According to the best biography of the rocket scientist, the Jewish Mafia apparently made Werner Von Braun’s Washington years a misery even though the space philosopher never showed any anti-Jewish bigotry and was a major proponent of desegregation (particularly in his long-time home state of Alabama).
The inscription on the downtown monument dedicated that day closes with the words: “Dr. von Braun, whose vision and knowledge made possible the landing of the first man on the Moon by the United States, contributed significantly to the life of this community. He will forever be respected and admired by his local fellow citizens.” In truth, not all his fellow townspeople agreed with those sentiments or with the naming of the civic center for him. More than a few members of the city’s prominent Jewish community, for example, had not forgotten, nor quite forgiven, his past in Nazi Germany. Three decades later, that remained the case…
The story of Wernher von Braun “reminds me of a Greek drama that deals with the fights between the gods,” mused Peter Petroff in June 1999. The Bulgarian-born master engineer and multimillionaire entrepreneur, then in his eighties, added: “Zeus, the big-shot god, gives selected people just enormous capabilities. Then the lesser gods are jealous and throw up all these hindrances.” Petroff, whom von Braun recruited to work at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in the mid-1960s, continued with his analogy: “Zeus created a guy, von Braun, who was way, way above everybody else. The gods gave him too much talent. He was not only a top-notch engineer and physicist, but he was a visionary. On top of that, he could convince anybody of anything.”1 Then, on March 1, 1970, von Braun, at the apogee of the Apollo 11 and 12 Moon-landing triumphs, left his impregnable home base of twenty years and moved north to take on a challenging position at NASA headquarters in Washington. “This was a tragedy,” Petroff observed years afterward. “Little guys, from jealousies or for fun, messed up what [von Braun] was doing, a typical Greek drama. This was tragic.”
…[George] Low, a superb engineer, experienced technocrat, and Austrian-born Jew, soon was appointed acting administrator by Nixon until a permanent choice could be made. That would take more than six months. With Paine gone, von Braun was now on his own at NASA headquarters, caught in the Washington morass. The climate there soon turned arctic….
Whatever friendly feelings and healthy working relationship had existed between the two, a drastic change occurred nevertheless in the treatment accorded von Braun at headquarters—for whatever reasons—after Paine left and Low took over. When the agency’s top officials testified on Capitol Hill, NASA’s erstwhile perennial star witness was not among them. He was required to submit all his other speeches for review and approval, and advised to stick to the script and forgo his trademark ad-libs. Few headquarters officials ever asked his advice or input on decisions. There were no more chatty sessions in the administrator’s office, von Braun’s secretary recalled; he had difficulty even getting an appointment to see Low, whose office was two doors away.4 Clearly, he had become persona non grata. “Wernher and Low had problems,” recalled Jay Foster of von Braun’s planning team. “I don’t know that it was necessarily personal, but I don’t think Low ever forgave Wernher for the Nazi connection.”
…Some von Braun staffers believed that the so-called Jewish Mafia within NASA and the larger space community had applied pressure on Low to drive von Braun out while he had the opportunity.
…One senior German-born member of the old rocket team, who kept a close eye on the Washington machinations from Huntsville, said he believed Low’s ill will toward von Braun sprang much more from “outright jealousy” than from any “ethnic factors.” “For instance, von Braun in the past would always testify at a congressional committee hearing in a full chamber, with only standing room,” the retired rocket expert continued, on condition of anonymity. “When George Low testified, there would be only a few people in the audience, and some of them would fall asleep. It was just jealousy.”
…Paine claimed that Webb wanted to keep von Braun out of Washington: ‘I think Jim had the feeling that, well, the Jewish lobby would shoot him down or something.’”
…board. Fletcher said he realized he was blamed, but that he had not insisted that the rocket pioneer should go. The administrator named the official responsible, although granting he could have “overruled” that individual, as Fletcher put it.
“It was George Low” whom Fletcher identified, the retired Washington staff member revealed a quarter century later, on condition of anonymity. “He was very jealous of Dr. von Braun.” It was also Low whom von Braun had privately identified to his former staffer.
…One day, he looked very weak but his spirit was good. He had his usual twinkle in his eye. I said, ‘Wernher, how’re you doing?’ He said, ‘Well, Ed, I’ve had so many blood transfusions I can say truly that I’m a full-blooded American.’”
…Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, to declare repeatedly in later years, “Wernher von Braun was the only philosopher NASA ever really had.” When Wolfe appeared on NBC News’ top-rated Today show in the fall of 1998 to discuss his new novel, A Man in Full, and John Glenn’s recent return to space, he did so but then hastened to bring up von Braun: “He was a member of the German Wehrmacht, and he had a Teutonic accent—had everything but a dueling scar on his cheek—and so they couldn’t bring him forward as “NASA’s philosopher.” But he was the philosopher, and he said, “The importance of the space program is not surpassing the Soviets in space. The importance is to build a bridge to the stars, so that when the Sun dies, humanity will not die. The Sun is a star that’s burning up, and when it finally burns up, there will be no Earth … no Mars … no Jupiter.” And he said, “You have to find a way, because humans are the only thinking creatures that we know of in the entire universe, and we have to build a bridge to save this particular species.” I think that’s a grand thought, and it should be the thought that everybody has in supporting the space program.”
…His simple headstone was engraved: WERNHER VON BRAUN, 1912-1977 Psalms: 19:1 The Old Testament citation in stone was of his longtime favorite scriptural passage, a soaring Psalm of David: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork.”
In 1971, Von Braun wrote:
In the early years of Hitler’s regime in Germany this persecution took many forms but the most obvious was the vilification of the Jewish people in the Nazi press. Most thinking Germans saw this for what it was, creating a necessary scapegoat for the desperate unemployment rate to rally the masses behind the Hitler government. However, most including myself did not believe even in our most violent nightmares that this overt antagonism would ultimately lead to anything like Auschwitz (of which I heard for the first time after the war). Until the outbreak of the war, Jews were welcomed as officers and enlisted men in the German Army, and social contacts were widely maintained with Jewish friends. I confess to no deep psychological thinking on this matter during these times. I thought that when the political objective of the anti-Jewish campaign had been reached a new scapegoat would be found. Stalin’s series of persecutions of the Kulaks, the Army officers (Tuchachevski, et al.), the Trotskiists, the Intelligentsia and the Russian Jews seemed to set a most likely pattern. During these years I was, of course, a young engineer with very little interest in politics, and rather engrossed in my studies on the potential of space flight and my rocket experiments. I felt very fortunate when I gained support for my work in the form of some money and facilities from the German Army. I did not have any more scruples in accepting this support than, say, the Wright Brothers may have had when they signed their first contract with the U.S. War Department. In 1939, when war was declared, our rocket work was directed to producing weapons. Most of my time before and during the war was spent at an experimental rocket station at Peenemuende, a remote spot on the Baltic Coast. Our days were spent in designing, building, and testing. I have often been asked how could I produce weapons of war, and I have read many essays on the moral aspects of this general question, which I guess is as old as war itself and thus as old as mankind. From my own experience, I can only say this: when your country is at war, when friends are dying, when your family is in constant danger, when the bombs are bursting around you and you lose your own home, the concept of a just war becomes very vague and remote and you strive to inflict on the enemy as much or more than you and your relatives and friends have suffered. There was another aspect, too: our knowledge of what was happening in Germany and the world was rather limited by the Nazi propaganda machine. In private discussions with friends, one would occasionally discuss things like the existence of concentration camps, in which all kinds of opponents of the Hitler regime, including Jews, were held. But I do not remember ever having heard of a single incident of an atrocity, let alone of deliberate mass killings of civilians. If you find this hard to believe, you have merely to ask yourself how long after the event it was that you first heard about the massacre at Mylai in Vietnam, and this in a country with a free press eager to unearth unpleasant facts, rather than in one with a rigidly controlled press determined to protect tightly held state secrets and to withhold anything from public purview that Hitler wanted the population not to know about. You ask me why I did not lend my influence to save the Jewish people. First, as I just said, I truly was not aware that atrocities were being committed in Germany against anyone. I knew that many prominent Jewish, Catholic and Protestant leaders had been jailed for their opposition to the government. I also suspected from the fact that I had lost sight of my own Jewish friends, that many Jews had either fled the country or were held in concentration camps. But being jailed and being butchered are two different things. Secondly, while I may have been of some importance to the German Army’s rocket programs, I certainly did not wield any political influence over anyone outside of Peenemuende. I, myself, was arrested by Himmler and needed the influence of my commanding general to save myself. As you know, the extent of the actual suffering and the criminal mass slaughter of the Jewish people became known to the world only many months after the hostilities ended, and it was only then that I learned of these things myself. I was deeply shocked and have ever since been ashamed of having been associated with a regime that was capable of such brutality. And, along with many millions of my former fellow countrymen who learned about these atrocities only after the war was over, I know that our generation must accept our share of the guilt for what happened.
