Wernher von Braun and Peak Whiteness
Part 2: “Fickt nicht mit der Raketemensch!” or, the Rocket and the Third Reich
“Fickt nicht mit der Raketemensch!” or, the Rocket and the Third Reich
Part 1: A Romantic Urge
Part 3: WvB’s Secret America
Part 4: The Counterforce
“All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside… all this time…”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Wernher von Braun met Hitler at least five times. The group photo above was taken at the Army ordinance station at Kummersdorf shortly after a winter snowstorm in early 1934. Hitler, just one year into the Thousand Year Reich, stands at the center of the Nazi universe. His two sycophantic aids, Rudolph Hess and Martin Bormann station themselves just above him on both sides. And soaring directly upward is WvB, hatless and handsome in a black double-breasted suit surrounded by thick clouds of Wehrmacht grey. How much are we to read into WvB’s visible distinction from the crowd of Army and Nazi party officers? Does he stand apart, does he dare up-stage the Führer, or is he among kindred souls in this photo? In truth, he is all that and then some.
Wernher Magnus Maxmilian Freiher von Braun was born 23 March 1912, the second of three sons to a family of Prussian Junkers, from a long line of aristocrats whose estates would become lost to Stalin in what is today western Poland. His father, Magnus von Braun, patriarchal by nature and nationalist, even monarchist, in his politics, worked in the civil service in interwar Berlin. His mother, from the lesser von Quistorp family, raised the children in a cultivated and privileged home, protected from the politics and culture of the city. The family bequeathed to even their maverick middle son a thick layer of formal charm, good manners and deep conservatism. But it was the simple gift of a telescope on his 13th birthday that ignited a life long desire to be the first man to walk on the Moon.
While German Communists and Nazi Stormtroopers battled in the streets, WvB embraced his own growing “fanaticism” for the Rocket. In boarding school WvB dedicated himself to math and physics, enthusiastically joining an amateur Rocket society led by Hermann Oberth, an early visionary of space travel and technical advisor on Fritz Lang’s film Frau im Mond (1929). In his entrepreneurial way, WvB’s club rented an unused ammo dump in a Berlin suburb and began testing small liquid fueled rockets at what they dubbed the Raketenflugplatz (meaning “Rocket launching place,” but the word is really much funnier if you just try and say it in German). There young Wernher came to understand one important thing about the science of rocketry: if you are going to send anything into space, let alone get it to another planet, you are going to have to build something very big. Earth’s orbital escape velocity is over 25,000 mph and chemical fuels were (and still are) very heavy, so if WvB was going to get himself to the Moon, he needed something bigger than an amateur Rocket club.
In 1932, right on cue, the Army pulled up in “a black sedan” to witness one of their test launches.* One of these military men, Major General Doctor Walter Dornberger of German Army Ordinance, recognized WvB’s leadership and offered to pay for his doctoral research, hiring him on as “a civilian employee of the Army.”* Indeed, the German Army was keen on Rockets because the Versailles Treaty ending World War I prevented them from building really big guns. It said nothing about self-propelled rockets, and through that loophole WvB’s career blasted off, so to speak.
Born near the Spring Equinox under favorable stars, this kind of good fortune and favor in the hands of the Elect, his innate ability to catch every break and dodge every curve, followed WvB for his entire charmed life. His entire life seemed to embody a kind of turbocharged white privilege.
At the same time, his father took up a key position in the cabinet of Franz van Pappen, an aristocratic conservative nationalist who formed a new government in 1932. Though narrowly defeated in the presidential elections by the aging war hero Paul von Hindenburg, Adolph Hitler was still the leader of the largest party in the Reichstag. Nazi stormtroopers rioted in the streets of Berlin and Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine screamed for a top spot in the cabinet for their Führer. In this moment of crisis, the last gasp of the aging Prussian aristocracy came up with a truly terrible plan. They would bring an end to Germany’s first experiment in Democracy (and box out the Communist and Socialist parties) by “hiring on” Hitler to serve as Chancellor, thereby co-opting the youthful energy of the National Socialists to their revanchist rule. But Hitler was a modern man and his ambition could not be contained.
On the night of 30 January 1933, with Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the Nazi seizure of power began. Within six months, Hitler abolished all other political parties in Germany, seized absolute control over the state, police, civil service and media apparatus, opened the first concentration camp at Dachau, began purging German Jews from public life, and, after the summary arrest and execution of one of his best friends (the paramilitary leader Ernst Röhm along with a few hundred others in “the night of the long knives”), Hitler claimed the absolute loyalty of the German army.
