Look up braun in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Braun is a common surname, originating from the German word for the color brown. The name is the 22nd most common family name in Germany. Many German emigrants to the United States also changed their name to Brown (see Brown (surname)).

In German, Braun is pronounced [bʁaʊn], roughly similar to the English word "brown." In English, it is often pronounced like "brawn," as in Carol Mosely Braun. Pronunciation is an individual choice and is hard to guess unless one is in a position to hear the person's name spoken.

Companies[link]

• Braun, German appliances manufacturer

People[link]

• Alexander Braun (1805–77), German botanist
• Bob Braun (1929–2001), Cincinnati television personality
• Carol Moseley Braun (born 1947), American politician and lawyer, the first (and to date only) black woman elected to the United States Senate
• Carl Braun born 1927, American former professional basketball player and coach
• Carl Braun, (1886–1960), German opera singer, bass
• Carl Braun (1822–1891), Austrian obstetrician (knighted to Carl Ritter von Fernwald Braun)
• Colin Braun (1988), NASCAR driver for Roush Fenway Racing
• Dagmar Braun Celeste (born in 1942, Krems, Austria), former first lady of Ohio, married to former Ohio governor and U.S. ambassador Richard F. Celeste.
• Egidius Braun (*1925), from 1992 to 2001 President of the German Soccer Association
• Emma Lucy Braun (1889-1971), American botanist and ecologist
• Emile Braun (1849–1927) Belgian liberal politician, Mayor of Ghent.
• Eva Braun (1912–45), longtime companion (and ultimately, wife for a night and a day) of Adolf Hitler
• Franziska Braun (died 1976), mother of Eva Braun
• Friedrich Braun (1862–1942), Russian-German philologist
• Gregor Braun (*1955), German bicycle racer
• Hanns Braun (1886–1918), German athlete
• Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Braun (1862–1934), German surgeon
• Jayme Caetano Braun (1924–99), Brazilian folk musician, composer and poet
• Justin Braun (born 1987), American ice hockey player
• Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850–1918), German physicist and inventor of the Cathode ray tube
• Lasse Braun (born as Alberto Ferrero in 1936 in Algiers, Algeria), Franco-Italian director
• Lilian Jackson Braun (1913 - 2011), American writer
• Lily Braun (1865–1916), German feminist writer
• Matt Braun (born 1932), American writer of Western novels
• Matthias Braun, (Czech: Matyáš Bernard Braun, February 24, 1684, in Sautens – February 15, 1738, in Prague) sculptor and carver active in the Czech lands
• Michael Braun (footballer) (born 1978), Australian rules footballer
• Otto Braun (1872–1955), German Social Democratic politician, and Prime Minister of Prussia 1920–32
• Ralf Braun (born 1973), German backstroke swimmer
• Rick Braun, smooth jazz trumpet player
• Russell Braun, Canadian operatic lyric baritone, son of Victor Braun
• Ryan Braun (born 1983), American All Star baseball player
• Sabine Braun (born 1965), German athlete
• Sandy Koufax, originally named Braun (born 1935), American Hall of Fame baseball pitcher
• Tamara Braun (born 1971), American actress
• Timothy Braun (born 1975), American writer
• Viktor Barna (1911–72) originally "Braun", Hungarian and British champion table tennis 22-time world champion
• Victor Braun, Canadian-born operatic baritone, father of Russell Braun
• Volker Braun (1939), German writer
• Wernher von Braun (1912–77), German-American rocket scientist

See also[link]

• Braun (disambiguation)
• Brawn (disambiguation)
• Brown (surname)
• Browne
• Brauner

This page or section lists people with the surname Braun, von Braun. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.

Tom Lehrer
Lehrer performing in 1960
Background information
Birth name	Thomas Andrew Lehrer
Born	(1928-04-09) April 9, 1928 (age 84) New York, New York
Occupations	Mathematician, teacher, lyricist, pianist, composer, singer/songwriter
Instruments	Vocals Piano
Years active	1945–1971, 1998
Labels	Reprise/Warner Bros. Records Rhino/Atlantic Records Shout! Factory
Associated acts	Joe Raposo

Thomas Andrew Lehrer (born April 9, 1928) is an American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician. He has lectured on mathematics and musical theater. Lehrer is best known for the pithy, humorous songs he recorded in the 1950s and 1960s.

His work often parodies popular song forms, though Lehrer usually creates original melodies when doing so. A notable exception is his song "The Elements", where he sets the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Lehrer's earlier work typically dealt with non-topical subject matter and was noted for its black humor, seen in songs such as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". In the 1960s, he produced a number of songs dealing with social and political issues of the day, particularly when he wrote for the U.S. version of the television show That Was The Week That Was.

In the early 1970s, he retired from public performances to devote his time to teaching mathematics and music theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He did two additional performances in 1998 at a London gala show celebrating the career of impresario Cameron Mackintosh.^[1]

Early life[link]

Lehrer was born in 1928 to a Jewish family in the New York City borough of Manhattan, and began studying classical piano music at the age of seven. He was more interested in the popular music of the age, however. Eventually, his mother also sent him to a popular-music piano teacher.^[2] At this early age, he began writing his own show tunes, which eventually helped him in his future adventures as a satirical composer and writer in his years of lecturing at Harvard University, and later at other universities.^[3]

Lehrer graduated from the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, NY.^[4] He attended Camp Androscoggin, both as a camper and a counselor.^[5] While studying mathematics as an undergraduate student at Harvard College, he began to write comic songs to entertain his friends, including "Fight Fiercely, Harvard" (1945). Those songs were later named The Physical Revue,^[6] a joking reference to a leading scientific journal, The Physical Review.

Mathematics career[link]

Lehrer earned his AB in mathematics (magna cum laude) from Harvard University in 1946, when he was nineteen.^[7] He received his MA degree the next year, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He taught classes at MIT, Harvard, and Wellesley.

He remained in Harvard's doctoral program for several years, taking time out for his musical career and to work as a researcher at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957, working at the National Security Agency. (Lehrer has stated that he invented the Jell-O Shot during this time, as a means of circumventing liquor restrictions.)^[8] All of these experiences eventually became fodder for songs, viz. "Fight Fiercely, Harvard", "The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be" and "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier". Despite holding a master's degree in an era when American conscripts often lacked a high school diploma, Lehrer served as an enlisted soldier, achieving the rank of Specialist Third Class, which he described as being a "corporal without portfolio".^[9] In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time studies at Harvard, but he never completed his doctoral studies in mathematics.

From 1962, he taught in the political science department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).^[10] In 1972, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching an introductory course entitled "The Nature of Mathematics" to liberal arts majors—"Math for Tenors", according to Lehrer. He also taught a class in musical theater. He occasionally performed songs in his lectures, primarily those relating to the topic.^[11]

In 2001, Lehrer taught his last mathematics class (on the topic of infinity) and retired from academia.^[12] He has remained in the area, and still "hangs out" around the University of California, Santa Cruz.^[13]

Mathematical publications[link]

The American Mathematical Society database lists Lehrer as co-author of two papers:

• RE Fagen & TA Lehrer, "Random walks with restraining barrier as applied to the biased binary counter", Journal of the Society for Industrial Applied Mathematics, vol. 6, pp. 1–14 (March 1958) MR0094856
• T Austin, R Fagen, T Lehrer, W Penney, "The distribution of the number of locally maximal elements in a random sample", Annals of Mathematical Statistics vol. 28, pp. 786–790 (1957) MR0091251

Musical career[link]

Lehrer was mainly influenced by musical theater. According to Gerald Nachman's book Seriously Funny, the broadway musical, "Let's Face It" (lyrics by Sylvia Fine; music by Cole Porter) made an early and lasting impression. Lehrer's style consists of parodying various forms of popular song. For example, his appreciation of list songs led him to set an unordered list of the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song".

Author Isaac Asimov recounted in his second autobiographical volume In Joy Still Felt of seeing Lehrer perform in a Boston nightclub on October 9, 1954, during which Lehrer sang very cleverly about Jim getting it from Louise, and Sally from Jim, "and after a while you gathered the 'it' to be venereal disease [the song was likely "I Got It From Sally (in later versions 'Agnes')"]. Suddenly, as the combinations grew more grotesque, you realized he was satirizing every perversion known to mankind without using a single naughty phrase. It was clearly unsingable (in those days) outside a nightclub." Asimov also recalled a song that dealt with the Boston subway system, making use of the stations leading into town from Harvard, observing that the local subject-matter rendered the song useless for general distribution. Lehrer subsequently granted Asimov permission to print the lyrics to the subway song in his book. "I haven't gone to nightclubs often," said Asimov, "but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time."^[14]

Lehrer was inspired by the success of his performances of his own songs, so he paid for some studio time to record Songs by Tom Lehrer. At the time, radio stations would not give Lehrer air time because of his controversial subjects. Instead, he sold his album on campus at Harvard for three dollars, while "supportive record merchants and dorm newsstands bought copies…and marked them up fifty cents."^{[citation needed]} After one summer, he also started to receive mail orders from all parts of the country (as far away as San Francisco, after The Chronicle wrote an article on the record). Interest in his recordings was spread by word of mouth; friends and supporters brought their records home and played them for their friends, who then also wanted a copy.^[15]

The album—which included the macabre "I Hold Your Hand in Mine", the mildly risqué "Be Prepared", and "Lobachevsky" (regarding plagiarizing mathematicians) became a cult success via word of mouth, despite being self-published and without promotion. Lehrer then embarked on a series of concert tours and recorded a second album, which was released in two versions: the songs were the same, but More of Tom Lehrer was studio-recorded, while An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer was recorded live in concert.

