Ettersburg Castle, Germany, 1926. A previously unremarkable student who had shown promise in languages but little else performs an astonishing scholastic turnaround after being given a telescope in honour of his confirmation. The instrument sparks an obsession with space and rocketry, driving a furious study of mathematics and physics that sees him teaching the other students and graduating early. This effort leads to a successful career in aerospace, with the boy eventually becoming the “father of space travel”, the architect of the iconic Saturn V rocket that took humanity to the Moon, an outspoken advocate for racial integration, and an unofficial spokesperson for NASA on a Disney programme about space travel.

Peenemünde, Germany, 1940. An opportunistic engineer working to develop the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile is urged to join the Allgemeine Schutzstaffel (SS) at the orders of Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of the Nazi Party. He is issued membership number 185,068 and the rank of Untersturmführer (“junior storm leader”, equivalent to second lieutenant). He goes on to perfect his terrifying weapon, the V-2, which would directly kill at least 4400 people in the final year of the Second World War – and the production of which is estimated to have led to the deaths of some 12,000 concentration camp prisoners and other labourers.

While these two contrasting stories seem worlds apart, they are the experiences of the same person, German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun (1912–1977). But as with many historical figures, notes photographer Lewis Bush in his engrossing new photobook, Depravity’s Rainbow, the life of von Braun is one all too easily “rendered into reassuringly clear blacks and whites”. Bush sets out to explore the “grey hinterland” that lies between both von Braun’s arguable evil and virtue, and space exploration’s contradictory history of extreme militarism and peaceful science.

The title of the book is a nod to another work concerned with the development and use of V-2 rockets, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow – a book so infamously complicated it was lampooned by Daniel Craig’s character in the 2019 film Knives Out as being something “nobody” actually read. But Depravity’s Rainbow is not afraid of a little structural complexity either, and the lion’s share of the work is given to telling – through archive photos – two converging narratives.

The first begins with the US flag planted on the Moon, and works its way backwards to the end of the Second World War, and von Braun joining the rocket team at Fort Bliss, Texas. He was there as part of Operation Paperclip – a secret US intelligence programme to recruit German scientists and engineers after the collapse of Nazi Germany.

The second narrative, meanwhile, starts with a young von Braun. It follows his life as he joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Space Flight Society) and became involved in the Germany Army. He then played an instrumental role in the development of the Aggregate series of rockets, which would end up including the devastating V-2 missile – a fact that secured the Allied forces’ interest in him as the Second World War came to a close.

The author notes the inherent dichotomy in von Braun’s joining the SS in 1940 only to go on, in 1965, to passionately lecture segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace on racism

This two-stream format allows Bush to highlight a number of interesting contrasts and parallels. He compares the craters of the Moon to those of the RAF-bombed Peenemünde Army Research Centre where von Braun was based. Bush also notes the inherent dichotomy in von Braun’s joining the SS in 1940 only to go on, in 1965 (with then NASA administrator James Webb), to passionately lecture segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace on racism and the need to “shed the shackles of the past”.

Double standards

The final section of Depravity’s Rainbow is a series of essays around the themes of the book. These range from the evolution of rocketry prior to the Second World War and the history of aerial bombardment, through to the horrors of the concentration camps and the holocaust, and the defences that von Braun would later employ to counter questions about his role within the Nazi regime. In many ways, these are the most fascinating parts of the book – even if the detour into musings on ideas, truth, progress and modernity does come across as a little self-indulgent before its intended place in the wider narrative becomes clear.

More interesting to my eye was the comparison that Bush makes between von Braun and “the man who might with time have become his American equivalent”. Born in Texas the same year as von Braun, Frank Malina was a rocketry researcher at Caltech who helped to found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that would ultimately become part of NASA in the 1950s. As Bush puts it, “Rather like von Braun, Malina combined practical engineering ability with theoretical expertise, and [with a colleague] formulated some of the key mathematical theories necessary for multiple-stage rocketry.” In fact, Malina was responsible for overseeing the WAC Corporal sounding rocket that would later be married to captured V-2s to form the RTV-G-4 Bumper, the first high-altitude multi-stage rocket.

Unlike von Braun, who may have spoken of rocketry as the means to a utopian future while hitching his wagon to Nazi militarism, Malina’s active pacifism and socialism attracted the attention of the FBI, who placed him under surveillance. Fearing incarceration, Malina emigrated to France in 1947, where he became the head of scientific research at the fledgling UNESCO for two years before leaving to devote himself to kinetic art (forms that contain motion), and later the intersection between the arts and the sciences.

Good scientists and honest people

His fears of arrest appear to have been founded. In 1952, at the height of the Second Red Scare – when a fear of communism permeating American politics led to the persecution of left-wing individuals – Malina was indicted for failing to list his Communist Party membership on an old security questionnaire from his time at Caltech. Malina was declared a fugitive, to be arrested should he ever return to the US. As the author points out, this led to the curious situation that “an American who advocated for a peaceful vision of rocketry as a panacea to ills on Earth would be more problematic for branches of the US government than a former Nazi who had worn the black uniform of the SS and whose rockets had led to the deaths of thousands”.

The author concludes that what set apart von Braun from his peers may not have been “his technical or theoretical expertise, his very considerable skill as a manager, or even his great charisma as a public figurehead for space exploration”. Rather, says Bush, “It was his utterly ruthless expediency, his willingness to make himself useful to the cause of anyone who he thought would help him achieve his vision.” And it is this, perhaps, that makes him so captivating a personality.

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• Source: https://physicsworld.com/a/the-two-faces-of-a-wartime-aerospace-engineer-the-controversial-tale-of-wernher-von-braun/