So while his father Magnus was out of a job, son Wernher made new friends.
Serving in the Kaiser’s Army was part of the von Braun family’s Prussian heritage; selling out to the Nazis was something else. In the 1920s, Aristocratic Germans looked down on the petty bourgeois Nazis; President Hindenburg dismissed Hitler as “that Bavarian private.” True to his kind, WvB recalled thinking that in the early 1930s “Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache.”* The von Brauns were conservative German nationalists, service was naturally due to their Kaiser and Reich. Whereas new notions of race, Darwinian struggle and the racial supremacy of “das Volk” was for the consumption of ordinary Germans. “The People’s state must set race in the center of all life. It must take steps to keep it pure,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf (1923), and this became one of the philosophical pillars of the new Nazi state. Yet WvB and other aristocratic men in the Army didn’t need Hitler — an overly emotional failed artist from Austria — to tell them that they were superior examples of humankind. That they already knew. So Hitler seduced the Army as he seduced WvB, first with money, and later with personal prizes. In the end, it will turn out to be WvB who seduced Hitler, but we’ll come to that in a moment.
A little over a year after the photo above, the new German Luftwaffe, or air force, joined the Army in making an investment in WvB hoping to develop rocket planes and jets. “In this manner our modest effort,” WvB recalled after the War, “emerged into what the Americans call the ‘big time.’ Thenceforth millions after millions flowed in as we needed it.”* With these millions, WvB built the world’s largest Rocket design, production and testing facility at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.
If WvB had little enthusiasm for the more loathsome aspects of Nazi ideology, he showed no opposition to it either. WvB joined the Nazi party in 1937 as member #5,738,692. WvB’s most authoritative biographer, Michael J. Neufeld, calls him, “a loyal, perhaps even mildly enthusiastic subject of Hitler’s dictatorship.”* WvB already had the Army on his side, but he was clearly perceptive enough to recognize that Party connections could only help to advance his career. Yet WvB always represented himself as much too busy for politics, as if politics were exclusively the attending of rallies and wearing uniforms. Building Rockets for the Army wasn’t politics, he told himself and anyone who asked, it was pure science and engineering. Of course this claim to be neutral or apolitical while working for the Nazi regime is a measure of his Aryan racial privilege and expressive of his life long aversion to the consequences of his actions.
But really, what was there for WvB not to love about the Third Reich? He obviously had no troubles filling out his ahnenpass, the racial passports required of all German citizens to certify their biological purity. WvB neither knew any Jews nor did he harbor antisemitic feelings. As a conservative, he easily embraced Hitler’s sexism and anti-communism. But most importantly, WvB put his faith in Hitler’s sense of mission, sharing a belief that it was Germany’s destiny to seize leadership of the Western World through technology like the Rocket.
Ever since he took office, Hitler had been on quite a roll: he ended the chaos of democracy, put people back to work, tore up the humiliating Versailles Treaty, built the autobahns, hosted the 1936 Olympics, annexed Austria, humiliated the British at Munich, and then conquered first Poland and then France with ease. Hitler won every fight he started, right up to the point where he invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
It is hard to imagine that WvB was not tempted, if only for a moment, to buy into the Nazis’ ambitions along the upward curve of Peak Whiteness, something WvB translated into a dream of putting a member of the Master Race on Mars. A member like himself, perhaps.
Working under General Dornberger, the team at Peenemünde had more than 3500 people working for them when the war started on 1 September 1939. But it was not until 3 October 1942, in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad, that a test of the new A-4 rocket flew 85 kilometers high at a range of 190 kilometers, breaking the sound barrier and traveling faster and farther than any other rocket in history. “We have invaded space with our rocket,” a jubilant Dornberger told his command, “and for the first time — mark this well — have used space as a bridge between two points on the Earth; we have proved rocket propulsion practicable for space travel.”* The Rocket carried a special insignia, the sexualized image of the Frau im Mond riding a menage á trois of Moon and Rocket to the stars, a vision of these young men’s movie-made erotic dreams of exploration and conquest.
But of course, everyone knew that as long as there is a war on, these new space invaders would serve not as Rockets to the Moon but as weapons of mass destruction. And not a moment too soon.
