Wernher von Braun, the SS, and Concentration Camp Labor: Questions of Moral, Political, and Criminal Responsibility

Abstract

Dr. Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), the German-American rocket engineer and space visionary, is often depicted in white or black, saint or devil terms. In the eyes of his associates and hero-worshippers, he is still seen as an apolitical space enthusiast who was not a real Nazi and had nothing to do with the crimes of the Third Reich-indeed he was arrested by the Gestapo and held for two weeks in 1944.* Many critics and many survivors of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, on the other hand, see him as an unprincipled opportunist or even a convinced Nazi who was directly responsible for the deaths of 20,000 prisoners. Although the scholarly community has begun to break with this simplistic dualism, an empirical inquiry into his actual involvement with National Socialist organizations and war crimes, based on all available evidence, is still very much needed-especially in view of the brief and unsystematic treatment these questions have received in recent studies.' While such an empirical inquiry cannot end the debate, in part because the evidence is itself debatable, it can narrow the limits of what can plausibly be claimed. Moreover, an inquiry into von Braun's behavior may help spark further investigations into the responsibility of engineers, scientists, and middle managers for the exploitation of concentration-camp labor; the existing literature concentrates overwhelmingly on either direct perpetrators of the Holocaust, or on industrial corporations and their leaders.2 The decisive split between proand anti-von Braun camps has a long historytoo long to be detailed here. Suffice it to say that from the time he rose to fame in the early 1950s to the Apollo moon landing in 1969 and beyond, Wernher von Braun was feted in the United States, West Germany, and elsewhere as a Cold War hero-as the Columbus of space, as the visionary of space travel, and as the greatest rocket engineer of the age, one who contributed to both Western military preparedness and the human exploration of space. As a part of building and protecting that reputation, von Braun had to develop an elaborate narrative