Dark Side of the Moon: Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich and the Space Race by Wayne Biddle

Author:Wayne Biddle [Biddle, Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780393059106
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE IMMEDIATE PUSH for moving from the Baltic coast to the Harz Mountains was the devastating RAF raid, which did not destroy Peenemünde’s production facilities, but made it clear that the Allies could accomplish this at any time.23 Hitler had decided a month earlier in favor of all-out production for the A-4 missile. As recently as January he had still been lukewarm about rockets, because even Himmler’s repeated attempts to arrange the meeting with the führer—sought by Dornberger—went nowhere. Hitler had already been treated for the second time to one of Dornberger and von Braun’s dog and pony shows, at his Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) headquarters in East Prussia in August 1941, and apparently saw no need for another. The rocket program had not been able to stage a single successful flight of the A-4 until October 3, 1942, following two embarrassing (though normal for such complex new technology) failures, including one in June 1942 that nearly fell back upon Albert Speer.24 Six months later, another crashed while Himmler looked on during his first trip to Peenemünde. Perhaps the blatant hazard of these tests was why Hitler never came to Peenemünde to watch one. The setbacks continued with a string of five more failures that did not abate until May 1943.25

A curious sidebar to the narrative of these ominous months of spring, 1943, is that von Braun chose the season to be wed, or at least tried to get married. Three documents survived the war showing that on March 25, two days after his thirty-first birthday, he identified himself as an SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) on his “Dr. Wernher Frhr. v. Braun” Peenemünde stationery and asked the SS Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement) office in Berlin for marriage papers, signing his name under the typical closing “Heil Hitler!” He wrote that he wished to be married as soon as possible, because his fiancée’s family had lost everything in a recent air attack on Berlin. He returned the completed application on April 5 with a personal note of gratitude to Himmler, who took a direct interest in maintaining racial purity by inspecting the ancestry of applicants for any Jews. In von Braun’s handwriting (or that of an office worker with remarkably similar script) at the top of the letter appeared the adulatory, but not required, greeting: “Führer!” His chosen bride was twenty-six-year-old Dorothee Brill, a decidedly un-Junker name, born in the small town of Tübingen near Stuttgart and recently living in the upscale Berlin suburb of Steglitz, which until the war years was home to a sizeable Jewish population that in 1923—24 had included Franz Kafka. The marriage did not occur, for reasons that are unknown, and even the engagement remained unknown outside his closest coterie for the rest of his life. Certainly the work-obsessed von Braun would not have sought SS clearance to marry a woman he knew was tainted with Jewish blood, so it is reasonable to assume either that he did not know or that the marriage failed to happen for other reasons.

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