On 7 July 1943, just as the last decisive battle in the East, the battle of Kursk, was commencing, WvB and General Dornberger arrived at The Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters on the Eastern Front. They were summoned to brief the Führer at the request of Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect turned all-powerful Armaments Minister.
After the war, the Allies convicted Speer of war crimes at the Nuremburg trials. But because he was the only one who expressed any regrets, his life was spared and he spent the next twenty years in Spandau prison, secretly working on his memoirs which he published in 1970 as Inside the Third Reich. Therein Speer vividly recalls Dornberger and WvB’s briefing as a turning point, the moment when the Rocket transformed from the Army’s secret research experiment into the technological salvation of the Third Reich. In hindsight, this meeting stood out for Speer as the moment where he failed his beloved Führer. “Our most expensive project was also our most foolish one,” recalled Speer. “Those rockets, which were our pride and for a long time my favorite armaments project, proved to be nothing but a mistaken investment.”* How had he blundered so badly? Why did they make such a costly bet on this new technology? Turns out, it was all WvB’s fault. His Rocket seduced both Hitler and Speer.
Speer believed WvB to be “a man realistically at home in the future.” The two young technocrats forged a partnership that was rare in the dog eat dog Darwinian world of high ranking Nazi officials. “I liked mingling with this circle of non-political young scientists and inventors,” recalled Speer. “Their work also exerted a strange fascination upon me. It was like the planning of a miracle… Whenever I visited Peenemünde I also felt, quite spontaneously, somehow akin to them.”* Speer loved the Rocket and felt a bond with WvB that he wanted to share with his beloved Führer.
WvB began his briefing with a film of the successful October launch (Hitler loved movies).* “For the first time,” recalled Speer, “Hitler saw the majestic spectacle of a great rocket rising from its pad and disappearing into the stratosphere. Without a trace of timidity and with his boyish sounding enthusiasm, von Braun explained his theory. There could be no question about it: From that moment on, Hitler had been finally won over…”*
Before this film, the future of the Nazi Rocket had been in doubt, for the Führer — who fancied himself a prophet — dreamed that the Rocket would not fly (kindly insert another dick joke of your choice here). But WvB got Hitler hot. “The A-4 is a measure that can decide the war,” raved the overstimulated dictator. “What encouragement to those on the homefront when we attack the English with it! This is the decisive weapon of the war.”* Hitler was so impressed with WvB that he awarded the young Rocket-man the ultimate academic honorific of “Professor,” a title WvB lorded over his German colleagues for the rest of their lives.
Both WvB and Dornberger recalled Hitler’s exaggerated response to the film, starting with a grand (and extremely rare) apology to Dornberger for having doubted him in his dreams. Still the Führer had one overriding concern about the project’s future, its relative lack of destructive power. “A strange, fanatical light flared up in Hitler’s eyes,” recalled Dornberger, as Hitler began raving, “But what I want is annihilation — annihilating effect!”* WvB recalled a similar conversation with Hitler about the limited damaged caused by a supersonic impact. Hitler argued that the A-4, falling almost vertically, would burrow too deep into the Earth before exploding, failing to do much real damage. WvB never before considered what happened when the Rockets came down. But he set someone to study the problem, and it turned out that Hitler was right about the ballistics. WvB was impressed with Hitler; their attraction was mutual.
Indeed Speer recalled that Hitler’s fascination with WvB only grew with time. “‘Weren’t you mistaken? [sez Hitler] You say this young man is thirty-one? I would have thought him even younger!’ He thought it astonishing that so young a man could already have helped to bring about a technical breakthrough which would change the face of the future. From then on he would sometimes expatiate on his thesis that in our century people squandered the best years of their lives on useless things. In past eras an Alexander the Great had conquered a vast empire at the age of twenty-three and Napoleon had won his brilliant victories at thirty. In connection with this he would often allude, as if casually, to Wernher von Braun, who at so young an age had created a technical marvel at Peenemünde.”*
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had the same reaction to seeing the A-4 films. “One has the impression of being there at the birth of a new world.” he wrote in his diaries. “I can imagine that the A4 will bring about a complete revolution in weapons technology and that future wars will look completely different… The A4 as it soars upward is not only an imposing but also an aesthetic sight.”* With an eye for that aesthetic, Goebbels’ renamed the Rocket the V-2; V for Vergeltungswaffe or Revenge Weapon.
