Neufeld condemns von Braun for his collaboration with the SS, and condemns the US government for covering up the evidence of his collaboration. Here I beg to differ with the author. War is an inherently immoral activity. Even the best of wars involves crimes and atrocities, and every citizen who takes part in war is to some extent collaborating with criminals. I should here declare my own interest in this debate. In my work for the RAF Bomber Command, I was collaborating with people who planned the destruction of Dresden in February 1945, a notorious calamity in which many thousands of innocent civilians were burned to death. If we had lost the war, those responsible might have been condemned as war criminals, and I might have been found guilty of collaborating with them.
After this declaration of personal involvement, let me state my conclusion. In my opinion, the moral imperative at the end of every war is reconciliation. Without reconciliation there can be no real peace. Reconciliation means amnesty. It is allowable to execute the worst war criminals, with or without a legal trial, provided that this is done quickly, while the passions of war are still raging. After the executions are done, there should be no more hunting for criminals and collaborators. In order to make a lasting peace, we must learn to live with our enemies and forgive their crimes. Amnesty means that we are all equal before the law. Amnesty is not easy and not fair, but it is a moral necessity, because the alternative is an unending cycle of hatred and revenge. South Africa has set us a good example, showing how it can be done.
In the end, I admire von Braun for using his God-given talents to achieve his visions, even when this required him to make a pact with the devil. He bent Hitler and Himmler to his purposes more than they bent him to theirs. And I admire the United States Army for giving him a second chance to pursue his dreams. In the end, the amnesty given to him by the United States did far more than a strict accounting of his misdeeds could have done to redeem his soul and to fulfill his destiny.
Note added in 2014: This review provoked a record number of eloquent and moving responses from people outraged by my friendly portrayal of von Braun. Here is an extract from one of them:
I was a medical student at the London Hospital, in 1944, when an early V-2 landed one afternoon in Petticoat Lane, a crowded and popular people’s market in London’s East End. There were hundreds of killed and injured and over two hundred were admitted to the hospital, where the severely injured were promptly triaged to the operating rooms but many lay for hours in the corridors and basement to receive treatment, mostly for nasty lacerations from flying glass. It was a scene I have never forgotten.
Professor Dyson’s role in the planning of the RAF raid on Dresden, admittedly a horrific incident, seems paltry compared to the calculated killing and brutal exploitation of the inmates of the forced labor camp where the V-2 was conceived and manufactured. Von Braun never publicly renounced his role in the Nazi regime, of whose sadism and brutality he seems to have been fully aware.
Surely confession and penitence must precede reconciliation? Amnesty yes, reconciliation maybe, but forgiveness no. Neither did we need to reward such a man with a presidential medal for his acts of redemption for unforgivable sins.
Bernard Lytton
Donald Guthrie Professor Emeritus of Surgery/Urology
Yale University School of Medicine
Director, Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty, Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
In response to a letter from Leo Blitz in Berkeley, whose mother survived the concentration camp at Stutthof, I wrote:
I once visited the camp at Stutthof when I was in Poland. I am not saying that von Braun or anyone else was innocent. But I think you miss the main point. Amnesty is not for the innocent. Amnesty is for the guilty. We need amnesty at the end of a war because a large number of people on both sides are guilty. War is like that. Modern war is a brutal business, and when I was working for Bomber Command I was in the same business as von Braun. After that, we all needed an amnesty, with a few exceptions such as your mother.
*Knopf/Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 2007.
†The original version of the 1950 memoir was unpublished, and is now in the von Braun papers at Huntsville. A revised version was published with the title “Reminiscences of German Rocketry” in Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 15 (1956). The memoir is historically unreliable, written for an American or British audience long after the event. No independent report of the conversation with Himmler exists.
4
THE DREAM OF SCIENTIFIC BROTHERHOOD
GROWING UP AS a child in England, I absorbed at an early age the notion that different countries had different skills. The Germans had Bach and Beethoven, the Spanish had Velázquez and El Greco, the French had Monet and Gauguin, and we had Newton and Darwin. Science was the thing the English were good at. This notion was reinforced when I began to read children’s books of that period, glorifying the achievements of our national heroes, Faraday and Maxwell and Rutherford.
Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealander who had discovered the atomic nucleus and created the science that came to be called nuclear physics, was then at the height of his fame. Although he had immigrated from New Zealand, Rutherford became more English than the English. He spoke for England in a famous statement contrasting the continental European style with the English style in science: “they play games with their symbols, but we, in the Cavendish, turn out the real solid facts of Nature.” The French and Germans were doing calculations with the abstract mathematical equations of quantum theory, while Rutherford was banging one nucleus against another and transmuting nitrogen into oxygen. English children learned to be proud of Rutherford, just as we were proud of our military heroes Nelson and Wellington, who had beaten Napoleon. Patriotic pride of this sort is in some ways healthy. It encourages children to be ambitious and to tackle big problems. But it is harmful when it leads them to believe that they have a natural right to rule the world.