Lehrer's major breakthrough in the United Kingdom came as a result of the citation accompanying an honorary degree given to Princess Margaret, where she cited musical tastes as "catholic, ranging from Mozart to Tom Lehrer". This prompted significant interest in his works and helped secure distributors for his material in the UK. It was there that his music achieved real popularity, as a result of the proliferation of university newspapers referring to the material, and the willingness of the BBC to play his songs on the radio (something that was a rarity in the United States).

By the early 1960s, Lehrer had retired from touring and was employed as the resident songwriter for the U.S. edition of That Was The Week That Was (TW3), a satirical television show. An increased proportion of his output became overtly political, or at least topical, on subjects such as education ("New Math"), the Second Vatican Council ("The Vatican Rag"), race relations ("National Brotherhood Week"), air and water pollution ("Pollution"), American militarism ("Send the Marines"), World War III "pre-nostalgia" ("So Long, Mom", premiered by Steve Allen), and nuclear proliferation ("Who's Next?" and "MLF Lullaby"). He also wrote a song that famously satirized the alleged amorality of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who had previously worked for Nazi Germany before working for the United States. ("'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun.") Lehrer did not appear on the television show; his songs were performed by a female vocalist and his lyrics were often altered by the network censors. Lehrer later performed the songs on the album, That Was The Year That Was, so that, in his words, people could hear the songs the way they were intended to be heard.

In 1967, Lehrer was persuaded to make a short tour in Norway and Denmark, where he performed some of the songs from the television program. The performance in Oslo, Norway, on September 10 was recorded on video tape and aired locally later that autumn; this program was released on DVD some 40 years later.^[16]

Also around 1967, Lehrer composed and performed on piano original songs in a Dodge automobile "industrial" film that was distributed primarily to Dodge automobile dealers. It was also shown at promotional events organized by Dodge. Set in a fictional American wild west town, the full proper title of the film appears to be "The Dodge Rebellion Theatre presents Ballads For '67" Since the film is introducing 1967 model automobiles, it was possibly produced in late 1966.

The record deal with Reprise Records for the That Was The Year That Was album also gave Reprise distribution rights for Lehrer's earlier recordings, as Lehrer wanted to wind up his own record imprint. The Reprise issue of Songs by Tom Lehrer was a stereo re-recording. This version was not issued on CD, but the songs were issued on the live Tom Lehrer Revisited CD instead. The [live] recording also included bonus tracks "L-Y" and "Silent E", which Lehrer wrote for the PBS children's educational series The Electric Company. Lehrer later commented that worldwide sales of the recordings under Reprise surpassed 1.8 million units in 1996. That same year, the album That Was The Year That Was went gold.^[15] The album liner notes (and Lehrer himself in one routine) promote Tom Lehrer's songs using reverse psychology, by deliberately quoting his negative reviews. ("I know it's very bad form to quote one's own reviews, but there is something the New York Times said about me [in 1958], that I have always treasured: 'Mr. Lehrer's muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.")

Departure from the music scene[link]

There is an urban legend that Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. He did comment that awarding the prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete, but has denied that he stopped creating satire thereafter as a form of protest, asserting that he had stopped several years prior to the award.^[17] Another mistaken belief is that he was sued for libel by the estate of Wernher von Braun, the subject of one of his songs, and forced to relinquish all of his royalty income to von Braun. Lehrer firmly denied this in a 2003 interview.^[13]

When asked about his reasons for abandoning his musical career, in an interview in the book accompanying his CD box set (released in 2000), he cited a simple lack of interest, a distaste for touring, and boredom with performing the same songs repeatedly. He observed that when he was moved to write and perform songs, he did, and when he was not, he did not, and that after a while he simply lost interest. Although many of Lehrer's songs satirized the Cold War political establishment of the era, he stopped writing and performing just as the 1960s counterculture movement gained momentum.

Lehrer's musical career was brief; in an interview in the late 1990s, he pointed out that he had performed a mere 109 shows and written 37 songs over 20 years. Nevertheless, he developed a significant cult following both in the United States and abroad.

In the 1970s, Lehrer concentrated on teaching mathematics and musical theater, although he also wrote ten songs for the children's television show The Electric Company—Lehrer's Harvard schoolmate Joe Raposo was the show's musical director for its first three seasons.

Revivals and discographic reissues[link]

In the early 1980s, Tom Foolery, a revival of his songs on the London stage, was a hit. Although not its instigator, Lehrer eventually gave the stage production his full support and updated several of his lyrics for the production (such as "Who's Next", in which Neiman-Marcus [or in the San Francisco production, J.C. Penney], not Alabama, gets the bomb). Tom Foolery contained 27 Lehrer songs and led to more than 200 productions,^[15] including an off-Broadway production at the Village Gate, which ran for 120 performances in 1981.^[18]

In conjunction with the Tom Foolery premiere in 1980 at Criterion Theatre in London, Lehrer made a rare TV appearance on BBC's Parkinson show, where he sang "I Got It from Agnes".^[19][20]

On June 7 and 8, 1998, Lehrer performed in public for the first time in 25 years at the Lyceum Theatre, London as part of the gala show Hey, Mr. Producer! celebrating the career of impresario Cameron Mackintosh, who had been the producer of Tom Foolery. The June 8 show was his only performance before Queen Elizabeth II. Lehrer sang "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" and an updated version of the nuclear proliferation song "Who's Next?". The DVD of the event includes the former song.^[21]

In 2000, a boxed set of CDs, The Remains of Tom Lehrer, was released by Rhino Entertainment. It included live and studio versions of his first two albums, That Was The Year That Was, the songs he wrote for The Electric Company, and some previously unreleased material. It was accompanied by a small hardbound book containing an introduction by Dr. Demento and lyrics to all the songs.

In 2010, Shout! Factory launched a reissue campaign, making his long out-of-press albums available digitally. They also issued a CD/DVD combo called The Tom Lehrer Collection, which includes his best-loved songs, plus a DVD featuring an Oslo concert.^[22]

Musical legacy[link]

Lehrer has commented that he doubts his songs had any real effect on those not already critical of the establishment: "I don't think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It's not even preaching to the converted; it's titillating the converted... I'm fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War."^[17]

In 2003 he commented that his particular brand of political satire is more difficult in the modern world: "The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban land mines... I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them."^[13]

In a phone call to Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post in February 2008, Lehrer instructed Weingarten to "Just tell the people that I am voting for Obama."^[23]

A play, Letters from Lehrer, written by Canadian Richard Greenblatt, was performed by him at CanStage, from January 16 to February 25, 2006. It followed Lehrer's musical career, the meaning of several songs, the politics of the time, and Greenblatt's own experiences with Lehrer's music, while playing some of Lehrer's songs. There are currently no plans for more performances, although low-quality audio recordings have begun to circulate around the internet.

Some of his songs ("I Hold Your Hand in Mine" and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park") were reworked into German by the Austrian-Jewish singer satirist Georg Kreisler who lived in the United States from 1938 until 1955. Lehrer was praised by Dr. Demento as "the best musical satirist of the twentieth century". Other artists who cite Lehrer as an influence include "Weird Al" Yankovic, whose work generally addresses more popular and less technical or political subjects,^[24] and educator and scientist H. Paul Shuch, who tours under the stage name Dr. SETI and calls himself "a cross between Carl Sagan and Tom Lehrer: he sings like Sagan and lectures like Lehrer." More stylistically influenced performers include American political satirist Mark Russell,^[25] and the British duo Kit and The Widow.^{[citation needed]} British medical satirists Amateur Transplants acknowledge the debt they owe to Tom Lehrer on the back of their first album, Fitness to Practice. Their songs "The Menstrual Rag" and "The Drugs Song" are to the tunes of Lehrer's "The Vatican Rag" and "The Elements" (itself set to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan), respectively. Their second album, Unfit to Practise, opens with an update of Lehrer's "The Masochism Tango" and is called simply "Masochism Tango 2008". Syndicated conservative morning-radio talk show host Jim Quinn sings with piano backing in a Lehrer-like tribute in a song on how political correctness has destroyed so many Christmas traditions with the song "A Politically Correct Christmas".

