Dr. Strangelove’s Second Coming —The Odd Resurrection of Wernher von Braun
The other day I ran into Wernher von Braun — in a strange and unlikely place. It had something of a Close Encounter of the Third Kind, at least for someone who was watching sci-fi movies in the 1970s. Unless you are a boomer or early Gen Xer you may not even have heard of von Braun. And maybe it’s because he has turned into what George Orwell would call an “unperson.”
Dr. Wernher von Braun was the famous rocket scientist who masterminded America’s victory in the space race. Von Braun celebrated his very own V-Day on July 20, 1969, when the US put a man on the moon and the Soviet Union didn’t. His earlier attempt at winning didn’t go so well because the Vengeance Weapon 2 (V-2) rockets he built for Adolf Hitler towards the end of WWII didn’t stop the Allied advance. The story of how he and the other German rocket men under his command got scooped up by the Americans has been told many times. The Soviets, eager to seize the capital, fought the bloody Battle of Berlin. Meanwhile, the Americans snatched Bavaria — with von Braun in it, eager to surrender. As he later put it, he was tired of working for a country that kept losing world wars and wanted to be on the winning side next time. For the Americans, von Braun turned out to be the big catch. Bigger than Berlin for the Russians since von Braun didn’t come in sectors that had to be shared with the Allies.
Von Braun and his rockets were badly needed during the Cold War. His bosses in the American military had no desire to be irritated by the skeletons from his Nazi past and gave them permission to stay in the closet. This helped propel their owner from SS membership to US citizenship in record time. In hindsight it is stunning that so much was successfully kept under wraps for so long. But then again, Twitter wasn’t around yet and the only whistleblowing against von Braun came from across the Iron Curtain, conveniently dismissible as communist propaganda.
On this side of the Iron Curtain, von Braun’s problematic past was successfully swept under the carpet as classified information. The only people in the 1960s who dared to take a peek under the rug came from the arts, and they did a magnificent job lampooning the Wernher von Braun story. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie, Peter Sellers plays Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair-using nuclear war expert and former Nazi who keeps calling the American president mein Führer and struggles with an uncontrollable arm prosthesis that constantly shoots up in a Sieg Heil salute. It’s his thick flock of wavy hair, however, combined with a hilarious German accent that leaves little doubt who inspired Dr. Strangelove’s character. And then there is Tom Lehrer, musician and satirical songwriter, who in 1965 texted and sang: “A man whose allegiance, is ruled by expedience / Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown / Ha, Nazi Schmazi, says Wernher von Braun / Don’t say that he’s hypocritical / Say rather that he’s apolitical.” And about his V-2 rockets that terrorized Antwerp and London towards the end of WWII: “Vonce zee rockets are up, who cares vhere zey come down? / That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.” None of this would stick to the real Wernher von Braun who had a Teflon reputation, at least as long as the space race was on and the Cold War undecided.
With von Braun it was all about timing, whether it was the moonshot right before the end of the decade — as JFK had asked for — or his personal regime change to Uncle Sam from Uncle Adolf, just before Uncle Joe’s Red Army had caught up with him. Even his exit from this world seemed perfectly timed, at a time when the most unappetizing parts of his CV were still classified information. When he died in 1977, he still got a glowing obituary in the New York Times peppered with “anecdotes” from the old days when his rockets used to hit London instead of the moon. It even included an interview with Albert Speer, Hitler’s former Minister of Armaments and a convicted war criminal, who, of course, had only good things to say about his former teammate. Several years later the successful moonshot had drifted into the past and von Braun’s uglier skeletons into broad daylight. Many Americans voiced outrage that they owed the space race victory to a Nazi who, after all, hadn’t been so terribly reluctant to join Hitler’s political party and even the SS. Was it really that surprising? Or were all the pearl clutchers reacting like Captain Renault in Casablanca who first pockets his wins before he is “shocked, shocked” to find out that illegal gambling is going on in Rick’s Café Américain?
The embarrassment was clearly lasting through the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 2019 since Wernher von Braun didn’t make it into the documentary. Apollo 11 was showered with awards for Best Editing. Putting a ton of original footage about Apollo 11 together and have the public face and architect of the space program virtually never show up was indeed quite an accomplishment.
Imagine my surprise when I was running into Wernher von Braun while browsing the internet in preparation for a class on organized religion in the US and Germany. The original Dr. Strangelove has a growing fan base among American evangelicals who are heaping praise on him as a recovering sinner, born-again brother and, above all, groundbreaking creationist — despite the fact the “creation” is no rocket science.
How did that happen? It turns out that von Braun did indeed join an evangelical church after moving to the US, but mostly to please his churchgoing superiors in Texas and Alabama. We don’t know if this move saved his soul, but it surely helped his career. As much as the thousands of slave laborers who died while building his V-2 rockets may have troubled his conscience, the few public statements he made about his time in Nazi Germany sound at most like he felt vaguely sorry, but certainly not guilty, let alone born-again. Equally vague is what he said about the universe and whether a divine “designer” might have something to do with it. According to von Braun, it cannot be ruled it out — exactly what a secular scientist would say. Nonetheless, it’s enough for evangelical creationists to claim von Braun as one of their heroes. Which seems to confirm that the bar for membership in these religious circles is breathtakingly low, at least for certain celebrities. Far from being born-again, Donald Trump is instead double-boosted and happily enjoying the spoils of modern science. He publicly supports the religious right’s spiritual nonsense and medieval time travels while refusing to get on board himself, yet he is one of them — no questions asked. Trump hasn’t worked for Hitler but would love Hitler’s generals to work for him because they are “so loyal.” His evangelical fan base has no problem with that. Adding Dr. Strangelove to the list of famous converts they can brag about is only logical. Who’s next? Charles Lindbergh?
Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.
An earlier version of this article was published at https://minnpost.com.
