The Dark Side of the Moon: Werner von Braun, the Third Reich and the Space Race Author: Wayne Biddle Publisher: W W Norton & Company ISBN: 978-0-393-05910-6 Price: £18.99 (Hb), 220pp
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Wayne Biddle, an American Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, has at last been able to penetrate the murky Nazi past of Dr Wernher von Braun, creator of the Saturn V rocket that enabled the United States to land the first men on the Moon in 1969. US intelligence gathered all the details of how closely he was involved with the ruthless use of slave-labour during the war years, but kept the information secret for half a century while they used his services.

So, after personally briefing Hitler on rocket technology, von Braun was able to move Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon on the subject. He was truly unique. Less than two years after surrendering to the Americans, von Braun was allowed to return to Germany – though with a round-the-clock guard – to marry his first cousin, aged 18, and take both her and his dispossessed parents back to El Paso in the US, where in effect they lived happily ever after.

By the time he died in 1977, von Braun’s days of being feted as the hero mainly responsible for the moonlandings were over. Details were at last beginning to leak out of his participation in the ghastly slave-labour camp in the Hartz mountains that was mass-producing his wartime V2 rockets. Had he lived much longer it is probable he would have had to join Dr Arthur Rudolph, the former camp director, in a humiliating exile back to Germany.

Wayne Biddle’s book is a fascinating but difficult read, for it is necessary to refer constantly to 43 pages of notes, which would have been better incorporated in the main text.

Reginald Turnill