Lehrer has said of his musical career, "If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while."^[2]

Music lists[link]

Reviews selected by Lehrer for his liner notes[link]

• "Mr. Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste." — The New York Times (9 February 1959)
• "More desperate than amusing" — New York Herald Tribune
• "He seldom has any point to make except obvious ones" — The Christian Science Monitor
• "Plays the piano acceptably" — The Oakland Tribune

Solo discography[link]

• Songs by Tom Lehrer (1953)
• More of Tom Lehrer (1959)
• An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (1959)
• Revisited (1960) (1990 CD reissue includes 1971 studio recordings of Silent E and L-Y)
• Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia (And Vice Versa) (1960; Australia-only)
• That Was the Year That Was (1965)
• Songs by Tom Lehrer (1966 re-recording)
• Tom Lehrer in Concert (1994; UK compilation)
• Songs & More Songs by Tom Lehrer (1997; US compilation of his first two studio albums with additional songs)
• The Remains of Tom Lehrer (2000)
• The Tom Lehrer Collection (2010)

Many Lehrer songs also are performed (but not by Lehrer) in That Was The Week That Was (Radiola LP, 1981)

The sheet music to many of Lehrer's songs is published in The Tom Lehrer Song Book (Crown Publishers, Inc., 1954) Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 54-12068 and Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer: with not enough drawings by Ronald Searle (Pantheon, 1981, ISBN 0-394-74930-8; Methuen, 1999, ISBN 978-0-413-74230-8). There is also a second song book, called "Tom Lehrer's Second Song Book," which is out of print and has no ISBN.

Lehrer wrote The SAC Song that was sung in the 1963 film A Gathering of Eagles.^[26]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Tom Lehrer

• That Was the Wit That Was Tom Lehrer interview in SF Weekly, published 2000-04-19, retrieved 2010-08-26
• Tom Lehrer Annotated Song Lyrics, many with MIDI files, collected by Graeme Cree, retrieved 2011-04-13
• 59 minute long mp3 radio programme from 1983, with a telephone interview with Tom Lehrer, as well as a 10 minute follow-up 1989 From "Bob Claster's Funny Stuff" on KCRW, retrieved 2010-08-26
• A Conversation with Tom Lehrer done by Paul D. Lehrman on September 7, 1997, retrieved 2010-08-26
• Tom Lehrer page on The Demented Music Database—includes biography, discography, lyrics and other miscellanea, retrieved on 2011-01-23

Wernher von Braun
Von Braun at his desk at Marshall Space Flight Center in May 1964, with models of the Saturn rocket family
Born	Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun (1912-03-23)March 23, 1912 Wirsitz, German Empire
Died	June 16, 1977(1977-06-16) (aged 65) Alexandria, Virginia, United States
Cause of death	Pancreatic cancer
Resting place	Alexandria, Virginia, United States
Nationality	German, American
Alma mater	Technical University of Berlin
Occupation	Rocket engineer and designer
Spouse	Maria Luise von Quistorp (m. 1947–1977) «start: (1947)–end+1: (1978)»"Marriage: Maria Luise von Quistorp to Wernher von Braun" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Wernher_von_Braun)
Children	Iris Careen von Braun Margrit Cecile von Braun Peter Constantine von Braun
Parents	Magnus von Braun (senior) (1877–1972) Emmy von Quistorp (1886–1959)
Military career
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	SS
Years of service	1937–1945
Rank	Sturmbannführer, SS
Battles/wars	World War II
Awards	Knights Cross of the War Merit Cross (1944) War Merit Cross, First Class with Swords (1943)
Other work	Rocket engineer, NASA, Built the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo manned moon missions

Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr^[1] von Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977) was a German-born rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect, and one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany during World War II and, subsequently, the United States.

In his 20s and early 30s, von Braun was the central figure in Germany's rocket development program, responsible for the design and realization of the V-2 combat rocket during World War II. After the war, he and some of his rocket team were taken to the United States as part of the then-secret Operation Paperclip. Von Braun worked on the United States Army intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) program before his group was assimilated by NASA, under which he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.^[2] According to one NASA source, he is "without doubt, the greatest rocket scientist in history".^[3] His crowning achievement was to lead the development of the Saturn V booster rocket that helped land the first men on the Moon in July 1969.^[4] In 1975 he received the National Medal of Science.

Early life[link]

Wernher von Braun was born in Wirsitz (Wyrzysk), Province of Posen, then a part of the German Empire, and was the second of three sons. He belonged to an aristocratic family, inheriting the German title of Freiherr (equivalent to Baron). His father, conservative civil servant Magnus Freiherr von Braun (1878–1972), served as a Minister of Agriculture in the Federal Cabinet during the Weimar Republic. His mother, Emmy von Quistorp (1886–1959), could trace her ancestry through both parents to medieval European royalty, a descendant of Philip III of France, Valdemar I of Denmark, Robert III of Scotland, and Edward III of England.^[5][6] Through Edward III, Von Braun would be a descendant of Mieszko I of Poland and Charlemagne.^{[citation needed]} Von Braun had a younger brother, also named Magnus Freiherr von Braun.^[7] After Wernher von Braun's Lutheran confirmation, his mother gave him a telescope, and he developed a passion for astronomy. When Wyrzysk was transferred to Poland at the end of World War I, his family, like many other German families, moved to Germany. They settled in Berlin, where 12-year-old von Braun, inspired by speed records established by Max Valier and Fritz von Opel in rocket-propelled cars,^[8] caused a major disruption in a crowded street by detonating a toy wagon to which he had attached a number of fireworks. He was taken into custody by the local police until his father came to collect him.

Wernher von Braun was an accomplished amateur musician who could play Beethoven and Bach from memory. Von Braun learned to play the cello and the piano at an early age and originally wanted to become a composer. He took lessons from composer, Paul Hindemith. The few pieces of von Braun’s youthful compositions that exist are reminiscent of Hindemith’s style.^[9]

Beginning in 1925, von Braun attended a boarding school at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar where he did not do well in physics and mathematics. In 1928 his parents moved him to the Hermann-Lietz-Internat (also a residential school) on the East Frisian North Sea island of Spiekeroog. There he acquired a copy of Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1929) (By Rocket into Interplanetary Space) (in German)^[10] by rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. Space travel had always fascinated von Braun, and from then on he applied himself to physics and mathematics to pursue his interest in rocket engineering.

In 1930 he attended the Technical University of Berlin, where he joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR, the "Spaceflight Society") and assisted Willy Ley in his liquid-fueled rocket motor tests in conjunction with Hermann Oberth.^[11] He also studied at ETH Zurich. Although he worked mainly on military rockets in his later years there, space travel remained his primary interest.

The following episode from the early 1930s is telling in this respect. At this time von Braun attended a presentation given by Auguste Piccard. After the talk the young student approached the famous pioneer of high-altitude balloon flight, and stated to him: "You know, I plan on travelling to the Moon at some time." Piccard is said to have responded with encouraging words.^[12]

He was greatly influenced by Oberth, and he said of him:

Hermann Oberth was the first, who when thinking about the possibility of spaceships grabbed a slide-rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs.... I, myself, owe to him not only the guiding-star of my life, but also my first contact with the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry and space travel. A place of honor should be reserved in the history of science and technology for his ground-breaking contributions in the field of astronautics.^[13]

German career[link]

Involvement with the Nazi regime[link]

Party membership[link]

Von Braun had an ambivalent and complex relationship with the regime of the Third Reich. He officially applied for membership in the NSDAP on November 12, 1937 and was issued membership number 5,738,692.^[14]

Ten years later he stated in an affidavit for the U.S. Army:

"In 1939, I was officially demanded to join the National Socialist Party. At this time I was already Technical Director at the Army Rocket Center at Peenemünde (Baltic Sea). The technical work carried out there had, in the meantime, attracted more and more attention in higher levels. Thus, my refusal to join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life. Therefore, I decided to join. My membership in the party did not involve any political activity."^{[citation needed]} [Whether von Braun's error with regard to the year was deliberate or a simple mistake has never been ascertained].

Michael J. Neufeld, the acclaimed author and chief of the Space History Division at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, writes:

"Von Braun, like other Peenemünders, was assigned to the local group in Karlshagen; there is no evidence that he did more than send in his monthly dues. But he is seen in some photographs with the party's swastika pin in his lapel - it was politically useful to demonstrate his membership."^{[citation needed]}

As for his attitude toward the National Socialist regime in the late 1930s and early 1940s, there can be little doubt that he was a loyal, perhaps mildly enthusiastic subject of Hitler's dictatorship. With the Führer going from success to success -- eliminating unemployment, tearing up the Versailles Treaty, rearming, reoccupying the Rhineland, and then in 1938 absorbing Austria and the Czech Sudetenland without war -- there is no doubt that the regime, but above all Hitler, had become immensely popular. Von Braun, a German nationalist immersed in a military environment, doubtlessly found much he could like about these accomplishments, and little reason to be disturbed, especially in view of how much money had been poured into his beloved rocketry as a result of rearmament. He admitted in a 1952 memoir article that he "fared relatively rather well under totalitarialism."^[15]

Membership in the Allgemeine SS[link]

Von Braun joined the Allgemeine SS, which was not an armed unit. In 1947, he gave the U.S. War Department this explanation:

"In spring 1940, one SS-Standartenfuehrer (SS-colonel) Mueller from Greifswald, a bigger town in the vicinity of Peenemuende, looked me up in my office ... and told me, that Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler had sent him with the order to urge me to join the SS. I told him I was so busy with my rocket work that I had no time to spare for any political activity. He then told me, that ... the SS would cost me no time at all. I would be awarded the rank of a[n] "Untersturmfuehrer (lieutenant) and it were [sic] a very definite desire of Himmler that I attend his invitation to join.

