Product Description

Wernher von Braun, the father of modern rocketry, is a hero to some and villain to others. After seven years of investigation, veteran aerospace journalist Bob Ward has rejected the extremes and presents a revealing, even-handed portrait of the one-time Nazi Party member who brought the United States into the Space Age. From the young German aristocrat's leadership role in the development of the world's first ballistic missile - the infamous V-2 rocket used against the Allies during the invasion of Europe - to his successes in the United States after the war, a picture of von Braun emerges as a brilliant scientist with limitless curiosity and a drive to achieve his goals at almost any price. Ward sheds new light on von Braun's extraordinary contributions to launching the first US satellite and winning the 'Moon race' with the Saturn V super-booster that powered Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, and their successors to the lunar surface. A gregarious night owl, von Braun also played the piano and cello, mastered scuba diving, flew an array of aircraft, spoke several languages, became a serious amateur astronomer, and was an avid reader and conversationalist, as much at ease discussing Nietzsche as nuclear fission.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #289032 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

About the Author
BOB WARD, former editor of The Huntsville Times, has written extensively about space since 1957. He covered the Wernher von Braun rocket team for years as a reporter and as a correspondent to technical and trade periodicals in New York. This is his fifth book on space subjects. He and his wife and family live in Huntsville, Alabama - 'Rocket City, USA'.

Customer Reviews

A superficial gloss
If you are looking for an analysis of any of the big moral issues concerning the career of a former Nazi SS officer, and his seamless integration in September 1945 into the US military and its missile programme, then you will be disappointed. Apparently Von Braun was generally a spiffing chap, full of charm and all those wonderful leadership qualities that made him a hero in his lifetime. You will find no attempt to get behind the bland statements of innocence about his Nazi involvement, nothing other than vague reminiscences from old friends or colleagues, of which this, unfortunately, is typical: "An odd thing about von Braun remembered Bonnie Holmes, was his noisiness. When not talking he hummed, whistled and otherwise made sounds." Von Braun's active participation in WW2 is simply glossed over as if it were just a passing phase in a life otherwise characterised by trying to be nice to people. By the end of the book you will be none the wiser about his true feelings about his Nazi career, the use of slave labour in his rocket factory, his own responsibility for the development of the V2 rocket which killed thousands of Londoners, his willingness to work for the US army to make cold war missiles, and indeed the morality of the US government in taking over 100 enemy scientists, in today's terms blatant enemy combatant war-criminals, from defeated Germany to the US in the late 40s. These issues do not even seem to have occurred to the author. The book is a whitewash, written in tabloid-style sentences presumably for those who are prepared to accept spurious reminiscences as even vaguely meaningful.

a diabolic character ...
Wernher von Braun (March 23 1912 - June 16 1977) is a two-sided problem for any writer. First, we know, he developed as a NASA-genius the Redstone rocket that placed Alan Shepard in suborbital flight in May 1961. Then he produced the great Saturn rockets that so successfully launched the U.S. manned flights to the Moon. But on the other hand over 5,000 of his V-2s were fired on Britain (V-2 for "Vergeltungswaffe 2", meaning "retaliation weapon 2"; a name invented by Josef Goebbels). These Nazi-rockets killed 2,724 people and badly injured 6,000. Moreover he was a major in the Nazi SS and one of Hitler's elite. Von Braun supervised the rocket's construction at the Nazis' Mittelwerk factory, which used slave labor from the nearby Dora concentration camp. In a letter to Mittelwerk's production manager, von Braun tells how he himself went to the notorious Buchenwald camp to arrange for the transport of more prisoners to Mittelwerk. At least 700 of them later died there. Survivors of the "hell of DORA" reported of burning corpse mountains, torture and for deterrence hanged prisoners at cranes. Dutch Sources report of 20.000 dead ones. Many slaves were murdered to eliminate any oral historical record of this new strange technology and the Nazi cruelties. Therefore von Braun also was a war criminal, and there must be a discussion of his culpability. Once the songwriter and verse-maker Tom Lehrer rhymed satyrically 1965 for a BBC television show: "'Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun". Maybe there are character-similarities (and friendly helping connections) between von Braun and Hitler's architect and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer. Fragment of those ingenious conqueror characters (compare with the Howard Hughes Story THE AVIATOR) often are human abysses like success greed, manipulative individual set-ups like triumphing and all controlling volitions (von Braun adored Nietzsche), a drive to achieve goals at almost any price, pathological jealous (remember Eisenhower's personal dislike of the German rocket team). On the other hand: 118 German rocket scientists were brought from Hitler's Third Reich together with von Braun to the USA as part of a military operation called Project Paperclip (helping sift through the Pennemuende documents). Later on von Braun became the director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville. He developed the Redstone (used for the Persian Gulf War), Jupiter-C (first satellite, Explorer), Juno and Pershing missiles; he received a mandate to build the giant Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans 1969 to the Moon: Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins. The above mentioned Tom Lehrer criticized: "What is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon?" Von Braun diabolically used his rhetorical abilities to set the US senate in fear of the Soviet Union; that blowed up the financing of his rocket-budgets and the Cold War hysteria as well. Once von Braun answered (with regard to the Nazi-system): "It has been important, how the golden cow would be milked most successfully..." Now, he didn't change his behaviour-patterns in the USA. Very ironically W.v.B. commented: "There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further." One of his visions von Braun never realized: to evacuate a mankind's elite (of course American) to the Mars (to protect them against an eventually nuclear war). Nevertheless his rocket programs (in Germany and the United States as well) ate up scare resources that could have been better invested in other types of social responsibility and political care. Maybe the book of Bob Ward doesn't realize enough, how diabolically von Braun operated - from Nazi to Nasa ...

From the V2 to the moon
I actually purchased this book to use as a reference for a piece of academic work (an essay about the morality, ethics & philosophy of science as part of science education) which I was required to produce as part of a taught postgraduate university course. For this purpose it performed admirably well - it is thoroughly referenced throughout and was invaluable in producing the work that was required of me.

However, it was also a well written, unbiased and enjoyable to read biography of a man whose input into the NASA space programme was vital to the success of the Apollo/Saturn V missions. It also provides an insight into the same man and his history from a middle class Prussian family and how through the Nazi war machine he was able to persue his personal interest in rocketry before surrendering to the US military at the tail end of the second world war.

If you have a general thirst to discover more about the man behind the Saturn V rocket then this is definitely the book for you.