Moonglow by Michael Chabon
We got him propped up and into position. Then I set the tray across his body and tucked the napkin into the collar of the long T-shirt he wore.
He leaned forward to put his face, his nostrils, in the path of the steam coming off the bowl. He closed his eyes and inhaled. He picked up the spoon, and I watched him put away most of the bowl. The taste of it seemed to come as a kind of relief.
“Okay,” he said. He put down his spoon. “Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun.” After the name, he added something acrid in Yiddish.
“All I got was onion,” I said.
“Something your great-grandmother used to say. A Yiddish curse. ‘He should grow with his head in the dirt, like an onion.’”
“That what’s going on there?” I picked up the copy of Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, purloined thirty-odd years earlier from the library of the Wallkill prison. “In the Willy Ley book, you—well, somebody—like, blotted von Braun’s name out over and over again.”
“Me,” he said, adding dryly, “It didn’t work.”
He sprinkled a few mandelen onto the soup and took another spoonful. I heard the tiny crackers crunch between his teeth.
“And then . . . I remember how you wouldn’t watch the moon landing. How you got up and left the room. Even though that was pretty much something you had been waiting your whole life to see.”
“Yah.”
“Did that have something to do with your feelings about von Braun?”
“Yah.”
“So, obviously? Something must have happened . . . ?”
Another spoonful of soup went into his mouth. He swallowed it. His eyes were fixed on mine, watchful and withholding, challenging me to justify the logic of my inference.
“Because that morning, when you took off on that motorcycle, it sounded like, at that point, you were feeling almost like . . . like you and von Braun were . . .”
“‘Kindred spirits’?”
“Yeah. But then later, at a certain point . . .” He was still watching me, with less apparent tenderness than I could ever remember having seen in his eyes. He had put down his spoon. “It kind of seems like you pretty much decided you hated the guy’s guts.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed.
“Why?”
When I was a boy and fell prey to what he regarded as an inherent weakness for stating the obvious, my grandfather had a certain voice he would use to repeat whatever I had just said. To me it sounded like the voice that Mel Blanc used to do dimwitted bloodhounds, Yetis, and musclebound dumb-asses in the old Warner Bros. cartoons. My grandfather probably thought of it as the voice of Lon Chaney, Jr., playing Lennie in Of Mice and Men. I had not heard it in a very long time, but now it resurfaced: stammering, at once low-pitched and infantile.
“‘Something must have happened,’” he said in his moron voice.
I waited. He picked up the spoon and tilted the bowl toward himself. It looked like he was going to polish off the rest of it. I imagined the account I would make to my mother when she got home from work: He loved the soup. I got him to eat a whole bowl.
There was a clang as he flung down the spoon. In a man so frail and narcotized, the gesture felt inordinately violent. He pushed the bowl away. Later I would find a chip missing from its rim.
“You want to know what happened at Nordhausen?” he said in his regular rasp. “Look it up.”
22
When my mother got home, I went down to the library, a storybook-style cottage on Mountain Boulevard that stayed open late on Thursday nights.
I started with Gravity’s Rainbow, which I had read at UC Irvine for Mike Clark’s graduate seminar on the modern novel, and which was the (accurately researched, it turned out) source of most of the little I had ever known about the V-2. I spent an hour flipping through and skimming the relevant passages, starting with the book’s epigraph, then following its secondary character of Franz Pökler, a young engineer whose career traces the history of spaceflight in Germany: the Weimar period of “Rocketport Berlin” and the starry-eyed Verein für Raumschiffahrt,* Frau im Mond and the rocket craze, the militarization of rocket research that came with Hitler’s rise, Peenemünde, and—I was jolted to discover—Nordhausen, where the book’s protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, also turned up at one point. I remembered having read these passages—some absurd, some harrowing—set in and around the rocket’s mountain lair, but the name of the site in the Harz Mountains had gone out of my memory completely. I wondered if my grandfather knew or had ever tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow. I wondered how he would have felt about the book’s depictions of the European theater of operations, the horror of Nordhausen, the experience of rocket attacks, and so many other things Pynchon had never lived through or seen. It all felt convincing to me, but what did I know? Apart from so-called hard science fiction, which he read (as with The Magic Mountain) for its artful packaging of big ideas, my grandfather regarded most fiction as “a bunch of baloney.” He thought reading novels was a waste of time more profitably spent on nonfiction.