I still remember some of the patriotic poems that I had to learn by heart and recite as a seven-year-old:
Of Nelson and the North
Sing the glorious day’s renown,
When to battle fierce came forth
All the might of Denmark’s crown.
The battle that Nelson fought in the harbor of Copenhagen was especially famous because his commanding officer put up a flag signal ordering him to cease fire. Nelson pointed his telescope at the flag signal and looked through it with his blind eye. Since he did not see the flag, he continued the battle and won a glorious victory. But even a seven-year-old understands that Nelson’s defeat of the Danes at Copenhagen was not as glorious as his defeat of the French fleet at Trafalgar four years later. Even a seven-year-old may feel some sympathy for the defeated Danes, and may question whether Nelson’s undoubted bravery and brilliance gave him the right to bombard their homes. I recently visited a tavern in Copenhagen where the tourist is proudly informed that this is one of the few buildings along the waterfront that were not demolished by Nelson’s guns. The collateral damage resulting from his victory is not forgotten.
John Gribbin’s book The Fellowship belongs to the harmless kind of patriotic literature.* It is a portrait gallery displaying a group of remarkable characters who made important contributions to the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. Each of the biographies is dramatic. Those characters lived through turbulent times, and their personal lives were as exciting as their ideas. Almost all of them are English. Gribbin is not writing a history of science but only a history of a particular institution, the Royal Society of London. “The Fellowship” means the group of men who founded the society in 1660 and devoted their time and energy to its activities. Although they were English, their aims and purposes were international, and they welcomed distinguished scholars from many countries as fellows of the society. From the beginning, one of the main activities of the society was the exchange of information and the improvement of contact between England and t
he rest of the world. The founding of the society was not the beginning of modern science, but it was a unique event with great consequences, well worth studying in detail. Gribbin’s book gives a lively and readable account of it.
The story begins a hundred years earlier with William Gilbert, a medical doctor who practiced in Colchester and London and became president of the Royal College of Physicians in 1600. He was one of the royal physicians responsible for keeping Queen Elizabeth in good health. In his spare time he did experiments on magnetism and published his conclusions in a book with the Latin title De Magnete. The full title in English is On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet the Earth: A New Physiology Demonstrated by Arguments and Experiments. The book is written in a remarkably modern style, putting the science of magnetism on a firm experimental foundation. Gilbert did careful measurements, mostly using as his experimental material little spheres of natural lodestone (magnetic oxide of iron), which he called terrellae, or in English “little earths.” He was aware from the beginning that these little magnets were models for the earth. He suspended them in water and measured their attractions and repulsions in detail. He cleared up a great deal of confusion by demonstrating that the use of the words “North Pole,” to mean the end of a magnet that pointed north, was wrong. He demonstrated that north and south poles attract each other, and therefore, if the magnet were taken to be a model of the earth, the end of the magnet that pointed north would correspond to the south pole of the earth. He says in his book:
All who hitherto have written about the poles of the loadstone, all instrument-makers, and navigators, are egregiously mistaken in taking for the north pole of the loadstone the part of the stone that inclines to the north, and for the south pole the part that looks to the south: this we will hereafter prove to be an error.
Roughly speaking, Gilbert did for the science of magnetism the same job that Benjamin Franklin did for the science of electricity two hundred years later, establishing the basic facts by means of experiments that anyone who doubted his conclusions could repeat. But Gilbert, since he lived two hundred years earlier, was in some ways the greater pioneer. In the course of his study of magnets, he also did a number of experiments on electricity, demonstrating that electric and magnetic materials were different and should be studied separately. Gilbert was aware that he was pioneering a new style of experimental philosophy that could be extended to many other subjects besides magnetism. He writes in the preface to De Magnete:
To you alone, true philosophers, ingenuous minds, who not only in books but in things themselves look for knowledge, have I dedicated these foundations of magnetic science—a new style of philosophizing.
One of the people who read De Magnete, probably soon after it appeared in 1600, was Galileo. Galileo was twenty years younger than Gilbert, but already well started in his studies of dynamics, using pendulums and balls rolling down inclined planes as his experimental tools. Galileo in his correspondence with friends wrote warmly of Gilbert: “I greatly praise, admire and envy this author, that a conception so stupendous should have come to his mind.” Galileo later did experiments himself with magnets and confirmed Gilbert’s results. Fortunately, the friendly relations between Galileo and his English admirers were not disturbed by disputes over priority of the kind that arose between Newton and Leibniz a century later. Gilbert was given some share of the glory that Galileo earned as the father of modern experimental science.
