Wernher von Braun

Wernher von Braun built the V-2 for Nazi Germany and the Saturn V for the United States. Born in Wirsitz in 1912 into a Prussian aristocratic family, he was inspired by Hermann Oberth's writings, joined an amateur rocket society in Berlin, and was recruited by the German army in 1932 at twenty. He took a doctorate in physics in 1934 and led development at Peenemünde. The A-4, designated V-2 for propaganda, first reached space on a suborbital trajectory in October 1942 and was fired at London and Antwerp from September 1944, killing around nine thousand people. It was built at the Mittelwerk underground factory by prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora camp, where roughly twenty thousand died of starvation, exhaustion and hanging — more people died producing the weapon than were killed by it. Von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and was an SS officer, and visited the factory. His postwar account minimised his knowledge of the conditions, and the documentary record indicates he requested skilled prisoners from Buchenwald. He surrendered to the Americans in 1945 with much of his team and was brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip, which sanitised their records. He worked on army missiles at Huntsville, and after Sputnik his Jupiter-C launched the first American satellite, Explorer 1, in January 1958. As director of Marshall Space Flight Center he led the development of the Saturn V, which sent Apollo 11 to the Moon in July 1969 and never failed. He promoted spaceflight publicly through Disney television films and Collier's articles. He died in 1977.

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