemed little interested setting new goals. Wernher left
NASA soon afterwards amidst the budgetry cutbacks at NASA, as so many
projects were wound down. The Apollo project had taken a huge
commitment from the American people. Wernher wondered if perhaps it
was unfair for him to expect it to continue. But with barely 10
years between Explorer 1 and Apollo 11, imagine where mankind could
be in another 10, 20, 30 years time …
However
Wernher accepted now he would never see another Moon landing in his
lifetime. The grim truth was he’d recently been diagnosed with
cancer within his kidney, and several operations to remove it had
failed. A slow death sentence gave a man a different perspective on
life and the world. Perhaps that’s why he was sleeping so badly
now, does a condemned man always muse on the mistakes of his life
whilst waiting for the end?
The fate
of mankind and rockets were now intertwined. That was his legacy,
his mark on the world.
On the one
hand the Apollo rockets had allowed mankind to reach out into space
for the first time, and land on another body other than the Earth.
The dream of so many civilisations since mankind began, to be able to
look down on the Earth from another world, had been realised.
Perhaps mankinds future lay out there amongst the planets and stars
beyond, a new era of exploration and colonisation lying ahead.
On the
other hand, there was the latest generation of the Vengeance rockets
which were now called Inter-Contental Ballistic Missiles. Both
Russia and America had them. Nuclear weapons with such range as they
could now strike anywhere on the planet at the touch of the button.
The whole world now lived and cowered under their threat – they
were Vengeance weapons indeed. And unlike the Apollo rockets,
Governments could not fund and make enough of these. Why have enough
nuclear warheads to destroy the world three times over, when you
could have enough to destroy it four times over? And they called it
a deterrent – Wernher had hoped that with the fall of Hitler and
the Nazis the world would be freed from such madness.
To the
stars or to oblivion, which was mankind’s destiny?
Wernher
retired to his bedroom, switched on a bedroom lamp, and changed into
his pyjamas. What made him uneasy was that whether rockets lead
mankind to greatness or genocide, he had played an equal part in both
destinies. Would future generations see him as a saviour, as a
monster, or perhaps as just a man? Time would decide.
Food For Thought ...
This short
story although about Wernher von Braun, is a partly fictionalised
account of his life. I’ve strived to be historically accurate as
possible throughout, however no-one can really know his exact
thoughts on the events he was part of.
Wernher
lived through difficult times. It’s easy to criticise his part in
Nazi Germany, the main desire to write this story came from asking
myself “but could I have done any better had it been me?”. I
think the answer is sadly no. Many Germans did try to stand up, and
the Gestapo erased them from history. Wernher’s behaviour during
the war isn’t heroic, but perhaps very human.
We was a
Nazi, and a member of the SS. But he was also arrested and
threatened for his defeatist attitude and desire to develop rockets
not for the military but for space flight.
If it’s
made you ask yourself if you’d what you’d have done in his place,
then perhaps it’s succeeded in it’s purpose.
