In this all encompassing biography of Von Braun something that stands out to me is how predestined his life really was, once you get past his rebellious dream to be a great engineer and achieve space flight. The best part of this book is the first third where Neufeld reconstructs the man's upbringing and one finds a polished scion of the Prussian "service" aristocracy, the sort of person born and bred to serve the German state and who would do so unquestioningly, so long as their caste entitlements were respected and they were offered glittering prizes to pursue; Von Braun was arguably never happier then after Hitler granted him the title of professor, such was his hunger for recognition. This being the case one can say that Von Braun was stained with the great sin of his class; unleashing the Nazis in the belief that they could be controlled in pursuit of the selfish conservative, nationalist agenda.

Assuming that I've gotten this all straight the outstanding, and at this point unanswerable, question is how much was Von Braun simply an opportunist on the make (the sort of man who was probably the foundation of the Nazi party) and how much he intellectually accepted the agenda of the Hitlerian regime. I tend more towards opportunist but there is no doubt in my mind that Von Braun should have been in the defendant's dock at a war-crime tribunal, if only as a witness, and he should really have never been offered American citizenship.

I might add that those who are looking less for a measured examination of the ills of the German nation and who want an epic of technological adventure will also not come away unsatisfied from this book. ( )

This one took a while to finish since I left it at work and only read it at lunch times which rarely include much reading there.

Certainly someone who made a huge difference in mankind reaching into space. He also was responsible for great advancement in rocket arts leading to ballistic missiles.

This has been lauded as perhaps the fairest biography on von Braun, it explains his status and story of working for the Nazi party. He is responsible for his choices and their effects, but I don't think he is as huge a villain as some would have him be. He wanted to get to space and if he had to make missiles first than that is what did. He denied he was aware of working conditions of slave labor at some of the rocket plants. Which is possibly true according to the evidence the author researched.

People that are really interested in the history of space or rockets should be familiar with von Braun. I recommend this book for those people.


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Probably the finest book written on Von Braun..several mentions of Col J C Nickerson jr (Nickerson family of Siluria Al) The author sent to me copies of letters from VonBraun to his friend "Nick".( my uncle)

I caught this magisterial biography on C-SPAN's Booknotes and immediately ordered it. An amoral technocrat who didn't care which flag he engineered under (unless it was expedient to), von Braun punched holes in Antwerp and London... and got us to the Moon. Within a decade von Braun's moral gyroscope, such as it was, yawed from slave labor (he was an SS-Sturmbannfuhrer) to pitching space flight in Collier's magazine and on Disney's Man in Space. Researched using the primary sources in both German and English, this biography indeed presents "a man in full" more than capable of complicity in war crimes, managing vast engineering enterprises, and charming the American public. A cautionary moral tale from the Third Reich, the Space Race, and the Cold War, this biography -which could only have been written years after the Cold War- is highly recommended for space buffs & students of the mid-20th century alike.