Von Braun a Magician

 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 92^nd 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           

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[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.