I asked Mueller to give me some time for reflection. He agreed.

Realizing that the matter was of highly political significance for the relation between the SS and the Army, I called immediately on my military superior ..., Dr. Dornberger. He informed me that the SS had for a long time been trying to get their "finger in the pie" of the rocket work. I asked him what to do. He replied on the spot that if I wanted to continue our mutual work, I had no alternative but to join."

Von Braun joined the organization and was issued membership number 185,068.

Michael J. Neufeld writes:

"As with von Braun's party membership, we have no truly independent account of what happened, but his story is plausible."^[16]

Von Braun's cozy feelings for the regime may have undergone a change when he was arrested and accused of being a "communist sympathizer" who had attempted to sabotage or delay the weapons program. These charges could have led to the death penalty for treason. Not helping the matter was that von Braun had skills as a pilot and had access to an aircraft, which might have allowed him to escape to England. (See: Arrest and release by the Nazi regime).

When shown a picture of him behind Himmler, Braun claimed to have worn the SS uniform only that one time,^[17] but in 2002 a former SS officer at Peenemünde told the BBC that von Braun had regularly worn the SS uniform to official meetings; it should be noted that this was mandatory.^[18] He began as an Untersturmführer (Second lieutenant) and was promoted three times by Himmler, the last time in June 1943 to SS-Sturmbannführer (major). Von Braun claimed this was a technical promotion received each year regularly by mail.^[18]

The Prussian rocketeer and working under the Nazis[link]

Walter Dornberger, Friedrich Olbricht, Wilhelm von Leeb, and von Braun at Peenemünde, 1941

Von Braun was working on his creative doctorate when the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, or Nazi party) came to power in a coalition government in Germany; rocketry almost immediately became part of the national agenda. An artillery captain, Walter Dornberger, arranged an Ordnance Department research grant for Von Braun, who then worked next to Dornberger's existing solid-fuel rocket test site at Kummersdorf. He was awarded a doctorate in physics^[19] (aerospace engineering) on July 27, 1934 from the University of Berlin for a thesis titled About Combustion Tests; his doctoral advisor was Erich Schumann.^[20] However, this thesis was only the public part of von Braun's work. His actual full thesis, Construction, Theoretical, and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket (dated April 16, 1934) was kept classified by the army, and was not published until 1960.^[21] By the end of 1934, his group had successfully launched two rockets that rose to heights of 2.2 and 3.5 kilometers.

At the time, Germany was highly interested in American physicist Robert H. Goddard's research. Before 1939, German scientists occasionally contacted Goddard directly with technical questions. Wernher von Braun used Goddard's plans from various journals and incorporated them into the building of the Aggregat (A) series of rockets. The A-4 rocket would become well known as the V-2.^[22] In 1963, von Braun reflected on the history of rocketry, and said of Goddard's work: "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles."^[8] Goddard confirmed his work was used by von Braun in 1944, shortly before the Nazis began firing V-2s at England. A V-2 crashed in Sweden and some parts were sent to an Annapolis lab where Goddard was doing research for the Navy. If this was the so-called Bäckebo Bomb, it had been procured by the British in exchange for Spitfires; Annapolis would have received some parts from them. Goddard is reported to have recognized components he had invented, and inferred that his brainchild had been turned into a weapon.^[23]

There were no German rocket societies after the collapse of the VFR, and civilian rocket tests were forbidden by the new Nazi regime. Only military development was allowed and to this end, a larger facility was erected at the village of Peenemünde in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. Dornberger became the military commander at Peenemünde, with von Braun as technical director. In collaboration with the Luftwaffe, the Peenemünde group developed liquid-fuel rocket engines for aircraft and jet-assisted takeoffs. They also developed the long-range A-4 ballistic missile and the supersonic Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile.

Schematic of the A4/V2

On December 22, 1942, Adolf Hitler signed the order approving the production of the A-4 as a "vengeance weapon" and the group developed it to target London. Following von Braun's July 7, 1943 presentation of a color movie showing an A-4 taking off, Hitler was so enthusiastic that he personally made von Braun a professor shortly thereafter.^[24] In Germany at this time, this was an exceptional promotion for an engineer who was only 31 years old.

By that time the British and Soviet intelligence agencies were aware of the rocket program and von Braun's team at Peenemünde. Over the nights of August 17 and 18, 1943 RAF Bomber Command's Operation Hydra dispatched raids on the Peenemünde camp consisting of 596 aircraft and dropped 1,800 tons of explosives.^[25] The facility was salvaged and most of the science team remained unharmed; however, the raids killed von Braun's engine designer Walter Thiel and Chief Engineer Walther, and the rocket program was delayed.^[26][27]

The first combat A-4, renamed the V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2 "Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2") for propaganda purposes, was launched toward England on September 7, 1944, only 21 months after the project had been officially commissioned. Von Braun's interest in rockets was specifically for the application of space travel, which led him to say on hearing the news from London: "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet." He described it as his "darkest day".^{[citation needed]} However, satirist Mort Sahl is often credited with mocking von Braun with the paraphrase "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London".^[28] In fact that line appears in the film I Aim at the Stars, a 1960 biopic on von Braun.

Experiments with rocket aircraft[link]

During 1936 von Braun's rocketry team working at Kummersdorf investigated installing liquid-fuelled rockets in aircraft. Ernst Heinkel enthusiastically supported their efforts, supplying a He 72 and later two He 112s for the experiments. Late in 1936 Erich Warsitz was seconded by the RLM to Wernher von Braun and Ernst Heinkel, because he had been recognized as one of the most experienced test-pilots of the time, and because he also had an extraordinary fund of technical knowledge.^[29] After von Braun familiarized Warsitz with a test-stand run, showing him the corresponding apparatus in the aircraft, he asked:

“Are you with us and will you test the rocket in the air? Then, Warsitz, you will be a famous man. And later we will fly to the moon – with you at the helm!”^[30]

A regular He 112

In June 1937, at Neuhardenberg (a large field about 70 kilometres east of Berlin, listed as a reserve airfield in the event of war), one of these latter aircraft was flown with its piston engine shut down during flight by test pilot Erich Warsitz, at which time it was propelled by von Braun’s rocket power alone. Despite the wheels-up landing and having the fuselage on fire, it proved to official circles that an aircraft could be flown satisfactorily with a back-thrust system through the rear.^[31]

At the same time, Hellmuth Walter's experiments into hydrogen peroxide-based rockets were leading towards light and simple rockets that appeared well-suited for aircraft installation. Also the firm of Hellmuth Walter at Kiel had been commissioned by the RLM to build a rocket engine for the He 112, so there were two different new rocket motor designs at Neuhardenberg: whereas von Braun’s engines were powered by alcohol and liquid oxygen, Walter engines had hydrogen peroxide and calcium permanganate as a catalyst. Von Braun’s engines used direct combustion and created fire, the Walter devices used hot vapours from a chemical reaction, but both created thrust and provided high speed.^[32] The subsequent flights with the He 112 used the Walter-rocket instead of von Braun's; it was more reliable, simpler to operate and the dangers to test-pilot Erich Warsitz and machine were less.^[33]

Slave labor[link]

SS General Hans Kammler, who as an engineer had constructed several concentration camps including Auschwitz, had a reputation for brutality and had originated the idea of using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers in the rocket program. Arthur Rudolph, chief engineer of the V-2 rocket factory at Peenemünde, endorsed this idea in April 1943 when a labor shortage developed. More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon.^[34] Von Braun admitted visiting the plant at Mittelwerk on many occasions, and called conditions at the plant "repulsive," but claimed never to have witnessed any deaths or beatings, although it had become clear to him by 1944 that deaths had occurred.^[35] He denied ever having visited the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp itself, where 20,000 died from illness, beatings, hangings and intolerable working conditions.^[36]

On August 15, 1944, von Braun wrote a letter to Albin Sawatzki, manager of the V-2 production, admitting that he personally picked labor slaves from the Buchenwald concentration camp, who, he admitted 25 years later in an interview, had been in a "pitiful shape".^{[not in citation given][2]}

In Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space, numerous statements by von Braun show he was aware of the conditions but felt completely unable to change them. A friend quotes von Braun speaking of a visit to Mittelwerk:

It is hellish. My spontaneous reaction was to talk to one of the SS guards, only to be told with unmistakable harshness that I should mind my own business, or find myself in the same striped fatigues!... I realized that any attempt of reasoning on humane grounds would be utterly futile.^[37]

When asked if von Braun could have protested against the brutal treatment of the slave laborers, von Braun team member Konrad Dannenberg told The Huntsville Times, "If he had done it, in my opinion, he would have been shot on the spot."^[38]

Others claim von Braun engaged in brutal treatment or approved of it. Guy Morand, a French resistance fighter who was a prisoner in Dora, testified in 1995 that after an apparent sabotage attempt:

Without even listening to my explanations, [von Braun] ordered the Meister to have me given 25 strokes...Then, judging that the strokes weren't sufficiently hard, he ordered I be flogged more vigorously...von Braun made me translate that I deserved much more, that in fact I deserved to be hanged...I would say his cruelty, of which I was personally a victim, are, I would say, an eloquent testimony to his Nazi fanaticism.^[39]

Robert Cazabonne, another French prisoner, testified that von Braun stood by and watched as prisoners were hung by chains from hoists.^[40] Von Braun claimed he "never saw any kind of abuse or killing" and only "heard rumors...that some prisoners had been hanged in the underground galleries".^[41]

Arrest and release by the Nazi regime[link]

According to André Sellier, a French historian and survivor of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, Himmler had von Braun come to his Hochwald HQ in East Prussia in February 1944. To increase his power-base within the Nazi régime, Heinrich Himmler was conspiring to use Kammler to gain control of all German armament programs, including the V-2 program at Peenemünde.^[42] He therefore recommended that von Braun work more closely with Kammler to solve the problems of the V-2, but von Braun claimed to have replied that the problems were merely technical and he was confident that they would be solved with Dornberger's assistance.

