The Apollo moon landings are some of the most impressive technical feats ever achieved, and, for capitalism’s boosters, definitive evidence of the superiority of Western capitalism over all other social systems. The United States beating the Soviet Union to the finish line in the space race is held up as the ultimate triumph of capitalism over communism. But the path that took humans to the heavens began in the depths of hell: the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Nazi Germany.
Built near the town of Nordhausen in central Germany, Mittelbau-Dora provided its prisoners as slaves to the Mittelwerk. This was a factory built under a mountain for the mass production of the V2 rocket, the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile. The several thousand civilians killed in London and Antwerp by V2s were not the only victims of these Nazi weapons: at least 20,000 prisoners died as a result of the conditions in Mittelbau-Dora and the Mittelwerk.
Edwin Katzenellenbogen, who was convicted for crimes committed as a doctor at the Buchenwald camp, described Dora as “the Hell of all the concentration camps”. Tens of thousands of prisoners worked in interchanging 12-hour shifts, first to dig the kilometres-long tunnels of the Mittelwerk, then on the dark production lines within.
Sanitation was absent, disease and starvation were rampant, and collective punishment was common. Prisoners were hanged in groups of up to a dozen at a time, and on at least one occasion, bodies were left to dangle over the areas where others were forced to continue working.
Wernher von Braun was an SS officer, scientific director of the V-weapons project, and head of the Mittelbau-Dora planning office. He came from an aristocratic family in the German empire, and was among the first pioneers of advanced rocket science. Through the interwar years, Germany was banned from investing in many kinds of weaponry under the Treaty of Versailles, but rockets were obscure enough to avoid being on the list. During this time, von Braun became a leading designer and inventor of the engines needed to propel explosive missiles over incredible distances.
He joined the Nazi Party in 1937. If you believe his version of events, he joined only to be allowed to continue his scientific work. Regardless of his political loyalty, he was at least comfortable enough with the genocidal policies of the Third Reich to enjoy the slave labour it provided to him from Mittelbau-Dora. He was certainly aware of the reality of the Mittelwerk, having visited the tunnels himself at least ten times.
As the walls closed in on the Third Reich, with US and British forces moving in from the west and Russians from the east, von Braun hid the most important of the design documents for constructing V2s. Alongside Major General Walter Dornberger, head of the German army’s weapons department, von Braun used the hidden documents as leverage to get an amnesty with the Americans, betting that the US wanted the weapons more than they cared about prosecuting war criminals.
He was right. Von Braun, Dornberger and many other German experts in weapons of many terrifying forms—ballistic, chemical, and biological—were brought across the Atlantic under a secret program known as Operation Paperclip. They began work in the US, making weapons for a new, but no less bloodthirsty, empire. Their pasts were whitewashed, with the story being that they were innocent scientists forced by circumstance into working for the Nazi regime.
For his part, Joseph Stalin got the Mittelwerk factory itself, which continued operation for a few years before its machinery was brought back to Russia, along with thousands of German technicians needed to operate it. The USSR also got the equipment and methods to manufacture sarin gas, a chemical weapon so potent that contact with a single droplet causes a painful death.
Sarin was invented by Nazi chemists, among them Otto Ambros, who tested it on Auschwitz prisoners. Ambros was convicted for crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trials, but that wasn’t a barrier to later working for US chemical companies and the US army. Within a few years of the end of the war, both imperial superpowers were producing large quantities of sarin and other chemical weapons.
The Cold War and the arms race
The new phase of world imperialism had the globe divided into the West, with the US on top, against the East orbiting the USSR. The prospect of direct hot war between the empires gave way to the Cold War, and the arms race continued. Both sides had nuclear and thermonuclear bombs, the most destructive weapons ever created. The next step was to be able to use them to precisely target any location on Earth.
The idea of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) being fired between continents, from Europe to America or vice versa, drove weapons development in the immediate postwar years. Rocket science was central to this, and the Nazi V2 was to become the ancestor of modern rocketry.
Space exploration was tied up with the race to ICBMs from the beginning. Von Braun himself was obsessed with concepts of lunar bases and hypothetical expeditions to Mars. The launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik in October 1957, the first artificial object put into orbit, was the starter’s gun for the space race.
