On May 2, 1945, high above the Adolf Hitler Pass in the Austrian Tyrol, Wernher von Braun convened his inner circle on a sunny terrace of the Haus Ingeborg hotel. Hitler was dead. The war, as they were all aware, was lost. The fall of Berlin was imminent. Regrettably, then, the time had come to surrender. Forward elements of the U.S. 6th Army were already at the foot of the mountain on the Austrian side. The Russian Army was mere miles to the east and moving fast. If they did not act now, von Braun told his companions—among them his brother Magnus, General Walter Dornberger, the former commandant of the rocket research facility at Peenemünde, and Huzel and Tessman, the two men whom Stolzmann had helped to conceal the Mittelwerk files—they would lose their freedom to decide. It was a strange kind of freedom, to choose one’s captor, but preferable to being the prisoner of chance. Von Braun had long since brought his companions around to the view that America was a fitter repository for his gifts than the Soviet Union. The decision was made. The next morning, equipped with a bicycle and a basic grasp of the English language, Magnus was sent down the mountain to bring the Americans the excellent news.
Halfway down, the younger von Braun brother was challenged by a sentry, Private Fred Schneikert of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who proved both ignorant of and unimpressed by the exalted nature of the prize he was being offered. There was some comedy of mistranslation and regimental head-scratching, but in time the name of von Braun found its way up the chain to an intelligence unit, where it landed with the proper éclat. A couple of weeks before, there had been a report, received through channels from an operative in Nordhausen, alerting them that von Braun might be hiding in the Bavarian Alps. A few hours later, Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun became a prisoner of the 44th Infantry Division. In less than a quarter century, this uncharacteristic act of submission would lead—as von Braun alone had always known that it must—to the imprinting of a human footprint in the soft dark dust of the Moon.
Von Braun was thirty-three. Tall, fair, gregarious, and good-looking, with his left arm and shoulder bandaged in a cast as the result of a recent automobile accident, von Braun posed with his GI captors for an odd photograph that ran the next day on the front pages of newspapers across the United States. In the photograph von Braun looks startlingly dapper for a prisoner of war, in a double-breasted suit and a long coat, but the first thing you notice is the cast, a monstrosity of plaster that forces von Braun’s arm to jut out at a bizarre angle, buttressed by a metal rod. It looks like a comedy prop, something you would see on Moe Howard when you cut from a scene of him challenging an old lady to an arm-wrestling contest. The second remarkable element of the photograph is von Braun’s expression, a smile variously interpreted over the years as one of relief, high spirits, or a remarkable, even defiant smugness.
It was probably the latter; as far as von Braun knew at the moment of his capture, he was sitting on the secret to the location of twenty-four thousand pounds of documents of incomparable scientific and strategic value. As my grandfather had assumed, von Braun planned to use this secret to negotiate the most favorable terms imaginable for his surrender and postwar career. There is no photographic record of the expression on von Braun’s face when he learned subsequently that the documents had been located and successfully disinterred from the salt mine near Bleicherode where Tessman and Huzel had buried them.
As for the U.S. intelligence officer who, just ahead of the Russian takeover of Nordhausen, had located and supervised the excavation of the Mittelwerk files, there is likewise no photographic record of the look on his face when, in the lobby of a Baltimore television station, he learned about the postwar clover in which, even without the cache of documents, Wernher von Braun had landed. But there was a testimony, and my grandfather made it to me.
24
Two days before my grandfather surrendered to the New York State Department of Corrections, he drove my mother from New Jersey to Baltimore to entrust her to his brother’s care. It was by no means the ideal situation, but nothing ever was, and he felt he had no choice. His mother and father had died of cancer within a couple of months of each other in the winter of 1954.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” my grandfather told my mother. “It’s going to be on your side of the street.”
My mother had not seen Baltimore in five years, and it looked strange to her. The row houses had two stories clad in white siding upstairs, redbrick down. They made my mother think of gums crowded with teeth. Most of them had flat roofs, but every so often one had a peaked attic. Those were the eyeteeth. The houses had shallow porches held up by white pillars. They ran on for blocks unvaryingly, like a vista you might drive past in a dream.
“I forgot the number,” my mother said.
My grandfather sighed. He took his right hand off the wheel to fish his wallet from the breast pocket of his jacket. A matchbook from Howard Johnson’s fell out of the wallet into the area by his feet. He swore. He returned the wallet to its pocket. His tone was calm, but that meant nothing. “Find it,” he said.
My mother leaned across the seat and felt around on the floor among the pedals and her father’s black wing tips until her fingers kicked against the match cover. “Found it.”
The comb of matches had been torn away cleanly along with the strip where you struck a light. She turned the match cover over to the side on which my grandfather had jotted down an address. My mother read the numbers aloud, but they failed to register. She was remembering the Howard Johnson’s restaurant where my grandfather had taken her one particularly fine Saturday not long before. Their nearest neighbor, Mrs. Lopes, had unexpectedly dropped by the house that day, bringing along two albums of photos from a recent visit to her sister in Altoona. My grandmother had shown what struck my mother at the time as remarkable if not excessive interest in the Pennsylvanian travels of Mrs. Lopes. My mother was thrilled when my grandfather, who harbored little patience for their neighbor, abruptly proposed a father-daughter outing.
He drove my mother out to visit a petting zoo with goats, sheep, and an irritable alpaca named for Yma Sumac. My mother knew that at fourteen she was too old to enjoy a petting zoo. She had enjoyed it nonetheless. There were no other visitors, and the animals seemed eager for company. They rushed to greet my mother and never let her out of their sight. In the enormous barn there had been a tire swing lashed to the highest rafter, and at the end of the visit the farmer had set up empty soup cans along a fence. My mother, always a bit of a deadeye, had shot all but one of them off with a .22 rifle. On the way back from the petting zoo, they stopped at Howard Johnson’s, where my grandfather had consented to my mother ordering a lunch of french fries with a side of peppermint ice cream.
The day was hot, but inside the Howard Johnson’s her bare arms and legs had prickled as her sweat cooled in the air-conditioning. There was frost on the scalloped metal ice cream dish. My grandfather had made a comic show of disgust as he watched my mother languidly dip each fry into the pink mound of ice cream before eating it. But she could see something else moving behind his face, some deeper pain or preoccupation. After a while he got up to go to the men’s room. He came back with a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. He was not a habitual smoker, but there were months when he would go through two packs a day.
The lighter engraved with a molecular diagram was out of fuel, an oversight she could not remember ever having seen him commit. Their waitress had brought the book of matches in their aqua, white, and orange cover. My grandfather lit a cigarette and settled back in the booth. The look in his eyes of painful assessment appeared to have departed. He complimented my mother on her marksmanship and then, unusually, told her a story from his boyhood. It was a brief tale but a good one. It concerned a friend of my grandfather’s, a boy called Moish, who had been shot by another boy with a .22 rifle. The tale concluded satisfyingly with a bloody fingertip wrapped in a sheet of newspaper and carried home in the victim’s pocket.*