Obviously, the Nazi leadership was smitten with the young Aryan genius. But WvB refused to put out, and for more than a year he only teased. Major technical problems stood in the way of both guidance control and the desired “annihilating effect.” In fact, it was not until September 1944 that the first V-2s fell on London. And then not in a great barrage of hundreds, as imagined by Hitler, but one at a time over a period of a few days. Londoners soon learned that with this new Rocket, if you heard a screaming in the sky, you were safe, because death and fire arrived in silence before the sound of the supersonic rocket could catch up.
The V-2 campaign launched about 3,172 rockets at targets in England, Belgium, France and Holland. The biggest campaigns targeted London (1358 rockets) and Antwerp (1610 rockets).* The single most devastating strike occurred on 6 December 1944 when a V-2 scored a direct hit on the packed Rex Theater in Antwerp, right in the middle of Cecil B. DeMille’s western The Plainsman starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane. 561 people, about half of whom were Allied soldiers, died in the theater. Did the Rocket seek to maximize its destructive potential? Was it sent to kill one specific person? Was it late for the show? Or was this result an altogether random event, a chance impact so horrific as to make one need to believe that the Rocket followed some narrative path, struck according to some decipherable control pattern. No such luck. Antwerp renamed itself the “City of Sudden Death.”
By the launch of the last V-2 in late March 1945, the Rocket had killed an estimated 9,000 people. To understand the significance of this number, we can compare it to the far greater destructive powers unleashed by the Allies in their Total War from the air. For example, the RAF led bombing raid on Hamburg — Operation Gomorrah in July 1943 — killed some 42,600 German civilians and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Most horrifically of all, the US firebombing of Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945 killed more than 100,000 people in a single night. So in a Deutschmarks per death ratio, postwar Speer was right, building the Rocket was a poor economic decision made from a loosing military position. While it may have been a magic bullet of some sort, it was was never going to win the War.
“In the end,” writes historian Richard Evans, “the main significance of the wonder-weapons was as a propaganda device that offered hope to those who still wanted Nazism to win.”* The Rocket in the Third Reich was never so much a practical weapon as an object of fantasy, a mass produced mechanical and chemical engine of apocalyptic desire. First fired only after the liberation of Paris, the final outcome of the German War was well and truly decided by the time the V-2 claimed its first victim. (Who, had he or she an instant of reflection before death, no doubt cared not one kraut fuck about how “late” or “cost effective” the weapon system turned out to be).
Its role more ideological than technological, the V-2 could not win the War but it did serve to prolong it. Hitler’s faith in the Rocket only grew as the Soviets approached Berlin, such hope serving as a measure of Hitler’s desperation and personal decline into delusion. So apart from being a technical marvel, the reality of the V-2 Rocket was that it only accelerated the killing in a War that stubbornly refused to end.
This was due in large part to Nazi racial ideology. Nazis both fanatical and fearful held out faith that the most gifted members of the master race would produce a final breakthrough, whether military or scientific, just in time to save their people from destruction at the hands of the bestial Eastern hoards. This extremist faith in the violence of Progress — always at the center of National Socialism’s embrace of the Enlightenment project — played a critical role in the cultural knot the Nazi regime tied around the German people. This bind, backed increasingly by raw terror, ensured that Germany fought to the finish.
Buried alive inside his bunker, all Hitler had left were his fantasies. Speer’s intimacy with Hitler had long been based on his ability to arouse then realize the Führer’s deepest desires using what Thomas Pynchon called “a pornography of blueprints,” first in architecture, then in city planning, and finally, fatally, with the Rocket. And when these fantasies ran out, Hitler poisoned his dog and his wife and then shot himself.
For generations, Americans enamored with WvB (like Walt Disney and JFK) accepted his story that he was never a committed Nazi, but that he was somehow preternaturally apolitical, just an idealistic engineer, a dreamer of space. As if dreaming were somehow innocent, as if our visions of the future were devoid of politics. But of course there is nothing innocent about selling Hitler on the blueprints of the A-10, a huge multi-stage Rocket that WvB promised could hit New York City. For selling Hitler hope to pay for his own fantasies of space travel, WvB is not only an object lesson in the moral hazards of masculine careerism, but he should be remembered as one of Hitler’s central co-conspirators. The fanatic’s ultimate fantasist.
