Dark Side of the Moon

July 13, 2009
Biddle, a former New York Times
reporter with a Pulitzer Prize to his credit, intertwines the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany with scientist Wernher von Braun and his role in the creation of Germany's deadly V-1 and V-2 rockets, and his postwar apotheosis as a leader of the United States space program. Biddle's primary purpose is to debunk the view—created at least in part, Biddle believes, by von Braun himself—that he was merely a pawn in the Nazi regime whose work on the V-2 weaponry was secondary in his own mind to his goal of building rockets to send humankind into space. While much of von Braun's role in the Nazi Party is shrouded in darkness, the facts and circumstantial inferences that Biddle finds convincingly contradict von Braun's self-exoneration regarding his wartime work. Biddle offers damning evidence—including testimony by slave laborers that puts von Braun inside the V-2 factory and well aware of, and participating in, the brutal treatment of the workers. Biddle also criticizes the U.S. space program for its embrace of von Braun despite his documented membership in Hitler's SS corps. 12 illus.

July 15, 2009
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Biddle (A Field Guide to the Invisible, 1998, etc.) recounts the early years of the quintessential"rocket scientist" and hero of America's 1960s race to the moon.

Von Braun (1912–1977) led the team that designed the Saturn V, still the world's most powerful rocket, and the only one that never failed. Even before America's moon landing, he was a prominent media figure, narrating a Disney TV special on space flight and writing and speaking incessantly on interplanetary travel. Before World War II, von Braun directed Germany's rocket program, which developed the V2, a military weapon capable of killing thousands. Anxious to exploit German technology, the United States discouraged investigations into von Braun's activities under Hitler, and the scientist denied Nazi sympathies, maintaining that space travel was his obsession. Biddle disagrees. With a jaundiced eye, the author examines von Braun's spectacular rise from a 20-year-old engineering student to, within five years, chief of a massive secret rocket-development project. Biddle makes a convincing case that von Braun had no objection to Hitler and regularly visited the squalid Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where thousands died working to assemble the V2. Like Michael Neufeld's Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007), Biddle asserts that the rocket scientist made a Faustian bargain with evil to further his ambitions. Unlike Neufeld, and less convincingly, he suggests that von Braun was a self-promoting charlatan, neither as preoccupied with space as he claimed nor as skilled an engineer.

Neufeld's is the definitive biography, but Biddle offers a solid, moderately damning investigation of von Braun's relation to the Third Reich.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 1, 2009
Believing that American journalists and historians fired up by the 1960s space race whitewashed the Nazi connections of Wernher von Braun, Biddle proposes to bring von Braun truthfully through the first thirty-three years of his life. As he walks through the early years, Biddle evinces animus toward the privileged background of the von Braun family, who were Prussian aristocrats, and skepticism that visions of spaceflight rather than development of a weapon motivated von Brauns management of the V-2 rocket project. Whenever Biddle unhooks his research from his asides, he assembles facts, omissions, or inconsistencies in von Brauns postwar accounts of the V-2 that cast doubt on von Brauns minimization of his knowledge about the concentration camp where the missile was constructed. Biddle further spells out von Brauns membership in the Nazi party and SSall topics covered in the 2007 definitive biography Von Braun, by Michael Neufeldas a preliminary to disputing opinions that von Brauns arrest by the SS in 1944 exonerated him from the taint of Nazism. A stern, prosecutorial portrait of the famous German American rocketeer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)