16.05.2022

As well as serving in the SS and a second act as a Nasa engineer, Wernher von Braun wrote a Martian sci-fi novel with a prescient twist…

Wernher von Braun with the Apollo 11 rocket that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, July 1969. Photograph: Nasa/Everett Collection/Alamy

recently read (and greatly enjoyed) V2, Robert Harris’s absorbing second world war thriller about British attempts to locate and destroy the base in the Netherlands from which Hitler’s “Retaliation Weapon 2” – those devastating rocket-powered bombs aimed at London – were launched. Harris is famous for the meticulous research that underpins his plots and V2 is no exception. For me, a particularly interesting aspect of the novel was his portrayal of Wernher von Braun, the German aerospace engineer who was the leading figure in the development of Nazi rocketry and who was snaffled by the US (with a large number of his technical associates) to enjoy a splendid second career as the mastermind of the US space programme. 

Harris portrays Von Braun as an exceedingly shrewd operator who effectively used the Nazi regime to enable him to further his dream of space exploration. Although he joined the National Socialist party in 1937, he claimed that doing so was the only way of being allowed to continue his technical work on rocketry, which is perhaps plausible. Less so perhaps was his decision to join the SS, a decision that plays a useful role in Harris’s story.

At one point, though, he came under suspicion for being insufficiently “patriotic” and spent two weeks in a Gestapo cell before being reinstated after intervention by Albert Speer, the minister for war production, on the grounds that he was essential to the V2 programme. Whatever the truth is about this, what is abundantly clear is that Von Braun was an astute manipulator of the Nazi regime for his own purposes. He also knew that when Germany eventually surrendered, the Americans would be more interested in his potential usefulness than in, say, the employment of slave labour in the German rocket programme.

And so it proved. In June 1945, the state department approved the transfer of Von Braun and his specialist team to the US. He worked on the US army’s ballistic missile programme and designed the rocket that launched the US’s first space satellite in 1958, four months after the USSR’s Sputnik sent the American political class into a panicky tailspin. In 1960, his group was assimilated into Nasa, where he became director of the new Marshall SpaceFlight Center and the lead architect of the Saturn V rocket that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the moon.

Not bad for a former SS officer, eh? But, as I discovered as I burrowed down the agreeable rabbit hole on which Harris had launched me, the story gets better. During his early years in the US, Von Braun became pally with Walt Disney, with whom he collaborated on a series of three educational films and to whom he probably confided his dream of a manned mission to Mars. More intriguingly, in 1949, when he was stationed at Fort Bliss in Texas, he wrote a science fiction novel (in German) entitled Marsprojekt but failed to find a publisher for it. He wrote it, he writes in the preface, “to stimulate interest in space travel”. Eventually, the novel was translated into English, cleared by the Pentagon (on the grounds that its author’s visions of space travel were “too futuristic to infringe on classified matters”) and published in 2006 as Project Mars: A Technical Tale.