Wernher von Braun's rockets reached space for Hitler, then the Moon for America
In 1944 a V-2 rocket co-designed by Wernher von Braun became the first human-made object to cross into space. Twenty-five years later, the Saturn V he architected sent Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Between those feats lay Nazi Party and SS membership, a secret transfer to America, and lasting questions about accountability.
Born in 1912 in Wirsitz, then in Prussia and now in Poland, von Braun was the son of a Weimar agriculture minister and a mother descended from several medieval royal houses. A telescope given after his confirmation sparked a love of astronomy, and he studied music with the composer Paul Hindemith, once hoping to compose. At boarding school he struggled with physics and mathematics until Hermann Oberth's book on rockets to interplanetary space made him buckle down. Inspired by Opel rocket cars, the teenager strapped the biggest fireworks he could buy to a toy wagon and launched it along a crowded pavement, earning a trip to the police station.
He joined Berlin's Spaceflight Society, finished an engineering diploma in 1932 and a physics doctorate in 1934. Historian Norman Davies notes that the Versailles treaty had oddly left rockets off its list of weapons banned to Germany. Von Braun applied to join the Nazi Party in November 1937, though in a 1947 affidavit he placed it in 1939. He entered the SS in 1940 and was promoted three times by Himmler, reaching major in June 1943; he later called these routine promotions arriving by post, while a former Peenemünde officer said he often wore the uniform.
The V-2, built at Peenemünde, crossed the Kármán line on 20 June 1944. After the war he was quietly moved to the United States with about 1,600 other German specialists under Operation Paperclip. Some see his postwar career as an escape from justice, enabled by the rivalry with the Soviets.
For the US Army he developed rockets that launched Explorer 1, America's first satellite, in 1958, and from 1955 to 1957 he popularised human spaceflight in films with Walt Disney. In 1960 his team joined NASA, where he directed the Marshall Space Flight Center. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975, advocated a crewed Mars mission, and died in 1977.
Source: Wernher von Braun
