Abstract
Late in 1962, a West Berlin correspondent of Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), the world-famous Director of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, sent him a series of hostile articles that had just appeared in East Germany. They turned out to be excerpts from the forthcoming book Geheimnis von Huntsville: Die wahre Karriere des Raketenbarons Wernher von Braun (Secret of Huntsville: The True Career of Rocket Baron Wernher von Braun).1 Written by a popular East-German author of non-fiction spy books, Julius Mader (1928–2000), Geheimnis heralded a Soviet-bloc attempt to destroy von Braun’s reputation by unmasking the depths of his involvement with the Nazi regime, the SS and its concentration camps. Von Braun had certainly been a tempting target for communist press attacks — the United States’ leading rocket specialist was an ex-Nazi who led the development of one of Hitler’s terror weapons, the V-2 ballistic missile, before changing sides literally overnight at the end of the war. But little effort had been expended in the Warsaw Pact in uncovering and propagating the details of his service to the National Socialist regime. Mader threatened to change all that.2
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Notes
A partial exception is Horst Körner, Stärker als die Schwerkraft: Von Werden und von den Zielen der Raumfahrt, Leipzig: Urania, 1960; see also his note to Mader in Geheimnis (1963 edn), 378–9.
Michael J. Neufeld, ‘Creating a Memory of the German Rocket Program for the Cold War,’ in Steven J. Dick, ed., Remembering the Space Age, Washington, DC: NASA, 2008, 71–87.
On the history of the V-2 program and Dora, see Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, New York: Free Press, 1995;
and Jens-Christian Wagner, Produktion des Todes: Das KZ Mittelbau-Dora. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001.
For the best example of the earlier apologist literature, see Frederick I. Ordway and Mitchell R. Sharpe, The Rocket Team, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979.
For the muckraking literature after 1984, consult Linda Hunt, ‘US Coverup of Nazi Scientists,’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41.4 (April 1985), 16–24;
Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991;
and Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Battle for the Secrets and Spoils of Nazi Germany, London: Michael Joseph, 1987.
Erik Bergaust’s hagiographical Wernher von Braun, Washington, DC: National Space Institute, 1975
may be contrasted with Rainer Eisfeld’s critical Mondsüchtig:Wernher von Braun und die Geburt der Raumfahrt aus dem Geist der Barbarei, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996, and Neufeld, Von Braun.
Bernd Ruland, Wernher von Braun: Mein Leben für die Raumfahrt, Offenburg: Burda, 1969, 233–7;
Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1969, translated as Inside the Third Reich, New York: Avon, 1970;
Manfred Bornemann and Martin Broszat, ‘Das KL Dora-Mittelbau,’ in Martin Broszat, ed., Studien zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970, 154–98;
and Manfred Bornemann, Geheimprojekt Mittelbau, Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1971; WvB to Grösser, 18 November 1971, in file 427–7, WvBP-H. On the 1992 controversy
see Johannes Erichsen and Bernhard M. Hoppe, eds, Peenemünde: Mythos und Geschichte der Rakete 1923–1989, Berlin: Nicolai, 2004, 10–12. Grösser and WvB also corresponded about a two-part television play broadcast on the ZDF network in August 1971, but it is not clear how critical that film was.
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Neufeld, M.J. (2012). ‘Smash the Myth of the Fascist Rocket Baron’: East German Attacks on Wernher von Braun in the 1960s. In: Geppert, A.C.T. (eds) Imagining Outer Space. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361362_6
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