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Wernher von Braun
Posted: May 20th, 2008
In the closing days of the war, von Braun and a group of his rocket scientists surrendered to American forces. Although he had been a member of the German SS and had used slave labor at Mittelwerk, the Nazi underground rocket facility, von Braun and his colleagues were embraced by the United States government and began working for the Army on rocket technology. In 1960, von Braun became the first director of NASA’s new Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. During his 10-year stint at Marshall, von Braun spearheaded the development of the Saturn rockets, including the Saturn V rocket that launched the crew of Apollo 11 toward their historic landing on the moon. Von Braun died on June 16, 1977. Below, follow our timeline, Werner von Braun and the Evolution of the Rocket Engine. |
Designing and developing terror weapons does not make a war criminal. However, working men to death in the pursuit of National Socialist objectives does. The question of Wehrner Von Braun’s complicity in war crimes has been covered up. Von Braun would have known the answer to this. However, he defended himself on many occasions.
I think that he was an amazing person.
Well i am from germany staying in the US right now and my oppinion is that no brave person in that time would have work for the nazi government like wernher von braun did. I think many people feared for their lifes and were threatened by death but that does not excuse the killing of hundreds of thousandds of people by building the most advaced rocket of that time.
Dear Diane, yes…they treated humans like slaves to build his rockets, the reason we used HIM was very self serving, it was to beat the Soviet Union in the race to develop intercontinental missles to deliver nuclear warheads, then the space race. We used him to save us from an even greater tragedy than the jews faced.
diane, this man pioneered rocket science, designing the first ballistic missile and the rocket that sent man to the moon, and if he had stood up to the SS over treatment of those people, that would have meant death or torture. more like shame on you
No test pilot in history has amassed a track record to compare with that of Captain Eric Brown, a chief test pilot during World War II who flew many of the new planes developed in the arms race.
In 1960, von Braun became the first director of NASA’s new Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, but began his career in the German army as one of the Nazi scientists.
When the Germans formally surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945, their reign of terror ended, but the terrifying weapons created by Nazi scientists lived on and would eventually shape both the Cold War and the space age.
If the Allies didn’t capture the Nazi technology and scientists, agents of the burgeoning Soviet Union might — and that could spell disaster in a post-war world.
At the end of World War II, undercover Allied agents engaged in a desperate race against one another to capture the elite of Germany’s scientific community in an effort to gain a major advantage in the looming Cold War.
Historians have long wondered about the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, but now, art historian Antonio Forcellino believes he has pieced together evidence of a deep rift between the Church …
300 years after Blackbeard’s reign of terror on the seas, a marine archaeology team believe they have found his legendary sunken flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, off the North Carolina coast.
In 1910, an American doctor named Hawley Crippen was convicted in England of poisoning and dismembering his wife. The vicious murder—and execution that followed—made international headlines. But did the prosecutors …
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German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), born in 1912 in Wirsitz, Germany, took an early interest in rockets and the possibility of space exploration. As a young man, he joined the German Rocket Society (Verein fur Raumschiffahrt). In 1932, von Braun joined the German army to work on the development of ballistic missiles. By 1937, he was the head of the Peenemeunde Rocket Center and leader of the Nazi rocket program that eventually developed the V-1 “buzz bomb” and the deadly V-2, the world’s first ballistic missile.