Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
By Michael Neufeld (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, $35)

In the new book Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Researcher Michael Neufeld describes German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun as having made a “Faustian bargain” with the leaders of the Nazi Reich that first employed him. This image of the classic “deal with the devil” works well, and on a number of levels.

A researcher and curator at the Air and Space Museum since 1988, Neufeld has combed through countless yards of documentation to bring readers a fascinating volume. In Von Braun, we have a vivid portrait of a man who steadfastly nurtured his childhood dream of designing rockets for space travel—a vision that clearly obscured any moral reservations he might have had about his government’s demand for the V-2 rocket as a “wonder weapon” against the Allies in World War II.

After Germany’s surrender, von Braun became a “founding father” of the space program in the United States, appearing as its most high-profile advocate in popular print and broadcast media of the 1950s and 1960s.

“The challenge of studying von Braun,” Neufeld says, “is that there is little that is personal from the first half of his life. Then you have the material describing the second half—and it is huge.”

Neufeld pored through 160 linear feet of mostly postwar documents in the Library of Congress and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. He spent years on fact-finding missions, notably to the von Braun’s ancestral home, now in Poland, and to the German Federal Archive in Koblenz, where von Braun’s father’s correspondence is stored.

“I actually like digging through all those papers,” Neufeld says. “I enjoy the detective work, finding new documents...shedding light on things that I never knew happened, or existed.”

The detective work was substantial. Von Braun’s friends and family were reluctant to explore the engineer’s German career. Some of this material became volatile media fodder after von Braun’s death in 1977, including his membership in Heinrich Himmler’s SS and his proximity, at least, to the horrific abuse of enslaved laborers.

Neufeld sheds a vivid light on these events. The reader bears witness to the elation of von Braun and his collaborators as their early rocket experiments win astoundingly generous funding from the rising National Socialist government. Later, Neufeld shares the record of SS commander Heinrich Himmler’s desire to bring von Braun’s rocket program under his authority, pressuring the scientist in 1940 to join the notorious Nazi party auxiliary. In 1944, von Braun rebuffed Himmler’s last offer—unmindful of the Reichsführer’s personal warning that the rocket “has ceased to be an engineer’s toy”—and the SS had him jailed for several days.

Neufeld brings a range of documentation and detail to the work, all of it well-applied to drive the story. Through every turn of events, technological or political, we are always aware of Von Braun’s emotional investment in manned space flight and the earthbound forces he had to marshal to achieve it. The author guides the reader through von Braun’s witness of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, and the engineer’s ensuing struggles within NASA.

For the contemporary reader, it is interesting to hear von Braun bemoan the fact that a Vietnam-weary public had suddenly turned “anti-science,” thus feeding Washington’s new political and financial emphasis on “cost-effectiveness” above projects that literally reached for the stars.

Neufeld has taken an extremely challenging subject and produced a well-researched book that is also a good read. He neither indulges in hero worship nor rushes to judgment—dual temptations for other writers—making Von Braun a victory over myriad “Faustian bargains” the biographer could have struck for himself.