Von Braun Joins U.S.: Nazi Rocketeer Builds Apollo Legacy

Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer who had designed the V-2 ballistic missile that killed approximately 9,000 civilians in Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands, was approved for transfer to the United States on June 20, 1945, as part of Operation Paperclip. The program, initially called Operation Overcast, recruited roughly 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, many with documented Nazi affiliations, and brought them to America to work on military and space technology rather than allow their expertise to fall into Soviet hands. Von Braun's wartime record was deeply compromised. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and held the rank of SS-Sturmbannfuhrer, equivalent to major. The V-2 rocket was manufactured at the Mittelwerk underground factory using slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where an estimated 12,000 prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and execution. Von Braun visited the factory multiple times and later claimed, unconvincingly to many historians, that he had been unaware of the extent of prisoner abuse. His security files were sanitized by U.S. intelligence to facilitate his immigration. Von Braun and his team were initially stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, and White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, where they continued V-2 testing and development using rockets shipped from Germany. In 1950, the group moved to the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama. Von Braun developed the Redstone and Jupiter missiles for the U.S. military before being transferred to NASA in 1960, where he directed development of the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Von Braun became the most visible advocate for space exploration in America, appearing on Disney television programs and magazine covers. The Saturn V remains the most powerful rocket ever successfully flown. The moral complexity of his story, a man who used slave labor to build weapons of terror and then built the machine that carried humans to another world, has never been satisfactorily resolved.