Von
Braun Was Also . . .
a
Magician!
Historians
have finally found the key to the enigmatic photograph above depicting Wernher
Von Braun’s capture/surrender[1]—it’s
hard to say which—taken when he fled from the Russians and raced toward the
advancing Americans to give himself up before the end of World War II and
before he could be shot by the Gestapo for cowardice, desertion, funny arm, a
totally camp hairdo, crappy missile production methods, and theft of a military
vehicle driven with one arm while saluting.
For
decades war buffs have been dumbfounded by the question of why the squad of GIs
in the above photograph could so charmed and amused by a high-ranking Nazi SS prisoner
disguised in civilian clothes at the end of a global conflagration that
destroyed a conservatively estimated fifty million people, all to please a
strutting buffoon. In fact the contrasting photo to the right shows an American GI of
the very squad that captured Von Braun in a different and likely more common mood
while guarding captured Nazi officers in uniform. Men like the GI in this
picture had just had an engaging tour of a couple of concentration camps.
Well, we now have the key to the conundrum of the funny first picture: A magic coin trick!
Investigative
reporters for Rocket City Blues have
tracked down Corporal Eddie Pilzer, probably shown second from the right in the
top photograph, now still hearty in his 92nd year and living Las Vegas, Nevada.
Pilzer reports that immediately upon
capture Von Braun began asking the squad of GIs for a deck of playing cards so
he could show them some tricks. When
the corporal flatly refused—“Go fuck yourself,” the Yank somewhat bluntly
remarked-- the Nazi major never stopped smiling. From the moment he
appeared riding in the stolen car he was smiling and he smiled right through
Pilzer’s recommendation that he perform an act that the cast would make
somewhat more awkward than it would usually be. And without a blink or a frown,
Von Braun boldly claimed to be an itinerant magician, produced a shiny coin, and
performed a magic trick. He flipped
the coin between his fingers so quickly and smoothly that no one in Pilzer’s
squad could tell which side of the coin was up!
“The guys were kind of
dazzled,” recalls Pilzer. “No sleep in three days, lots
of dead, lots of friends shot up, the stinking camps, no food, and here was this weird Kraut with his big hair and his smile
and his arm get-up, and before we know what’s happened, it’s like a party, right
on the spot. Gave us some gum and a cigarette to share. Usually we had the gum
and the cigarettes. Usually toward the end they had shit.”
Pilzer
was uneasy, he recalls, and “the party just stopped for a bit when this
squad of British SOE military intelligence agents arrived, took stock of the
situation and decided to pour gasoline on the captured major and set him on
fire. I didn’t say anything,” recalls Pilzer, “but the rest of my squad objected that their captive was a magician.”
Taking that claim with a bit of impatience, “those Brits drove off pissed, some of them laughing at us, and
shouting ‘Yer mums weren’t in London! Get stuffed Yanks yah fooking poofs!’” Finally, Pilzer remembers, Von Braun “made the party go again in a snap” and
told the GI squad he had “still more
tricks than they could imagine.”
 |
| Magic Roman Coin |
Certainly
Von Braun was as right about this as about so many other things to come. In fact, his coin trick charmed no less
than an entire city in Alabama, the American military Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and even US presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, although the latter
was known to spit out his chew, as they say, after meetings with the amazing rocketeer.
Admittedly the coin trick failed
to catch the fancy of Elie Wiesel or the investigators for the Nuremberg War
Crimes Trials, who were, to be sure, distracted in the latter 1940s by what they
then thought were somewhat bigger tricks.
Our
favorite immigrant, scientific smarty, Father of the ICBM, prophet of stuff to come
including some big ticket items, and now
. . . a magician. How many different ways will this man dazzle us?
"History is not memory." -- Michel Foucault
[1] Von Braun
was himself somewhat unclear in his account of what he was doing in civilian
clothes (a capital crime) and a stolen German truck. Some years into his life in Alabama, he
referred to his action as Die Verwandlung,
or, in English, “the metamorphosis.” However, perhaps because he wished to
avoid any implied parallel with Franz Kafka’s story Die Verwandlung, in which the protagonist reports his
transformation from a man into a cockroach, the rocketeer later referred to the
episode as "Die Ubertragung” a
somewhat less loaded term for “transfer”, as in a bus ticket that enables one
to go from one place to another or to any place he pleases without paying the price.