Apparently von Braun had been under SD surveillance since October 1943. A report stated that he and his colleagues Riedel and Gröttrup were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening that they were not working on a spaceship and that they felt the war was not going well; this was considered a "defeatist" attitude. A young female dentist who was an SS spy reported their comments.^[42] Combined with Himmler's false charges that von Braun was a communist sympathizer and had attempted to sabotage the V-2 program, and considering that von Braun was a qualified pilot who regularly piloted his government-provided airplane that might allow him to escape to England, this led to his arrest by the Gestapo.^[42]

The unsuspecting von Braun was detained on March 14 (or March 15),^[43] 1944 and was taken to a Gestapo cell in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland),^[42] where he was imprisoned for two weeks without even knowing the charges against him. It was only through the Abwehr in Berlin that Dornberger was able to obtain von Braun's conditional release and Albert Speer, Reichsminister for Munitions and War Production, convinced Hitler to reinstate von Braun so that the V-2 program could continue.^[42] Quoting from the "Führerprotokoll" (the minutes of Hitler's meetings) dated May 13, 1944 in his memoirs, Speer later relayed what Hitler had finally conceded: "In the matter concerning B. I will guarantee you that he will be exempt from persecution as long as he is indispensable for you, in spite of the difficult general consequences this will have."

Von Braun, with his arm in a cast from an auto accident, surrendered to the Americans just before this May 3, 1945 photo.

Surrender to the Americans[link]

The Soviet Army was about 160 km from Peenemünde in the spring of 1945 when von Braun assembled his planning staff and asked them to decide how and to whom they should surrender. Afraid of the well known Soviet cruelty to prisoners of war, von Braun and his staff decided to try to surrender to the Americans. Kammler had ordered relocation of von Braun's team to central Germany; however, a conflicting order from an army chief ordered them to join the army and fight. Deciding that Kammler's order was their best bet to defect to the Americans, von Braun fabricated documents and transported 500 of his affiliates to the area around Mittelwerk, where they resumed their work. For fear of their documents being destroyed by the SS, von Braun ordered the blueprints to be hidden in an abandoned mine shaft in the Harz mountain range.^[44]

While on an official trip in March, von Braun suffered a complicated fracture of his left arm and shoulder after his driver fell asleep at the wheel. His injuries were serious, but he insisted that his arm be set in a cast so he could leave the hospital. Due to this neglect of the injury he had to be hospitalized again a month later where his bones had to be re-broken and re-aligned.^[44]

In April, as the Allied forces advanced deeper into Germany, Kammler ordered the science team to be moved by train into the town of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps where they were closely guarded by the SS with orders to execute the team if they were about to fall into enemy hands. However, von Braun managed to convince SS Major Kummer to order the dispersion of the group into nearby villages so that they would not be an easy target for U.S. bombers.^[44]

On May 2, 1945, upon finding an American private from the U.S. 44th Infantry Division, von Braun's brother and fellow rocket engineer, Magnus, approached the soldier on a bicycle, calling out in broken English: "My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender."^[7][45] After the surrender, von Braun spoke to the press:

"We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”^[46]

The American high command was well aware of how important their catch was: von Braun had been at the top of the Black List, the code name for the list of German scientists and engineers targeted for immediate interrogation by U.S. military experts. On June 19, 1945, two days before the scheduled handover of the area to the Soviets, US Army Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in London, and Lt Col R. L. Williams took von Braun and his department chiefs by jeep from Garmisch to Munich. The group was flown to Nordhausen, and was evacuated 40 miles (64 km) southwest to Witzenhausen, a small town in the American Zone, the next day.^[47] Von Braun was briefly detained at the "Dustbin" interrogation center at Kransberg Castle where the elite of the Third Reich's economy, science and technology were debriefed by U.S. and British intelligence officials.^[48] Initially he was recruited to the U.S. under a program called "Operation Overcast," subsequently known as Operation Paperclip.

American career[link]

U.S. Army career[link]

On June 20, 1945, the U.S. Secretary of State approved the transfer of von Braun and his specialists to America; however this was not announced to the public until October 1, 1945.^[49] Von Braun was among those scientists for whom the U.S. Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency created false employment histories and expunged Nazi Party memberships and regime affiliations from the public record. Once “bleached” of their Nazism, the US Government granted the scientists security clearance to work in the United States. "Paperclip," the project’s operational name, derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists’ new political person to their “US Government Scientist” personnel files.^[50]

The first seven technicians arrived in the United States at New Castle Army Air Field, just south of Wilmington, Delaware, on September 20, 1945. They were then flown to Boston and taken by boat to the Army Intelligence Service post at Fort Strong in Boston Harbor. Later, with the exception of von Braun, the men were transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to sort out the Peenemünde documents, enabling the scientists to continue their rocketry experiments.

Finally, von Braun and his remaining Peenemünde staff (see List of German rocket scientists in the United States) were transferred to their new home at Fort Bliss, a large Army installation just north of El Paso. Von Braun would later write he found it hard to develop a "genuine emotional attachment" to his new surroundings.^[51] His chief design engineer Walther Reidel became the subject of a December 1946 article "German Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken,' exposing the presence of von Braun's team in the country and drawing criticism from Albert Einstein and John Dingell.^[51] Requests to improve their living conditions such as laying linoleum over their cracked wood flooring were rejected.^[51] Von Braun remarked that "...at Peenemünde we had been coddled, here you were counting pennies..."^[51] At the age of 26, von Braun had thousands of engineers who answered to him, but was now answering to "pimply" 26 year-old Major Jim Hamill who possessed an undergraduate degree in engineering.^[51] His loyal Germans still addressed him as Herr Professor, but Hamill addressed him as Wernher and never bothered to respond to von Braun's request for more materials, and every proposal for new rocket ideas were dismissed.^[51]

While there, they trained military, industrial and university personnel in the intricacies of rockets and guided missiles. As part of the Hermes project they helped to refurbish, assemble and launch a number of V-2s that had been shipped from Germany to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. They also continued to study the future potential of rockets for military and research applications. Since they were not permitted to leave Fort Bliss without military escort, von Braun and his colleagues began to refer to themselves only half-jokingly as "PoPs," "Prisoners of Peace."

In 1950, at the start of the Korean War, von Braun and his team were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, his home for the next 20 years. Between 1950 and 1956, von Braun led the Army's rocket development team at Redstone Arsenal, resulting in the Redstone rocket, which was used for the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the United States. This led to development of the first high-precision inertial guidance system on the Redstone rocket.^[52]

As director of the Development Operations Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), von Braun, with his team, then developed the Jupiter-C, a modified Redstone rocket.^[53] The Jupiter-C successfully launched the West's first satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. This event signaled the birth of America's space program.

Despite the work on the Redstone rocket, the twelve years from 1945 to 1957 were probably some of the most frustrating for von Braun and his colleagues. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev and his team of scientists and engineers plowed ahead with several new rocket designs and the Sputnik program, while the American government was not very interested in von Braun's work or views and only embarked on a very modest rocket-building program. In the meantime, the press tended to dwell on von Braun's past as a member of the SS and the slave labor used to build his V-2 rockets.

Popular concepts for a human presence in space[link]

Repeating the pattern he had established during his earlier career in Germany, von Braun – while directing military rocket development in the real world – continued to entertain his engineer-scientist's dream of a future world in which rockets would be used for space exploration. However, instead of risking being sacked, he now was increasingly in a position to popularize these ideas. The May 14, 1950 headline of The Huntsville Times ("Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon") might have marked the beginning of these efforts. These disclosures rode a moonflight publicity wave that was created by the two 1950 U.S. science fiction films, Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M.

In 1952, von Braun first published his concept of a manned space station in a Collier's Weekly magazine series of articles entitled "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!". These articles were illustrated by the space artist Chesley Bonestell and were influential in spreading his ideas. Frequently von Braun worked with fellow German-born space advocate and science writer Willy Ley to publish his concepts, which, unsurprisingly, were heavy on the engineering side and anticipated many technical aspects of space flight that later became reality.

The space station (to be constructed using rockets with recoverable and reusable ascent stages) would be a toroid structure, with a diameter of 250 feet (76 m); this built on the concept of a rotating wheel-shaped station introduced in 1929 by Herman Potočnik in his book The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor. The space station would spin around a central docking nave to provide artificial gravity, and would be assembled in a 1,075 mile (1,730 km) two-hour, high-inclination Earth orbit allowing observation of essentially every point on earth on at least a daily basis. The ultimate purpose of the space station would be to provide an assembly platform for manned lunar expeditions. More than a decade later, the movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey would draw heavily on the design concept in its visualization of an orbital space station.

