Wernher von Braun was born on March 23, 1912, in the city of Wirsitz, in the province of Posen, part of Prussian Germany. The family had estates in both East Prussia and Silesia, and until age twelve Wernher lived in those provinces as well. He was the second of three sons born to the Baron Magnus Alexander Maximilian von Braun and his wife, Baroness Emmy von Quistorp von Braun. All the von Braun boys became barons at birth. Although of noble rank, a baron was relatively low in the aristocratic pecking order.1 Nonetheless, the boys were taught to take their station in life, and its attendant responsibilities, seriously.
“My friend was born in Germany . . . the middle son of a baron, and he was therefore expected to study, to work, to learn, to lead, to be honorable,” said American-born Edward G. Uhl in a talk in 1993, in which he summarized the family milieu that Wernher von Braun had entered.2
As Time magazine wrote in 1958, taking the long view of the family’s history, “Von Braun’s origins had deep earthly roots in Prussian Junkerdom. A von Braun fought the Mongols at Liegnitz in 1245, and the family’s aristocracy was certified by the centuries.”3
His father, born in 1878, had farming and banking interests. “Papa” became a provincial and then national government official, principally in agricultural ministries. Wernher’s mother, who was of aristocratic Swedish-German lineage and was raised in England, was said to have possessed a brilliant mind and an intuitive sense about people.
The family’s membership in the aristocracy brought with it wealth and status. The von Brauns lived in substantial homes, where servants waited on them, and they had significant landholdings cared for by workfolk. It maintained a cultured atmosphere of good manners, tradition, appreciation of music, art, and literature, and a disciplined devotion to education.
His father had figured that Wernher, as a future “landed gentleman,” might make farming his life’s work. But his parents soon realized that their middle son was developing into an unusual child. “When he was only four he could read a newspaper—upside down as well as right side up,” his father recalled. “He was always asking questions that his teachers couldn’t answer, and he had a remarkable ability to apply himself completely to whatever interested him.”4 Although Wernher and his brothers all did well academically, Wernher was the most gifted. “Sigismund and Magnus are clever,” their father later observed, “but they are ordinary clever people. Wernher is a genius.”5
“I don’t know where his talent comes from,” his father wondered years later.6 His mother certainly had a great deal to do with it. She was a compassionate, well-educated woman, who spoke six languages, was well traveled, loved great music and fine art, and was a serious amateur ornithologist and astronomer. “She had a large household with many servants during the prewar years in Germany,” Ernst Stuhlinger later wrote, “but if one of them fell ill, she personally cared for her like a mother.” She “was at home in the most distinguished circles of society; but she conversed with equal ease and human interest with her gardener or coachman.”7
Before the siren’s call of space snared him, Wernher showed interest in and aptitude for music. “As a little boy,” his mother later remembered, “Wernher loved the piano and composed his own music. For a time we even thought he would make music his career. But it was not to be.”8 Baroness Emmy “not only opened the gates to the world of science for Wernher, she also taught him to play piano,” wrote Stuhlinger, who eventually became von Braun’s chief scientist and came to know Wernher’s parents later in the United States.9
Wernher progressed in his musical studies to the point where, in the 1920s, while living in Berlin with his parents, “he was accepted for piano lessons by the great composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963),” Stuhlinger later wrote.10 By age fifteen von Braun had written three short original pieces for piano. In 1925, he began taking cello lessons and soon joined his school’s orchestra. He continued with both instruments into adulthood, playing cello in a string quartet of German rocket professionals who made music for their own pleasure. He astounded new friends decades later when he sat down at a piano and flawlessly performed a long classical piece from memory.11
The von Braun family moved to Berlin in 1920 when the baron was promoted from provincial jobs in a series of German cities to national governmental posts. By 1924 he was the Reichsminister of agriculture during the Weimar Republic under President Friedrich Ebert, a position he held until 1932 under the administration of President Paul von Hindenburg.
Wernher’s first rocket “tests” took place with a bang when he was a headstrong twelve-year-old. In 1924, he got an irresistible idea, probably inspired by the experimental rocket-powered automobiles then making the headlines. He recruited big brother Sigismund, one year older, for the project; Magnus, just five, stayed home. The two older boys bought six large skyrockets and lashed them to Wernher’s coaster wagon, which he had given a special paint job for the occasion. After wheeling the wagon onto Tiergarten Strasse, Berlin’s most upscale street, the boys lit the fuzes, and Wernher hopped aboard for the ride.