Beyond the Pynchon there was not a lot. A brief Britannica entry on Nordhausen and its Mittelwerk rocket factory, cross-referenced to entries on the V-2, the facility at Peenemünde, and the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. Mentions of Peenemünde, the Mittelwerk, and KZ Dora-Mittelbau in a few general histories of World War II. Some of the grimmest pages, toward the end, in a book about the 3rd Armored Division’s yearlong slog from Normandy to Dessau. A Pentagon-approved 1971 book on Operation Paperclip that made careful reference to the 1947 acquittal, on charges of war crimes, of a V-2 project middle manager named Georg Rickhey. Finally, the jackpot, an article in The New York Times from March 1984, which I read on microfilm. It summarized an exposé of Operation Paperclip in the latest issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The author of the exposé, the Times said, had made extensive use of formerly classified documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to establish in detail that the postwar history of American technological accomplishment, particularly in the realm of biological warfare, aeronautics, and spaceflight, had been rooted in heinous Nazi war crimes and an elaborate American cover-up of those crimes. Following decades of inaction and denial, the article said, the U.S. government had stripped the citizenship of a prominent rocket scientist, Arthur Rudolph, and deported him to his native Germany. Rudolph had declined or been unable to contest direct evidence linking him to numerous atrocities during his tenure as managing director of V-2 production at Nordhausen. Along with Wernher von Braun, the article said, Arthur Rudolph had been the lead designer of the mighty Saturn V, the rocket that had borne the Apollo missions toward the Moon.*
Altogether it was not a lot, but I got the general drift.
Until August 1943 the plan was for V-2 rockets to be manufactured, once they became operational, at the same top-secret facility, on the remote island of Peenemünde off the German Baltic coast, where their research and development had been carried out. The prototypes and test rockets had all been manufactured in Peenemünde’s workshops by hundreds of “foreign workers”—prisoners, housed in an adjacent concentration camp, most of them Poles. The prisoners had already begun construction of a new factory when, during the full moon of August 17, Peenemünde became the target of a massive Allied air raid. The secret of Peenemünde had been discovered, intelligence gathered, reconnaissance carried out. The aim of the raid, code-named HYDRA, and the hope of its planners—among them Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys—was to strangle the V-2 (or A4, as it was known then) in its cradle. To that end, six hundred Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Stirlings dropped two million kilograms of high-explosive bombs in what was believed to be the general vicinity of the workshops, the experimental stations, and the living quarters of the scientists and engineers.
At that time the science of bomb targeting was less than precise. As the raid unfolded over Peenemünde, errors—navigational, calculative, aeronautical—compounded. While measurable damage was done to the workshops
If HYDRA had been ineffective, it was not without result. The V-2 program was now demonstrably vulnerable, and Heinrich Himmler seized on that vulnerability to bring it under control of his SS (in which Wernher von Braun had risen to the rank of Sturmbannführer). Clearly, the projected factory was at grave risk. It could not be built on an expanse of open seacoast at coordinates well known to the enemy. It must be moved and protected against further attack. It would be kept secret, as Peenemünde had been, but that was insufficient; the factory must be hidden as well.
A new site, the Mittelwerk, was commissioned and constructed in the Harz Mountains, just outside the town of Nordhausen. In a display of the kind of inventive audacity that characterized German military research, the new rocket factory was constructed inside of a minor mountain.* Fresh gangs of Poles, along with Frenchmen, Russians, Czechs, and Ukrainians—prisoners of war, political prisoners—were conscripted from KZ Buchenwald fifty miles away and detailed to excavate and expand a tunnel system under the Kohnstein, site of a disused gypsum mine. The Mittelwerk’s lattice of tunnels served as factory floor, administrative offices, staff dormitory, and at first as a subterranean concentration camp for the laborers who worked, ate, slept, and died in them. When they died, their bodies were shipped back to Buchenwald for cremation.
A steadily increasing rate of V-2 production demanded more inmates than the Mittelwerk could accommodate. The SS forced the prisoners to build a camp for themselves outside the south entrance to the tunnels, code-named Dora, which in time spawned further subcamps, centered around the Mittelwerk and known collectively as Mittelbau. A subcamp in the town of Nordhausen, called the Boelcke-Kaserne, was used as a dumping ground for inmates too enfeebled or sick to work. From the start of excavation and the first shipments of Buchenwald prisoners in September 1943 until the capture of the Mittelwerk and the liberation of Dora-Mittelbau in April 1945, an estimated sixty thousand prisoners were put to work building the seven thousand V-2s that eventually rolled off the line.
The men who built the rockets lived in filth, underfed, malnourished, and brutalized. Packed into the barracks of Dora in their striped uniforms, in bunks stacked four high, the workers froze in the winter, roasted in the summer, and died by the tens of thousands all year round. They were worked beyond their capacity to endure, in primitive and dangerous conditions. The tunnels were hot, dark, cramped, crowded. They were filled with fumes, smoke, and the racket of machinery. Discipline was severe and the guards bestial. Minor infractions were punished by kicking, beating, torture, mutilation; fear of insurrection resulted in regular mass executions. The condemned would be hanged six at a time from a massive crane used to transport rocket assemblies from one part of the line to the next, in full view of the workers on the factory floor and of the project’s scientists and engineers from von Braun on down the line. Bodies were left to dangle instructively overhead. Sabotage, though subject to swift and savage retribution, was rife and, along with the abysmal conditions and demoralized work force, may have led directly to the relatively high rate of failure experienced by the V-2.* In time a crematorium was built at Dora to save the trouble and expense of sending dead inmates all the way to Buchenwald.