After the war, WvB swore that the A-4 was never originally designed as a ”weapon with which to devastate London.” The narrow truth of this statement is a measure of WvB’s ethical blindness. Yet, to the end of his life, WvB insisted that the only thing wrong with the V-2 Rocket was that it “hit the wrong planet.”
If that’s its only moral flaw, then the V-2 must have been built on the wrong planet too. Because the V-2 is unique in the history of arms and armaments for being the only weapon to have killed more people in its manufacture than through its application in War. Perhaps what is most remarkable about the V-2 is that the Nazis used slave labor to build the first spaceship.
Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, and my candidate for the last century’s most evil person, visited Peenemünde several times. This photo was taken on his second trip in June 1943 where he is flanked on the left by General Dornberger and just to the right, largely obstructed by Himmler, is WvB wearing the black Hugo Boss uniform of an SS officer. WvB joined the SS on May Day 1940 (Member #185,068), and in four years rose to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (Major).* This is the only known photo of WvB in the black, and he looks like he’s trying to hide from history. The obstructed view in the photo probably saved WvB’s career in later years, as it remains suggestive of his partial-view morality. Even if we are willing to accept a moral argument for building rockets for the Army, once the SS gets involved all ambiguity vanishes, and all that could have been good about the Rocket turns to shit and death.
If Adolph Hitler had a vision of a Jew-Free Europe, then Heinrich Himmler had a plan for the Führer’s unshakeable will to be done. Founded to be Hitler’s private bodyguards; by the mid-1930s the SS transformed itself into the central force of Nazi terrorism, controlling the German police (Gestapo), the security police as well as an ever growing system of “concentration camps” starting with Dachau and ending with Auschwitz. With the War in the East, the power of the SS expanded into special death squads (Einsatzgruppen) and death camps like Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibór (Vernichtungslager). The self-conscious vanguard of the race, SS membership required biological standards, one had to be near 6 feet tall, able to document their Aryan racial heritage to at least 1750, and make application to Himmler for the right to marry (something which legendary playboy WvB applied for in 1943 but never consummated). Himmler was an inexhaustible activist of mass death and now he wanted a piece of the Rocket.
On 18 August 1943 the British Royal Air Force led an air raid on Peenemünde of more more than 600 planes, damaging many of the larger buildings and killing several hundred Russian prisoners of war. Most of the engine test stands, the wind tunnel and a majority of the scientists survived, yet WvB’s Rocket utopia was over. Hitler saw the bombing of Peenemünde as a serious threat to his plans and soon announced the relocation of “all German industrial plants under the Earth.”*
Promising total security and a limitless supply of labor, Himmler got the order from Hitler to construct new underground factories to build V-2s. The site chosen was an old mine dug into the Hartz Mountains outside of Nordhausen. Two twisting parallel tunnels under the mountain more than a mile long, connected by dozens of side tunnels, which eventually provided more than a million square feet of manufacturing space. Ten days after selecting the site, the SS set up a labor camp known as Dora, a satellite of the main camp at Buchenwald. Himmler ordered General Kammler — head of SS construction projects and the man who oversaw the construction of the gas chambers at Auschwitz — to begin blasting and expanding the tunnel system. “Pay no attention to the human costs,” demanded Kammler. “The work must go ahead, and in the shortest possible time.”* Within two months the V-2 factory was up and running; though the blasting under the mountain never seemed to stop.
As the tunnels became operational in the summer of 1944, Speer sent Walter Frentz — Hitler’s favorite photographer — to take pictures of the assembly plant in the Mittelwerk. These photos depict healthy, skilled, albeit imprisoned workers in striped uniforms completing the final V-2 engine assembly. By the time the first V-2 hit London, there were more than 30,000 prisoners living in the camps around Dora-Mittelbau. Tens of thousands of slaves of the Reich worked, slept, ate, washed and, ever increasingly, died underground building V-2s. In the first six months some 2,882 prisoners died of disease, starvation and beatings in the dark and filth. By March 1944 a crematorium had to be built to deal with all the bodies, which was all according to the SS plan of Vernichtung durch Arbeit, or extermination through work.