Von Braun envisaged these expeditions as very large-scale undertakings, with a total of 50 astronauts travelling in three huge spacecraft (two for crew, one primarily for cargo), each 49 m (160.76 ft) long and 33 m (108.27 ft) in diameter and driven by a rectangular array of 30 rocket propulsion engines.^[54] Upon arrival, astronauts would establish a permanent lunar base in the Sinus Roris region by using the emptied cargo holds of their craft as shelters, and would explore their surroundings for eight weeks. This would include a 400 km expedition in pressurized rovers to the crater Harpalus and the Mare Imbrium foothills.

Walt Disney and von Braun, seen in 1954 holding a model of his passenger ship, collaborated on a series of three educational films.

At this time von Braun also worked out preliminary concepts for a manned mission to Mars that used the space station as a staging point. His initial plans, published in The Mars Project (1952), had envisaged a fleet of ten spacecraft (each with a mass of 3,720 metric tons), three of them unmanned and each carrying one 200-ton winged lander^[55] in addition to cargo, and nine crew vehicles transporting a total of 70 astronauts. Gigantic as this mission plan was, its engineering and astronautical parameters were thoroughly calculated. A later project was much more modest, using only one purely orbital cargo ship and one crewed craft. In each case, the expedition would use minimum-energy Hohmann transfer orbits for its trips to Mars and back to Earth.

Before technically formalizing his thoughts on human spaceflight to Mars, von Braun had written a science fiction novel, set in 1980, on the subject. According to his biographer, Erik Bergaust, the manuscript was rejected by no less than 18 publishers. Von Braun later published small portions of this opus in magazines, to illustrate selected aspects of his Mars project popularizations. The complete manuscript, titled Project MARS: A Technical Tale, did not appear as a printed book until December 2006.^[56]

In the hope that its involvement would bring about greater public interest in the future of the space program, von Braun also began working with Walt Disney and the Disney studios as a technical director, initially for three television films about space exploration. The initial broadcast devoted to space exploration was Man in Space, which first went on air on March 9, 1955, drawing 42 million viewers and unofficially the second-highest rated television show in American history.^[51][57]

Later (in 1959) von Braun published a short booklet^[58] – condensed from episodes that had appeared in This Week Magazine before—describing his updated concept of the first manned lunar landing. The scenario included only a single and relatively small spacecraft—a winged lander with a crew of only two experienced pilots who had already circumnavigated the moon on an earlier mission. The brute-force direct ascent flight schedule used a rocket design with five sequential stages, loosely based on the Nova designs that were under discussion at this time. After a night launch from a Pacific island the first three stages would bring the spacecraft (with the two remaining upper stages attached) to terrestrial escape velocity, with each burn creating an acceleration of 8–9 times standard gravity. Residual propellant in the third stage would be used for the deceleration intended to commence only a few hundred kilometers above the landing site in a crater near the lunar north pole. The fourth stage provided acceleration to lunar escape velocity while the fifth stage would be responsible for a deceleration during return to the Earth to a residual speed that allows aerocapture of the spacecraft ending in a runway landing, much in the way of the Space Shuttle. One remarkable feature of this technical tale is that the engineer Wernher von Braun anticipated a medical phenomenon that would become apparent only years later: being a veteran astronaut with no history of serious adverse reactions to weightlessness offers no protection against becoming unexpectedly and violently spacesick.

Von Braun with President Kennedy at Redstone Arsenal in 1963

Von Braun with the F-1 engines of the Saturn V first stage at the US Space and Rocket Center

Still with his rocket models, von Braun is pictured in his new office at NASA headquarters in 1970

Concepts for orbital warfare[link]

Von Braun developed and published his space station concept during the very "coldest" time of the Cold War, when the U.S. government for which he worked put the containment of the Soviet Union above everything else. The fact that his space station – if armed with missiles that could be easily adapted from those already available at this time – would give the United States space superiority in both orbital and orbit-to-ground warfare did not escape him. Although von Braun took care to qualify such military applications as "particularly dreadful" in his popular writings, he elaborated on them in several of his books and articles. This much less peaceful aspect of von Braun's "drive for space" has recently been reviewed by Michael J. Neufeld from the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.^[59]

NASA career[link]

The U.S. Navy had been tasked with building a rocket to lift satellites into orbit, but the resulting Vanguard rocket launch system was unreliable. In 1957, with the launch of Sputnik 1, there was a growing belief within the United States that America lagged behind the Soviet Union in the emerging Space Race. American authorities then chose to utilize von Braun and his German team's experience with missiles to create an orbital launch vehicle, something von Braun had originally proposed in 1954 but had been denied.^[51]

NASA was established by law on July 29, 1958. One day later, the 50th Redstone rocket was successfully launched from Johnston Atoll in the south Pacific as part of Operation Hardtack I. Two years later, NASA opened the Marshall Space Flight Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, and the ABMA development team led by von Braun was transferred to NASA. In a face-to-face meeting with Herb York at the Pentagon, von Braun made it clear he would go to NASA only if development of the Saturn was allowed to continue.^[60] Presiding from July 1960 to February 1970, von Braun became the center's first Director.

Charles W. Mathews, von Braun, George Mueller, and Lt. Gen. Samuel C. Phillips in the Launch Control Center following the successful Apollo 11 liftoff on July 16, 1969

The Marshall Center's first major program was the development of Saturn rockets to carry heavy payloads into and beyond Earth orbit. From this, the Apollo program for manned moon flights was developed. Wernher von Braun initially pushed for a flight engineering concept that called for an Earth orbit rendezvous technique (the approach he had argued for building his space station), but in 1962 he converted to the more risky lunar orbit rendezvous concept that was subsequently realized.^[61] During Apollo, he worked closely with former Peenemünde teammate, Kurt H. Debus, the first director of the Kennedy Space Center. His dream to help mankind set foot on the Moon became a reality on July 16, 1969 when a Marshall-developed Saturn V rocket launched the crew of Apollo 11 on its historic eight-day mission. Over the course of the program, Saturn V rockets enabled six teams of astronauts to reach the surface of the Moon.

During the late 1960s, von Braun was instrumental in the development of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville. The desk from which he guided America's entry in the Space Race remains on display there.

During the local summer of 1966–67, von Braun participated in a field trip to Antarctica, organized for him and several other members of top NASA management.^[62] The goal of the field trip was to determine whether the experience gained by US scientific and technological community during the exploration of Antarctic wastelands would be useful for the manned exploration of space. Von Braun was mainly interested in management of the scientific effort on Antarctic research stations, logistics, habitation and life support, and in using the barren Antarctic terrain like the glacial dry valleys to test the equipment that one day would be used to look for signs of life on Mars and other worlds.

In an internal memo dated January 16, 1969,^[63] von Braun had confirmed to his staff that he would stay on as a center director at Huntsville to head the Apollo Applications Program. A few months later, on occasion of the first moon-landing, he publicly expressed his optimism that the Saturn V carrier system would continue to be developed, advocating manned missions to Mars in the 1980s.^[64]

However, on March 1, 1970, von Braun and his family relocated to Washington, D.C., when he was assigned the post of NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning at NASA Headquarters. After a series of conflicts associated with the truncation of the Apollo program, and facing severe budget constraints, von Braun retired from NASA on May 26, 1972. Not only had it become evident by this time that his and NASA's visions for future U.S. space flight projects were incompatible; it was perhaps even more frustrating for him to see popular support for a continued presence of man in space wane dramatically once the goal to reach the moon had been accomplished.

Von Braun and William R. Lucas, the first and third Marshall Space Flight Center directors, viewing a Spacelab model in 1974

Dr. von Braun also developed the idea of a Space Camp that would train children in fields of science and space technologies as well as help their mental development much the same way sports camps aim at improving physical development.

Career after NASA[link]

After leaving NASA, von Braun became Vice President for Engineering and Development at the aerospace company, Fairchild Industries in Germantown, Maryland on July 1, 1972.

In 1973 a routine health check revealed kidney cancer, which during the following years could not be controlled by surgery.^[65] Von Braun continued his work to the extent possible, which included accepting invitations to speak at colleges and universities as he was eager to cultivate interest in human spaceflight and rocketry, particularly with students and a new generation of engineers. On one such visit in the spring of 1974 to Allegheny College, von Braun revealed a more personal side, including an allergy to feather pillows and a disdain for some rock music of the era.^{[citation needed]}

Von Braun helped establish and promote the National Space Institute, a precursor of the present-day National Space Society, in 1975, and became its first president and chairman. In 1976, he became scientific consultant to Lutz Kayser, the CEO of OTRAG, and a member of the Daimler-Benz board of directors. However, his deteriorating health forced him to retire from Fairchild on December 31, 1976. When the 1975 National Medal of Science was awarded to him in early 1977 he was hospitalized, and unable to attend the White House ceremony.