Von Braun later painted a vivid picture of the ensuing chaos. “I was ecstatic. The wagon was wholly out of control and trailing a comet’s tail of fire, but my rockets were performing beyond my wildest dreams. Finally they burned themselves out with a magnificent thunderclap and the vehicle rolled to a halt. The police took me into custody very quickly. Fortunately, no one had been injured, so I was released in charge of the Minister of Agriculture—who was my father.”12
Sigismund, who later became a career diplomat in Germany’s foreign service (before, during, and after Hitler’s rule), added more specific details: The wild rocket ride had, in fact, caused a casualty or two. The runaway wagon “crashed into the legs of a woman, ruining her stockings,” and then plowed into a fruit stand. At the police station Wernher was admonished not to repeat such dangerous “experiments.” The baron paid a fine to cover the damages, angrily lectured the boy, and ordered him and his big brother confined to the family home for two days.13 Wernher’s mother, equally concerned, took a sympathetic but practical approach. “The world needs live scientists, not dead ones,” she told him.14
Wernher was not quick to learn his lesson. To celebrate the end of his house arrest, he tied even more skyrockets to his wagon and set sail once again down the street—with similar results. (Luckily for Sigismund, he had not been invited along.) Little wonder that, as he later admitted, “Papa always seemed to be wondering what new damned foolishness I was up to!”15
Von Braun’s schoolwork faltered around this time. He had become a rather average student and that year even flunked math and physics—in large part because of the hours spent building a homemade automobile with a friend.
He was sent away at age thirteen to study at one of the progressive Hermann Lietz boarding schools, at ancient Ettersburg Castle near Weimar in central Germany. The Lietz schools were famous for their advanced teaching approach, combining strong academics with hands-on exposure to practical crafts. Six hours of classes began early in the morning, and the rest of the day the boys learned such crafts as woodworking, metalworking, carpentry, stonecutting, and masonry. Wernher thrived under this new regimen.
While enrolled at the school, he received an unusual, life-changing gift from his mother. “For my confirmation,” von Braun recalled in 1958, “I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.”16 It was through this gift, he said, that “I became an amateur astronomer, which led to my interest in the universe, which led to my curiosity about the vehicle which will one day carry a man to the Moon.”17
At age fifteen he read a science fiction article in an astronomy magazine that ignited his zeal to make rocketry and space exploration his life’s work. “I don’t remember the name of the magazine or the author, but the article described an imaginary trip to the Moon. It filled me with a romantic urge. Interplanetary travel! Here was a task worth dedicating one’s life to! Not just to stare through a telescope at the Moon and the planets, but to soar through the heavens and actually explore the mysterious universe! I knew how Columbus had felt.”18
Later that year, Wernher was reading a pamphlet on astronomy and saw a drawing of a rocket speeding through space toward the Moon. It illustrated an article about a man who would soon become his mentor, rocket theoretician Hermann Oberth, then a thirty-year-old physics professor in Romania. Intrigued, Wernher sent for a copy of Oberth’s classic book, The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, which had been published two years earlier. He was soon “shocked to discover that it contained mostly mathematical equations.” A resolve that would come to characterize him emerged. Wernher, who disliked math, recalled much later, “I decided that if I had to know about math to learn about space travel and rocketry, then I’d have to learn math.”19
At school he turned his mind to math and physics with a vengeance. In his mid-teens, Wernher persuaded his father to let him transfer to a branch school in the Lietz system on Spiekeroog Island in the North Sea. At sixteen he planned to accelerate his studies so he could graduate a year early and join a group of rocket enthusiasts in Berlin. But he changed his plans when the school headmaster asked him to teach the math classes of a teacher who had fallen ill. He also privately tutored some of the weaker students in the classes he taught, determined that all would pass their exams. Everyone did, and he made the highest marks in his classes.
It was at the North Sea school that Wernher began to develop his leadership, organizational, and communications skills—as well as skills at swimming and sailing in the rough seas. His interest in gripping the helm of a sailboat became a love he returned to often in adulthood. Increasingly interested in astronomy and now caught up in his visions of space travel, he decided he had outgrown the small telescope his mother had given him. He persuaded the headmaster to purchase a five-inch refracting telescope and then organized his schoolmates to build an astronomical observatory to house it.
About the same time, he began writing about astronautics. In one of his notebooks he wrote with no little prophecy: “As soon as the art of orbital flight is developed, mankind will quickly proceed to utilize this technical ability for practical application.”20 He also wrote a five-page short story, “Lunetta” (“Little Moon”), which told of life aboard an Earth-orbiting station. The piece was published in the school magazine.21
Decades later, while living in the United States for a time before returning to Germany, and as her middle son scored one early space success after another, Emmy von Braun reminisced: “I used to ask him, ‘Wernher, what do you want to be?’ He was about ten at the time, and he would say, ‘I want to work on the wheel of progress.’ It sounded so strange coming from a boy of that age. But he did exactly that, didn’t he?”22