Wernher von Braun

Wernher von Braun was a rocket engineer whose career spans two opposing chapters of history. In Nazi Germany he was behind the V-2 ballistic missile, whose production cost the lives of thousands of concentration-camp prisoners. After the war he became the chief architect of America’s Saturn V rocket, which carried the first humans to the Moon in 1969.

He was born on 23 March 1912 in Wirsitz (today Wyrzysk, Poland) into a Prussian aristocratic family. Captivated by rocketry as a young man, in the 1930s he led the development of military rockets for the German army at the Peenemünde centre. In 1937 he joined the Nazi Party and in 1940 the SS, reaching the rank of Sturmbannführer (major). His team developed the A-4, better known as the V-2 — the first ballistic missile to cross the boundary of space (1942), deployed as a vengeance weapon against London and Antwerp. The V-2s were assembled in the underground Mittelwerk factory, worked by prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. In inhuman conditions around 20,000 people died there — more than the missiles themselves killed on impact. Von Braun was the project’s technical director, visited the plant repeatedly and knew of the conditions; he later downplayed his share of responsibility for the forced labour. This dark side of his biography was suppressed for decades. In May 1945 he and his team surrendered to the U.S. Army and were brought to the United States under the secret Operation Paperclip. He first developed the army’s Redstone rockets; his Juno I launcher placed the first American satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit on 31 January 1958. In 1960 he became the first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and the chief architect of the Saturn V, which on 20 July 1969 made the Apollo 11 Moon landing possible. He died on 16 June 1977 in Alexandria, Virginia. He remains a figure who cannot be judged one-sidedly — a brilliant engineer and a man bound to a criminal regime.