Personal life[link]

Maria von Braun, wife of Wernher von Braun

During his stay at Fort Bliss, von Braun mailed a marriage proposal to 18-year-old Maria Luise von Quistorp (born (1928-06-10)June 10, 1928), his cousin on his mother's side. On March 1, 1947, having received permission to go back to Germany and return with his bride, he married her in a Lutheran church in Landshut, Germany. He and his bride, as well as his father and mother, returned to New York on March 26, 1947.

On December 9, 1948, the von Brauns' first daughter, Iris Careen, was born at Fort Bliss Army Hospital.^[53] The von Brauns eventually had two more children, Margrit Cécile on May 8, 1952 and Peter Constantine on June 2, 1960. On April 15, 1955, von Braun became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Death[link]

On June 16, 1977, Wernher von Braun died of pancreatic cancer in Alexandria, Virginia, at the age of 65.^[66][67] He was buried at the Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia.^[68]

Grave of Wernher von Braun in Ivy Hill Cemetery (Alexandria, Virginia)

Published works[link]

• Proposal for a Workable Fighter with Rocket Drive. July 6, 1939. 
  • The proposed vertical take-off interceptor^[69] for climbing to 35,000 ft in 60 seconds was rejected by the Luftwaffe in the autumn of 1941^[27]:258 for the Me 163 Komet^[70] and never produced. (The differing Bachem Ba 349 was produced during the 1944 Emergency Fighter Program.)
• 'Survey' of Previous Liquid Rocket Development in Germany and Future Prospects. May 1945. ^[71]
• A Minimum Satellite Vehicle Based on Components Available from Developments of the Army Ordnance Corps. September 15, 1954. "It would be a blow to U.S. prestige if we did not [launch a satellite] first." ^[71]
• The Mars Project, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, (1953). With Henry J. White, translator.
• German Rocketry, The Coming of the Space Age. New York: Meredith Press. 1967. 
• First Men to the Moon, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York (1958). Portions of work first appeared in This Week Magazine.
• Daily Journals of Werner von Braun, May 1958 – March 1970. March 1970. ^[71]
• History of Rocketry & Space Travel, New York, Crowell (1975). With Frederick I. Ordway III.
  • 2nd Edition:, Estate of Wernher von Braun; Ordway III, Frederick I & Dooling, David Jr. (1985) [1975]. Space Travel: A History. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-181898-4. 
• The Rocket's Red Glare, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, (1976). With Frederick I. Ordway III.
• Project Mars: A Technical Tale, Apogee Books, Toronto (2006). A previously unpublished science fiction story by von Braun. Accompanied by paintings from Chesley Bonestell and von Braun's own technical papers on the proposed project.
• The Voice of Dr. Wernher von Braun, Apogee Books, Toronto (2007). A collection of speeches delivered by von Braun over the course of his career.
• Wernher von Braun, Crusader for Space, A Biographical Memoir, Ernst Stuhlinger and Fredrick I. Ordway III, Krieger ISBN 0-89464-842-X. Two volumes on the life of von Braun,

Recognition and critique[link]

In 1970, Huntsville, Alabama honored von Braun's years of service with a series of events including the unveiling of a plaque in his honor. Pictured (l–r), his daughter Iris, wife Maria, U.S. Sen. John Sparkman, Alabama Gov. Albert Brewer, von Braun, son Peter, and daughter Margrit.

• Apollo space program director Sam Phillips was quoted as saying that he did not think that America would have reached the moon as quickly as it did without von Braun's help. Later, after discussing it with colleagues, he amended this to say that he did not believe America would have reached the moon at all.^{[citation needed]}
• The crater von Braun on the Moon is named after him.
• Von Braun received a total of 12 honorary doctorates, among them, on January 8, 1963, one from the Technical University of Berlin from which he had graduated.
• Von Braun was responsible for the creation of the Research Institute at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. As a result of his vision, the university is one of the leading universities in the nation for NASA-sponsored research. The building housing the university's Research Institute was named in his honor, Von Braun Research Hall, in 2000.
• Several German cities (Bonn, Neu-Isenburg, Mannheim, Mainz), and dozens of smaller towns have named streets after Wernher von Braun.
• The Von Braun Center (built 1975) in Huntsville is named in von Braun's honor.
• Scrutiny of von Braun's use of forced labor at the Mittelwerk intensified again in 1984 when Arthur Rudolph, one of his top affiliates from the A-4/V2 through to the Apollo projects, left the United States and was forced to renounce his citizenship in place of the alternative of being tried for war crimes.^[72]
• A science- and engineering-oriented Gymnasium in Friedberg, Bavaria was named after Wernher von Braun in 1979. In response to rising criticism, a school committee decided in 1995, after lengthy deliberations, to keep the name but "to address von Braun's ambiguity in the advanced history classes."
• An avenue in the Annadale section of Staten Island, New York was named for him in 1977.
• Von Braun's engineering approach was very conservative, building in additional strength to structure designs, a point of contention with other engineers who struggled to keep vehicle weight down. Von Braun's insistence on further tests after Mercury-Redstone 2 flew higher than planned, has been identified as contributing to the Soviet Union's success in launching the first human in space.^[73]
• Von Braun also was voted into US Space Camp hall of fame, 2007

Summary of SS career[link]

• SS number: 185,068
• Nazi Party number: 5,738,692

^[74]

Dates of rank[link]

• SS-Anwärter: November 1, 1933 (received rank upon joining SS Riding School)
• SS-Mann: July 1934

(left SS after graduation from the school; commissioned in 1940 with date of entry backdated to 1934)

• SS-Untersturmführer: May 1, 1940
• SS-Obersturmführer: November 9, 1941
• SS-Hauptsturmführer: November 9, 1942
• SS-Sturmbannführer: June 28, 1943

^[74]

Honors[link]

In popular culture[link]

Film and television

Von Braun has been featured in a number of movies and television shows or series about the space race:

• I Aim at the Stars (1960), also titled Wernher von Braun and Ich greife nach den Sternen ("I Reach for the Stars"); von Braun played by Curd Jürgens, his wife Maria played by Victoria Shaw.^[78] Satirist Mort Sahl suggested the subtitle "But Sometimes I Hit London".
• From the Earth to the Moon (TV, 1998): von Braun played by Norbert Weisser.
• October Sky (1999): this film portrays U.S. rocket scientist Homer Hickam, who as a teenager admired von Braun (played by Joe Digaetano). The film's title, October Sky, is an anagram of the autobiography it was based on: Rocket Boys.
• Space Race (TV, BBC co-production with NDR (Germany), Channel One TV (Russia) and National Geographic TV (USA), 2005): von Braun played by Richard Dillane.
• The Lost Von Braun, a documentary by Aron Ranen. Interviews with Ernst Stuhlinger, Konrad Dannenberg, Karl Sendler, Alex Baum, Eli Rosenbaum (DOJ) and Von Braun's NASA secretary Bonnie Holmes.
• Wernher von Braun – Rocket Man for War and Peace A three part (part1, part 2, part 3) documentary – in English – from the German International channel DW-TV.^[79] Original German version Wernher von Braun – Der Mann für die Wunderwaffen by the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk.

Several fictional characters have been modeled on von Braun:

• The Right Stuff (1983): The Chief Scientist, played by Scott Beach, was clearly modeled on von Braun.
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964): Dr Strangelove is usually held to be based at least partly on von Braun.^[80]
• Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965, directed by Jean-Luc Godard): Howard Vernon plays Professor von Braun (also known as Leonard Nosferatu), the inventor of the "Alpha 60" super-computer that rules Alphaville.
• In Diamonds Are Forever (1971), the seventh James Bond film, the supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld employs a German scientist resembling von Braun, named Professor Dr. Metz, a pacifist who is duped by Blofeld's rhetoric, who works in a NASA-style research lab in the Nevada desert. The lab is ambiguously depicted as being involved in faking the moon landings (an apparent joking nod to conspiracy theorists, and which figures in some versions of their theories).

There are other references to von Braun in film and on television:

• Mobile Suit Gundam (1979): The largest Lunar city in the Universal Century era is called 'Von Braun City'. The city is the home of Anaheim Electronics, is a strategic point in space, and is built around Neil Armstrong's footprint in the Apollo missions.
• Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) (1977): Director and star Kidlat Tahimik is president of a Wernher von Braun club and is fascinated with "First World" progress, particularly von Braun's efforts in the U.S. space program.
• Planetes (TV, 2004): There is an upcoming exploratory mission to Jupiter on a new fusion powered ship, the Von Braun.
• Alien Planet (TV, 2005): A spacecraft, named Von Braun, is named after him.
• Babylon 5 (1994): Captain Sheridan's sister Anna returns home on the Earth cruiser Von Braun in the second season episode Revelations.

Print media

• In "Werner von Braun—Space Wizard," a four-panel comic strip in Mad Magazine in the late 1950s, artist Wallace Wood depicted von Braun at the launch of a rocket, ready to listen to a radio transmitting the rocket's signals. Suddenly he says, "HIMMEL! Vas ist los?" and then explains, "Vat iss wrong is vit der RADIO! It iss AC...und der control room iss DC!"
• In Warren Ellis' graphic novel Ministry of Space, von Braun is a supporting character, settling in Britain after World War II, and being essential for the realization of the British Space Program.