The 104th Infantry (Timberwolf) and the 3rd Armored (Spearhead) divisions rolled into Nordhausen on April 11, 1945, and found it abandoned by the enemy. They stumbled first across the subcamp in the town itself. Ravaged by an untreated outbreak of typhus, the Boelcke-Kaserne had also borne the brunt of an Allied air raid the week before that killed fifteen hundred inmates and wounded hundreds more. The death marches, forced transports, mass burials, and other attempts by the evacuating Germans to conceal the enormity of Nordhausen had left only the most enfeebled and grievously maimed in the Boelcke-Kaserne. The liberators had not even begun to grasp what they were seeing when they came upon Dora—these were among the first U.S. troops to enter a concentration camp. Photographs and film footage they took there featured in newsreels and on front pages all over the world. Even after the name and the business of Nordhausen had been carefully mislaid by history (at least in the adopted homeland of Wernher von Braun), the imagery of its horror endured: The dead ranged in corduroy roads to the vanishing point, bone-men slumped and staring. In the tunnels under Kohnstein Mountain, among incomplete rocket assemblies and machines left running, the liberators found the men of the Mittelwerk’s final shift, abandoned by their captors, too weak to move, let alone try to escape. Heaps of sticks atop which solemn heads stood regarding them like owls. In the infirmary the bodies of the Mittelwerk’s last on-the-job fatalities lay naked on tile slabs, drained of blood and awaiting transport to the crematorium.
Having come six hundred miles through some of the most brutal combat and one of the bitterest European winters of the twentieth century, the liberators were as inured to the routine of battlefield horror as any men have ever been obliged to become. When they saw what there was to see in the camps and under Kohnstein Mountain, according to their own subsequent accounts—accounts followed closely by Pynchon when he had his engineer Pökler tour KZ Dora—a considerable number of these men with their thousand-yard stares broke down in tears or turned away to vomit.
The liberators could not have endured so long and so much, however, without having learned the knack of repressing futile emotion. They soon moved on to anger and a desire to impose some measure of justice or, failing that, retribution, if clear distinction could be made between the two. They looked around for someone to lay their hands on. The SS guards and functionaries had all fled the area, along with the Mittelwerk’s personnel. I couldn’t find anything to suggest that the liberators contemplated trying to punish or even gave much thought to the brains of the operation, the men with slide rules and soldering irons whose great invention, only incidentally the first long-range ballistic missile, was a process by which horror could be converted into terror by dint of cruelty.* At any rate, had the liberators of Dora made this imaginative leap, there would have been no way to act upon it. Von Braun’s rocketeers were miles away, scattered across southern Germany and Austria. In the end the townsmen paid the debt of horror. The liberators returned to Nordhausen from Dora and the Mittelwerk, rousted the men from their houses, and ordered them at gunpoint to fetch shovels and start digging until all the dead of KZ Dora-Mittelbau were buried.
That is what I found in the public record that night at the Montclair Public Library when I went to look up Nordhausen. Between the impressment of the local citizens as gravediggers and the beginning of the end of my grandfather’s war, I can offer only informed speculation, combined with a few little facts that he inadvertently dropped over the course of the next few days.
I know that he arrived at Nordhausen the day after its liberation, along with the news that FDR was dead. He steered the Zündapp through the empty streets of the town. With every barrier lifted and every gateway open to him as a result of his “Eisenhower pass,” he had no trouble entering the various subcamps or the factory under the mountain. Like the men of the Timberwolf and Spearhead Divisions, he had been hardened by prolonged exposure to violence. Like them, I imagine, what he saw around Dora-Mittelbau may have brought him to the point of tears or nausea. It was clear from what he told me afterward that, like the liberators, he looked around to find a fitting object of his rage when his tour of this particular hell and its environs was complete.
What he saw that day, and what he heard from the survivors he questioned, persuaded him that there was no way Wernher von Braun could have been technical director of the V-2 program while remaining unaware of how business was conduct
Over the course of that long day in Nordhausen my grandfather trusted his eyes and gave up the dream he had shared with the Wernher von Braun of his imaginings. Along with it, he surrendered the memory of a rocket in a clearing, a half hour of something that had felt like peace, a midnight conversation with the rector of Our Lady of the Moon. When those things were gone, there was a bad moment as my grandfather found himself confronted once more with the void that surrounded the planet of his heart for a thousand parsecs in every direction. After that, as with the liberators of Nordhausen putting away their disgust and useless anguish, there was only the matter of his anger and where to point it.