Sputnik really showed up the US, which had been coasting on the assumption that it was ahead. Sputnik proved that in fact the USSR was winning the race in space technology and also in ICBMs—they had used one to launch Sputnik. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was established the next year. The US launched its own satellite in February 1958, only four months after Sputnik.
In September 1962, US President John F. Kennedy announced his government’s intention to send men to the moon in a speech at Rice University. The famous words, “we choose to go to the moon … not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard”, were preceded by Orwellian double-speak about how the US must “occupy a position of pre-eminence” in space to preserve “peace”. That is, the US must win this arms race so that no other empire would be able to dominate the planet. As JFK spoke, the US military was escalating its war in Vietnam.
The US would proceed to be beaten to every major milestone in the space race except for boots on the moon itself: the first artificial satellite, the first animal in space, the first human in space, and the first spacewalk were all accomplished by the USSR.
The advantage that NASA had over Moscow was von Braun and the other Nazi rocket scientists, who were the world’s leading experts. Former high-ranking Nazis were involved in every significant US development in space and rocket technology in the course of the space race.
In 1954, Bell Labs created the first guided surface-to-air missile. This was developed by Dornberger, who would go on to be vice-president of the Bell Aircraft corporation and a consultant for Boeing.
In 1958, America’s first satellite was launched on a rocket designed by von Braun. He would be the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA’s main base of operations for rocket research.
Kurt Debus was the first director of NASA’s Launch Center. He oversaw the launches of the first US satellite, the first American in space, and all of the Apollo mission launches. He was well qualified, because overseeing launches of rockets was the job Hitler gave him as an SS officer.
And the famous Saturn V rockets that propelled the Apollo missions were developed under the management of Arthur Rudolph, former deputy head of V2 production at the Mittelwerk. Von Braun, of course, was also centrally involved.
The developments made in rocketry that were needed for the space program were the same developments needed for the US to be able to build ICBMs. The goal of landing a rocket on the moon instead of on Moscow, and delivering explorers instead of nuclear warheads, was ultimately just a gloss over what was really weapons research for the Cold War.
The Paperclip scientists did not fall into obscurity as nameless technicians. Many of them became very public leaders of the US space program, and hardcore advocates for the militarisation of space.
Von Braun in particular was a prolific writer for science magazines. A 1952 issue of the magazine Collier’s, featuring articles under the heading “Man Will Conquer Space Soon”, inspired Walt Disney to get in touch with him. The Nazi rocket expert helped to design parts of Disneyland and consulted for TV specials produced by Disney. After the space race, von Braun was a consulting editor for Popular Science, one of the US’s most widely-read science magazines, until his death in 1977.
The truth about von Braun and his colleagues is today widely acknowledged. But that doesn’t stop many from continuing to venerate him, with his leadership role in NASA being his main legacy. The National Space Society, a US space science non-profit, has awarded the “Wernher von Braun Memorial Award” every second year since 1993 to recognise “excellence in management of and leadership for a space-related project”. Past recipients include Elon Musk and current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.
What is less remembered is Mittelbau-Dora and the tens of thousands of innocent lives lost there. It is a tragedy of history that the name Wernher von Braun is known more than the names of those like Jean Michel.
Resistance
Michel was an organiser in the French Resistance against Nazi occupation. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and ended up in Mittelbau-Dora, where he spent close to two years. His memoir, Dora, is both horrifying in its stories of the cruelty of the Nazi regime, and one of the most inspiring tales of resistance available.
Even in the deepest darkness the spirits of Michel and other prisoners were never broken. Secret networks organised sabotage on the V2 production lines, snuck in to SS quarters to listen to British broadcasts on the radio, and spread news about the advance of the Allied armies towards Germany. They even constructed a radio transmitter they planned to use to call for help when those armies got close enough.
No telling of the story of space exploration should be considered complete without beginning with Mittelbau-Dora. Not only is it the starting point, it is also emblematic of what is at the heart of competition over space. The driving force behind Nazi rocket science was the same force behind the space races of the Cold War and today: imperial domination and all the violence that comes with it.
This September, the US confirmed publicly for the first time that it has deployed weapons into orbit around Earth. More missions to the moon are planned by today’s biggest powers, the US and China. Capitalism continues to walk down the pathway to the final frontier that began at Mittelbau-Dora, and each step brings the threat of all-out war closer.