In the winter of 1945, WvB and General Dornberger left Peenemünde to take over leadership of the “Mittelbau-Dora Planning Office.” Living a dozen miles away from the caves, drawing up fresh plans inside a grand villa that had long-ago been confiscated from a Jewish factory owner, WvB made at least ten visits to the Mittelwerk to inspect the assembly process. WvB sez he never saw a hanging or any explicit violence. He could unsee the corpses strewn around the camp, the smoke of the choked crematoria and the piles of grey ash that blew into all corners of the camps. But there is no way he could have escaped the smell of death and disease coming from that industrial slave pit. WvB even made a critical trip to the main SS camp at Buchenwald in an effort to recruit skilled draftsmen and engineers from among the French prisoners. Above the gates at Buchenwald the Nazis posted the phrase “Jedem das Seine” — “Everyone gets what they deserve.”
As output increased along with the death rate in the Mittelwerk, Rockets began exploding on the launch pads or breaking up on atmospheric reentry. The SS suspected sabotage and used the enormous production cranes to stage mass executions of rebellious prisoners, hanging as many as 57 at one time and leaving the bodies dangling over the production line for days. At maximum, the Mittelwerk produced 600 Rockets a week, building some 4,575 Rockets inside those fetid caves. During which time, more than 60,000 prisoners worked at 30 or more sub-camps and worksites in and round Dora-Mittelbau. By the time the Allies liberated the camp in the Spring 1945 an estimated 20,000 workers died at the work camps which built the V-2.
For Himmler the killing was never enough. In the spring of 1944, Himmler summoned WvB with a proposition veiled as a threat. “‘I hope you realize that your A-4 rocket has ceased to be a toy,’ said Himmler,” recalls WvB after the War. “‘And that the whole of the German people eagerly await the mystery weapon… And as for you, I can imagine that you’ve been immensely handicapped by Army red tape. Why not join my staff? Surely you know that no one has such ready access to the Führer….’”* WvB explained that he trusted General Dornberger, that delays in the V-2 plans were technical problems not Army interference, and thanks but no thanks.
Gangster that he was, Himmler was not about to give WvB a chance to refuse him a second time. On the day before his 32nd birthday, SS agents took WvB, with his brother and two other Peenemünde engineers into what the Gestapo liked to call “protective custody.” At first they were charged with “defeatism” on the evidence of talking shit in a bar a little too loudly. Later he was charged by the SS with sabotaging weapons production by diverting resources into his dreams of space travel. In the end, Himmler released WvB unharmed by an order of the Führer obtained by General Dornberger and Albert Speer. What does it say about WvB that Hitler had to save him from the SS? According to Operation Paperclip, the US military conspiracy to capture Nazi Scientists, WvB’s arrest by the SS meant that he was not a fanatical Nazi and that he was safe to bring to the US.
On a strange winter’s night in Castle Varlar, December 1944, the German army celebrated the Rocket’s success in a grand Nazi banquet so macabre that it really should be a slapstick scene in a Marx Brother’s film or an outrageous satire from Gravity’s Rainbow. As a crowd of Nazi dignitaries sipped champagne, General Dornenberg, WvB and two other engineers — all wearing crisp new tuxedos — received the Reich’s highest non-combat award, the Knight’s Cross. Mobile crews just outside the castle grounds launched four rockets during the course of the party, with revelers turning their attention to toast the honored recipient, followed by an excited pause and a deafening roar as another Rocket took flight, followed by another award, followed by a Rocket, until late into the night. The juxtaposition of celebration and War, of progress and death, marks the high-point in WvB’s career as a Nazi.
He served his Führer, his Reich and his race with distinction. And yet, rational as WvB was, he could tell that Germany was losing the war. If the Thousand Year Reich was not going to last long enough to put a Man on the Moon then WvB needed to find a new ticket to ride.
This story is told in four parts. Part 1 offers an introduction to Peak Whiteness and the life of WvB. Part 2 deals with WvB’s youth and service to the Third Reich. Part 3 begins with his surrender to the Americans and his work building Rockets for the American empire. And part 4 considers the Counterculture’s challenge — in humor, film and literature — to WvB and the Military Industrial Complex.
Part 1: A Romantic Urge
Part 2: The Rocket and the Third Reich
Part 3: WvB’s Secret America
Part 4: The Counterforce
Michael Mark Cohen teaches American Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley. He lives in the East Bay with his wife and two kids. Follow him on twitter at @LilBillHaywood, check out his archive of radical cartoons at www.cartooningcapitalism.com, listen to a webcast of his Intro to American Studies course on YouTube, and you can see him play himself in Frederick Wiseman’s four-hour documentary At Berkeley (2013).
Thanks for all your responses, comments and feedback.