After Gilbert and Galileo comes Francis Bacon, who, unlike the other characters in the story, seldom did an experiment. He was a man of many talents, so gifted that he was seriously proposed in later centuries as the author of Shakespeare’s plays. At the age of fifteen he was helping the English ambassador in Paris with diplomatic correspondence, and developed a serious interest in codes and cryptography. He later became a successful writer, lawyer, and politician. He was lord chancellor in 1618 and was disgraced for taking bribes in 1621. After his disgrace, he spent five years in retirement writing fragments of a great work that remained unfinished, The Great Instauration. By “instauration” he meant an organization for acquiring knowledge from all over the world and putting it to practical use.
The essential feature of his vision was that the increase of knowledge should be a collective activity, with organized groups of people observing in detail how nature works. After the observations were collected, another group of people, scholars and philosophers, would interpret the results and deduce the laws that nature follows. Finally, a third group of people, inventors and manufacturers, would use their knowledge of nature’s laws for the advancement of human wealth and welfare. This blueprint for the building of a knowledge-based society was very far ahead of its time. In many ways, Bacon’s scheme resembles the institutions of science and technology in the twenty-first century more than it resembles the Royal Society in the seventeenth. Nevertheless, the founders of the Royal Society were strongly influenced by Bacon’s writings and believed that they were helping to make his dreams come true. And now, 350 years later, it turns out that they were right.
Bacon was a master of a literary form that he called the essay. His essays are brief, usually a couple of pages summarizing his views about a big subject. Many of his essays have become classics, distilling much wisdom into a few words. Here are a few of his memorable statements about the pursuit of knowledge:
All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed on the facts of nature, and so receiving their images as they are. For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.
Man is the helper and interpreter of Nature. He can only act and understand in so far as by working upon her or observing her he has come to perceive her order. Beyond this he has neither knowledge nor power.
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
The true and lawful goal of the sciences is simply this, that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.
After his death in 1626, his most imaginative work was published, a novel with the title New Atlantis, describing a utopian society living on an island in the South Pacific and directed by an organization called the Foundation. The Foundation is a group of philosophers dedicated to scientific research and human improvement:
The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
Bacon died amid a chaos of unpaid debts and unfinished manuscripts. He never knew which of the many seeds that he planted would bear fruit. The New Atlantis turned out to be one of the most fertile. Thirty years after his death, the name “Fellows,” which he gave to the members of his Foundation, was borrowed by the founders of the Royal Society for the members of theirs. And three hundred years later, the writer Isaac Asimov borrowed the name “Foundation” for one of the most popular series of science-fiction stories ever written.
The next of the English pioneers was William Harvey, the physician who revolutionized the practice of medicine by discovering the circulation of the blood. The title of his great work published in 1628 was Anatomical Exercises on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. He was trained in Padua, where he was a student of Fabricius, a famous anatomist who made careful dissections of animals and identified the valves in veins. Fabricius did not understand the function of the valves, since he believed the prevailing dogma that veins and arteries both carried blood away from the heart. After Harvey returned to England he did careful experiments, tying bandages around the arms of his patients and observing how the flow of the blood in the veins responded. He found that the function of the valves was to block flow away from the heart and allow flow toward the heart. These simple observations proved that the blood circulates through the body, away from the heart through the arteries and back to the heart through the veins. Harvey also showed that a separate circulation takes blood from the heart to the lungs and back again.
After Harvey came
the “great generation,” the group of about twenty people who came together in 1660 to launch the Royal Society. The main purpose of Gribbin’s book is to explain how and why this happened. How did it happen that so many people with wealth and education became seriously interested in science? And why did they concentrate their attention on experiments and observations of nature rather than on philosophical theorizing? Gribbin answers these questions by examining the historical circumstances out of which this group of people arose.
The central fact about the founding of the Royal Society is that it coincided with the restoration of the English monarchy under King Charles II. England had been torn apart by civil war for nine years, from 1642 to 1651. Parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell defeated royal forces led by Charles I. Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and England became a republic, governed by Cromwell as lord protector. Charles II spent nine years in humiliating exile, wandering between France and Holland and Spain. When Cromwell died in 1658, his second-in-command, General George Monck, started to talk with the defeated Royalist leaders and quickly negotiated a deal. Charles II would be invited back as king, and only a few ringleaders of the gang that had killed his father would be punished. Most English people were tired of religious squabbles. They had no wish to fight the civil war over again. So Charles II came back and successfully reunited the country, governing with a light hand and making whatever compromises were needed to stay on his throne. He reigned for twenty-five years, more or less peacefully, and before he died somebody composed a poem for his tombstone:
Here lies our sovereign lord King Charles, whose word no man relies on,
Dreams of Earth and Sky Page 6