Literature

• The Good German by Joseph Kanon. Von Braun and other scientists are said to have been implicated in the use of slave labour at Peenemünde; their transfer to the US forms part of the narrative.
• Space by James Michener. Von Braun and other German scientists are brought to the US and form a vital part of the US efforts to reach space.
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The highly notable novel involved British intelligence attempting to avert and predict V-2 rocket attacks. The work even includes a gyroscopic equation for the V2. The first portion of the novel, "Beyond The Zero", begins with a quote from von Braun: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."
• New Dictionary, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in his collection Welcome to the Monkey House, notes Von Braun as one of the things an old dictionary does not mention.
• Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut, has a scene in which a character reads a Life magazine with von Braun on the cover.
• Dora by Jean Michel. This is not a novel, but a memoir referring to the Mittelbau-Dora V-2 slave labour camps, by Jean Michel and Louis Nucéra.
• Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam, Jr. The movie October Sky was based on this memoir about a boy, Sonny (in the movie, he's called Homer) Hickam, who lives in a small West Virginia coal town and builds rockets and greatly admires von Braun. Although not directly concerned with von Braun, it is a vivid picture of popular attitudes toward rocket science and von Braun during the early days of the U.S. space program.

Music

• Wernher von Braun (1965):^[81] A song written and performed by Tom Lehrer for an episode of NBC's American version of the BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was; the song was later included in Lehrer's album That Was The Year That Was. It was a satire on what some saw as von Braun's cavalier attitude toward the consequences of his work in Nazi Germany: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun." Contrary to popular belief, Wernher von Braun did not sue Tom Lehrer for defamation, nor has Lehrer been forced to relinquish all of his royalty income to Von Braun. Lehrer firmly denied those claims in a 2003 interview.^[82]
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1991): A rock opera by Grant Hart's post-Hüsker Dü alternative rock group Nova Mob, in which von Braun features as a character. The album includes a song called Wernher von Braun.
• Progress vs. Pettiness (2005): A song about the Space Race written and performed by The Phenomenauts for their CD Re-Entry. The song begins: "In 1942 there was Wernher von Braun..."
• Oh Carolina (aka Carolina) (1960): written by John Folkes and recorded by the Folkes Brothers and made famous by a cover from Jamaican born singer Shaggy mentions Wernher von Braun without any context.
• John D. Loudermilk's song He's Just A Scientist (That's All) contains the lyric "Everybody's flippin' over Fabian or Frankie Avalon, but nobody ever seems to give a flip over Dr Werner Von Braun."
• The song "Apollo XI/V1/V2/Aggregat 4" from German Electro band Welle: Erdball deals with his inventions.
• Blues metal artists Clutch make reference to von Braun in the 2009 song "Struck Down" on the album Strange Cousins From The West.

Computer games

• In the 1999 PC game System Shock 2, the main starship is named the Von Braun.

See also[link]

	Biography portal
	Physics portal
	Spaceflight portal
	World War II portal

• Aggregate 1
• German inventors and discoverers
• List of coupled cousins
• Robert H. Goddard
• Sergey Korolyov
• Pedro Paulet

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Bergaust, Erik (1976). Wernher von Braun: The authoritative and definitive biographical profile of the father of modern space flight (Hardcover). National Space Institute (1976). ISBN 0-917680-01-4 
• Biddle, Wayne (2009). Dark Side of the Moon: Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich, and the Space Race (Hardcover). W.W. Norton (2009). ISBN 978-0-393-05910-6 
• Bilstein, Roger E. (2003). Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles (Paperback). University Press of Florida (July 2003). ISBN 0-8130-2691-1 
• Crouch, Tom D. (1999). Aiming for the Stars: The Dreamers and Doers of the Space Age (Hardcover). Smithsonian (September 17, 1999). ISBN 1-56098-386-8 
• Dunar, Andrew J; Waring, Stephen P (1999). Power to Explore: a History of Marshall Space Flight Center, 1960–1990. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. ISBN 0-16-058992-4. http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/book/toc.html 
• Eisfeld, Rainer (2000). Mondsüchtig. Hamburg: Rohwolt. ISBN 3-499-60943-6 
• Erlebnisbericht Adam Cabala, in: Fiedermann, Heß, Jaeger: Das KZ Mittelbau Dora. Ein historischer Abriss. Berlin 1993, S.100
• Freeman, Marsha (1993). How we got to the Moon: The Story of the German Space Pioneers (Paperback). 31st Century Science Associates (October 1993). ISBN 0-9628134-1-9 
• Lasby, Clarence G (1971). Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War. New York, NY: Atheneum. ISBN B0006CKBHY 
• Neufeld, Michael J (1994). The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-02-922895-6 
• Neufeld, Michael J (2007). Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-26292-9 
• Ordway, Frederick I., III (2003). The Rocket Team: Apogee Books Space Series 36 (Apogee Books Space Series) (Hardcover). Collector's Guide Publishing Inc; Har/DVD edition (September 1, 2003). ISBN 1-894959-00-0 
• Sellier, André (2003). A History of the Dora Camp: The Untold Story of the Nazi Slave Labor Camp That Secretly Manufactured V-2 Rockets. Chicago, IL: Ivan R Dee. ISBN 1-56663-511-X 
• Stuhlinger, Ernst (1996). Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company. ISBN 0-89464-980-9 
• Tompkins, Phillip K. (1993). Organizational Communication Imperatives: Lessons of the Space Program (Paperback). Roxbury Publishing Company (1993). ISBN 0-935732-40-3 
• Ward, Bob (2005). Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 1-59114-926-6 
• Weisstein, Eric W., Robert Goddard from ScienceWorld.
• Willhite, Irene E. (Editor) (2007). The Voice of Dr. Wernher von Braun: An Anthology (Apogee Books Space Series) (Paperback). Collector's Guide Publishing, Inc. (May 1, 2007). ISBN 1-894959-64-7 
• Winterstein, William E., Sr. (2005). Secrets Of The Space Age: The Sacrifices and Struggles To Get To The Moon; The Aftermath: What Happened After Lunar Mission, Intrigue and United States Space Heroes Betrayed (Hardcover). Robert D. Reed Publishers (June 30, 2005). ISBN 1-931741-49-2 

Further reading[link]

• Neufeld, Michael J. (2007). Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-26292-9. OCLC 83609796. 
• Petersen, Michael B. (2009). Missiles for the Fatherland: Peenemuende, National Socialism and the V-2 missile. Cambridge Centennial of Flight. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-88270-5. OCLC 644940362. 
• Warsitz, Lutz (2009). The First Jet Pilot: The Story of German Test Pilot Erich Warsitz. Trans. Geoffrey Brooks. Barnsley, Yorkshire, England: Pen and Sword Books. ISBN 978-1-84415-818-8. OCLC 244653641.  Includes von Braun’s experiments with rocket aircraft.
• Ward, Bob (2005). Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun. Annapolis, MD, United States: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-59114-927-9. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Wernher von Braun

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Wernher von Braun

• Dr. Wernher von Braun – At the Redstone Arsenal Historical Information pages
• Wernher Von Braun – A Register of His Papers in the Library of Congress

– Photos of Wernher von Braun's gravesite

• The capture of von Braun and his men – At the U.S. 44th Infantry Division website
• Dark Side of the Moon: Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich, and the Space Race – review of biography
• Wernher von Braun page – Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) History Office
• "The Disney – von Braun Collaboration and its Influence on Space Exploration" – by Mike Wright, MSFC
• Coat-of-arms of Dr. Wernher von Braun
• Remembering Von Braun – by Anthony Young – The Space Review Monday, July 10, 2006
• The Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial
• "The old dreams, and the modern reality." Wernher von Braun interviewed by Jules Bergman circa 1969.
• Article on von Braun, Huntsville, and German rocket scientists
• Audio commentary by Wernher von Braun about Flight Captain Erich Warsitz (world’s first jet pilot), Museum of Transport – Switzerland, “Planetarium”, August 30, 1971
• V2rocket.com

Articles and topics related to Wernher von Braun v t e NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Alabama) Directors: von Braun Rees Petrone Lucas Thompson Lee Bridwell Littles Griner Stephenson King Lightfoot Goldman (acting) Projects: Space Shuttle Propulsion International Space Station Chandra X-ray Observatory Gravity Probe B Project Constellation Ares I Ares V Orion NRHP sites: Neutral Buoyancy Simulator Propulsion and Structural Test Facility Redstone Test Stand Saturn V Dynamic Test Stand Saturn V Dynamic Test Vehicle Other: Operation Paperclip Von Braun Team ABMA Redstone Arsenal Redstone Rocket U.S. Space & Rocket Center v t e Systems engineering Fields Aerospace engineering Biological systems engineering Configuration management Earth systems engineering and management Enterprise systems engineering Performance engineering Reliability engineering Safety engineering Processes Requirements analysis Functional specification System integration Verification and validation Design review Integrating functionality Concepts Business process System Systems engineering process System lifecycle Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Languages Systems Modeling Language IDEF Tools Decision making Functional modelling Optimization Planning Reliable analysis Statistical analysis Systems analysis System dynamics Systems modeling V-Model Work breakdown structure People Wernher von Braun Harold Chestnut Arthur David Hall III Derek Hitchins Robert E. 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