By Paddy Dollard
NEIL Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity’s first extra-terrestrial baby-steps in July 1969, when they walked on the moon. Clumsy, uncertain, stumbling, there on the surface of the moon, they might have been mimicking the weary, clumsy, sometimes half-dead footsteps of the slave labourers who, at the end of World War Two, worked on the Nazi V2 rocket sites in France. And, in a sense, they were.
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“The German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun…saw everything that went on every day. When they walked along the corridors, they saw the prisoners’ drudgery, their exhausting work and their ordeal. During his frequent attendance in Dora… von Braun never once protested against this cruelty and brutality…On a little area beside the clinic shack you could see piles of prisoners every day who had not survived the work load and had been tortured to death by the vindictive guards… von Braun just walked past them, so close that he almost touched the bodies.”*
NEIL Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity’s first extra-terrestrial baby-steps in July 1969, when they walked on the moon. Clumsy, uncertain, stumbling, there on the surface of the moon, they might have been mimicking the weary, clumsy, sometimes half-dead footsteps of the slave labourers who, at the end of World War Two, worked on the Nazi V2 rocket sites in France. And, in a sense, they were.
These first clumsy, but tremendously empowering, steps on the moon were linked directly to the weary, stumbling steps of those Nazi-enslaved workers. One walk was, so to speak, the direct continuation of the other.
The same man, Wernher Von Braun, presided over the work on the rocket systems that took the first human beings to another planet, and over the work of those 20th century slaves at the end of the Second World War. The scientific work done on the murdering V2 rockets was the first great breakthrough into new scientific possibilities. Out of these developed, 25 years later, the rocket which took Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon.
Inventing rockets to take bombs to terrorise and slaughter London’s civilians, Von Braun thereby took the first great leap in the development of space rockets
Wernher Von Braun was a pioneering German rocket scientist, a Nazi Party member from the mid 1930s, and a member of the SS, the Nazi elite shock troops.
Large numbers of the forced labourers used on the rocket sites were either worked to death or killed by their guards. Someone has calculated that more people died preparing the V2s than were killed in by them in London, when the flying bombs rained down out of the skies there, late in 1944 and in 1945.
Von Braun might, as so many were, have been hanged or jailed as a Nazi war criminal for his role in using slave labour during World War Two.
When the Americans captured Von Braun and his team of rocket scientists, instead of punishing them as Nazi war criminals, spirited them, and their knowledge, away to the USA and set them to work. It was a momentous decision for America as well as for Von Braun. And thus Wernher Von Braun, the slave making Nazi war criminal, came in human history to be the father of space travel!
Humankind began the last stage of its ascent to the stars by climbing up a pyramid of the bones and skulls of enslaved and murdered human beings!
The paradoxical combination in so much of the history of the 20th century of wonder-making technology and outright barbarism, is there in the story of Wernher Von Braun in its most poignant, most tragic, most terrifying and most repulsive form.
Dr Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr Von Braun was born a Prussian aristocrat in 1912, a most repulsive character. Yet, he is something else too. He is, it can he argued, also a, brutish, hero of humanity’s long and tortuous ascent from naked ape to suzerain of nature.
WHEN, fascinated since childhood by the idea of rocket travel, Von Braun decided to devote his life to it, he faced an all-defining difficulty. Where could the necessary resources be found? Who would have a reason to lay out the necessarily vast sums of money for the development of rockets? Who else, but the militarists? Who else, but those who in their urgent striving to gain an advantage over their enemies, were concerned to advance the technology of war?
Von Braun, who was first and foremost a scientist, chose to sell his soul to the 20th century devil, militarism. There was simply no other way for rockets to be developed.
He hooked up with the German Army just before Hitler came to power (30 January 1933). Thereafter, he continued his work, now for Hitler and the Nazis, who he joined.
Finally, in 1945, he switched adroitly to the Americans, still pursuing the same morally, socially and politically blinkered scientific goals. With the Americans too, rocket technology was, inevitably, tied closely to the making and preparation of war.
Working with Walt Disney TV, Von Braun made himself into an influential propagandist, before a mass audience, for rocketry and for space travel. US military competition with Russia and competition in the space race secured for him the necessary backing.
And finally, in 1969, Von Braun realised his childhood dream of space travel.
What strikes one most, watching the widely available clips from Von Braun’s TV and other speeches, making propaganda for space travel, is the spirit in him of boundless optimism about what mankind can achieve.
The old wonder-working spirit of unchasened belief in human progress incongruously lurked in this former Nazi!
The belief which long ago gave way to today’s Great Fear, the paralysing pessimism induced by the widespread apprehension that humankind has ruined its own indispensable natural world. Today with our paralysing sense of hubris and of now inescapable doom, we have come today to resemble more ancient peoples at the dawn of humanity’s rise to mastery over nature, shivering in helpless fear for broken taboos, than the people in the 19th and 20th centuries, whose spirit one can still see in Von Braun.
The spirit still accessible to us in the old scientific Utopias of a writer like H G Wells, who had dreamt of a world where science would empower “men like gods” – Utopias that have given way with us to The Great Fear and the trembling anti-Utopia.
TODAY, when we are making the most startling advances, in, for instance, biology, most popular culture — film, TV, comic books — is saturated not with the old adventuring spirit, but with spiritually debilitating, perspective-shattering, effort-inhibiting pessimism. We are gripped by the nightmare vision of a future world ruined by “science”. We live in a society in which the human demand for mastery over nature is increasingly seen as the Original Sin that is leading us inexorably to human ruin and the death of nature.
In this context, 30 years after his death, the Nazi-dirtied, war-crime-tainted, spiritually numbed, morally despicable Von Braun seems paradoxically like an old, positive, boundlessly hopeful exponent of faith and confidence in humankind and its possibilities. Like the fouled, perverted hero of science and vaunting human aspiration, which, when all is said and done, is what he was. A typical mid-20th century bourgeois hero.
He was not unrepresentative morally neutral (at best) complex scientist, who is emblematic of the prostitution and degradation of humanity’s growing power over nature to the rulers of capitalist class society.
T
he pitiful human condition which Von Braun’s career exemplifies — the terrible combination of all powerful science and social barbarism, and even social cannibalism — exists as it does because humanity, having developed awe-inspiring deliberate power over nature, has not yet achieved conscious control over its own social processes. Us.
We live in a world still dominated by uncontrolled economic and other wild social forces. In which the most civilised, most advanced, most scientific societies worship the operations of blind market forces, and sacrifice to them the lives of vast numbers of human beings.
A world in which, in our own way, in this respect, we are as primitive as the human beings who worshipped savage icons, some piece of nature or some reified human-made artefact elevated to a fetish, stained with the blood of human sacrifice.
A world in which a monied minority are to hundreds of millions of people in all countries, what the farmer is to his livestock.
A world in which many millions in the less developed world die, year after year, to keep up the profits of the masters of the advanced world, and all the world, and to sustain the pomp and pretensions of their own pettier local rulers.
Advances in technology and science in this world threaten nature and humanity’s future only because they enter into an anarchic capitalist society. It cries out for subordination to conscious, democratic, rational human and humane control. In other words, for working-class socialism.
Von Braun’s career, where one of the very greatest scientists of his time could only do his work as part of military machines dedicated to destruction and counter-destruction, forcibly — you might almost say with nuclear force! — demonstrates the urgent need for socialism.
Until we achieve that, science and social barbarism will remain as inextricably entangled as they were in the life of Wernher Von Braun.
* Sellier, André, A History of the Dora Camp: The Untold Story of the Nazi Slave Labor Camp That Secretly Manufactured V-2 Rockets, Chicago (2003)