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Description:
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"Werner von Braun: the man who sold the Moon" is the first critical biography of the young German aristocrat who created Hitler's most advanced terror weapon, the V-2 rocket, and who came to the U.S. to develop missiles as a central weapon of the Cold War. The book reveals that factions of the U.S. Army, in their zeal to have von Braun's team of scientists working for American interests, covered up what they knew about his complicity in Nazi causes and abetted him in the perpetuation of the myth he carefully created about his past.
Declassified Army documents, war crimes trial transcripts, concentration camp survivors' accounts, as well as von Braun's published writings and personal papers have enabled biographer Dennis Piszkiewicz to document von Braun's career more fully than any previous historian. The man who tirelessly promoted with Walt Disney to create television programs and the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland, and worked with NASA to put the first astronauts on the moon, was actually a member of the Nazi party, held a rank in the SS equivalent to Major, and was an accomplice in the use of slave labor from the Dora concentration camp to produce the V-2 rocket. When the Third Reich collapsed, von Braun unashamedly switched his allegiance to the victor, and skillfully distanced himself from his Nazi partners. By going on to promote NASA and "sell" the American people on his dreams of space exploration, he became the man who sold the moon.
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