Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War Book

The first authoritative biography of Wernher von Braun, chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich—creator of the infamous V-2 rocket—who became one of the fathers of the U.S. space program. In this meticulously researched and vividly written life, Michael J. Neufeld gives us a man of profound moral complexities, glorified as a visionary and vilified as a war criminal, a man whose brilliance and charisma were coupled with an enormous and, some would say, blinding ambition.

As one of the leading developers of rocket technology for the German army, von Braun yielded to pressure to join the Nazi Party in 1937 and reluctantly became an SS officer in 1940. During the war, he supervised work on the V-2s, which were assembled by starving slave laborers in a secret underground plant and then fired against London and Antwerp. Thousands of prisoners died—a fact he well knew and kept silent about for as long as possible.

When the Allies overran Germany, von Braun and his team surrendered to the Americans. The U.S. Army immediately recognized his skills and brought him and his colleagues to America to work on the development of guided missiles, in a covert operation that became known as Project Paperclip. He helped launch the first American satellite in 1958 and headed NASA’s launch-vehicle development for the Apollo Moon landing.

Handsome and likable, von Braun dedicated himself to selling the American public on interplanetary travel and became a household name in the 1950s, appearing on Disney TV shows and writing for popular magazines. But he never fully escaped his past, and in later years he faced increasing questions as his wartime actions slowly came to light.

Based on new sources, Von Braun is a brilliantly nuanced portrait of a man caught between morality and progress, between his dreams of the heavens and the earthbound realities of his life.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The German rocket engineer who became a celebrity of the "space race" has long been a divided figure in the eye of the American public. On the one hand, his role as a compelling pitchman for the U.S. space program in the 1950s, and his leadership of the Saturn rocket program in the astronaut-maddened 1960s put Wernher von Braun at the center of the efforts to land men on the moon. On the other, his legacy as the developer of the infamous Nazi V-2 rockets tarnishes his burnished reputation as a symbol of scientific progress: the musical satirist Tom Lehrer famously imagined him shrugging: "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?" Michael J. Neufeld's penetrating new biography tries to capture this complex, undoubtedly gifed man as a whole. Neufeld takes as his book's touchstone Goethe's Faust, and this emphasis brings to the fore the vital question: how much are von Braun's accomplishments the fruit of a truly Faustian bargain? The answer, we learn here, seems to be "a great deal." The great engineer's childhood dreams of spaceflight ruled his entire career, and their allure may have enabled von Braun to ignore the manifest evil of the regime that helped him realize them. Neufeld gives an unsparing account of the slave labor camp that produced the V-2, and these appalling passages land on the reader with devastating effect. Ironically, Von Braun's eagerness to reinvent himself seems particularly American. He was aided in the transformation by his temperament, which allowed him in later years to turn away from the nightmares of the past: Neufeld convincingly suggests that "looking to the future was a reflex that came naturally to him." But our eyes are drawn to an atrocity so massive as to exert an inescapable gravity over the rocketeer's vision of a purely scientific ascent. --Bill Tipper