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.