Nazi Rocketeers, The: Dreams of Space and Crimes of War (Stackpole Military History Series)
The German rocket pioneers, led by Wernher von Braun, were inspired originally by dreams of spaceflight in 1930s Weimar Republic. But the combination of economic depression and the enormous expense of their research led this group of dreamers to enter the employ of the army that funded their research, so long as the rocket team produced missiles for the Third Reich. In the throes of Germany's impending defeat, Hitler ordered their V-2 rocket into mass production at rates that required the use of slave labor from Nazi concentration camps. At war's end, von Braun and his team surrendered to the Americans; in the States, they continued building rockets that included the first ICBMs as well as the Saturn V, which took men to the moon. Piszkiewicz's retelling of their story portrays the Germans as willing participants in Nazi war crimes in an account that lacks the sympathetic slant of Frederick Ordway and Mitchell Sharpe's The Rocket Team (LJ 8/79) or the complexity of Michael Neufeld's The Rocket and the Reich (LJ 1/95). Given the ambiguities of the rocketeers' story, the recommended choice among the three accounts remains Neufeld's.?Thomas J. Frieling, Bainbridge Coll., Ga.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.