Was Wernher von Braun a Nazi?

The record

• 1912: born on March 23 in Wirsitz, then in Germany, today Wyrzysk in Poland, into an aristocratic family.
• 1932: goes to work on liquid-fuel rockets for the German army.
• 1937: joins the Nazi Party; becomes technical director of the army’s rocket center at Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast.
• 1940: joins the SS; he is promoted three times, the last time, in 1943, to Sturmbannführer, a rank equal to major.
• 1944: held by the Gestapo for about two weeks in March over remarks judged defeatist, then released; in September the first V-2s are fired in combat.
• 1945: surrenders to American troops in May.

The V-2 and the Mittelwerk

The V-2 was the first long-range ballistic missile. More than 3,000 were fired in combat, mostly at London and Antwerp, and they killed about 5,000 people. Building them killed more. After British bombers struck Peenemünde in August 1943, production moved into tunnels under the Kohnstein, a hill near Nordhausen, in central Germany: the Mittelwerk. The workers were prisoners of the Dora camp, set up as part of the Buchenwald system. According to Michael Neufeld, a historian at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, at least 10,000 of them died, about twice as many people as the missile killed.

Von Braun did not run the factory. Neufeld’s research shows that he visited the tunnels many times and, in 1944, went to Buchenwald to pick out skilled prisoners for the work. Neufeld’s judgment is that he was “directly part of a system murderously exploiting camp prisoners.” After the war von Braun described his party and SS memberships as formalities he could not refuse.

Paperclip, and the same choice in Moscow

The US Army shipped von Braun and more than a hundred of his engineers to Fort Bliss, Texas, where they rebuilt captured V-2s and fired them at White Sands, New Mexico. The program, later named Paperclip, brought more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians to the United States between 1945 and 1959. Their files were screened by officials who wanted their skills, and Nazi records were often played down. In 1984 one of them, Arthur Rudolph, who had run production at the Mittelwerk, left the United States and gave up his citizenship rather than face a Justice Department case over the prisoners.

Moscow made the same choice in its own zone of Germany. Soviet teams took V-2 parts, factories and specialists, and in 1946 moved German rocket engineers to the Soviet Union. On October 18, 1947, a rebuilt V-2 rose from Kapustin Yar, on the steppe near the Volga, with Sergei Korolev watching. Both superpowers began their rocket programs with the V-2 and the men who built it.

Huntsville and the Saturn V

In 1950 the team moved to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Von Braun became an American citizen in 1955, explained spaceflight on Walt Disney’s television shows, and in 1958 his team launched Explorer 1, the first American satellite, after Sputnik. From 1960 he directed NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where his engineers built the Saturn V, the 111-meter rocket that carried the Apollo crews; all thirteen launched between 1967 and 1973 reached space. He was the engineer Kennedy’s Moon deadline depended on. He died on June 16, 1977.

Both parts of the record

Both facts stand side by side in the archives. He was a member of the Nazi Party and an officer of the SS whose missile was built by prisoners who died in the thousands. He was also the engineer whose team built the rocket that took Americans to the Moon. Today the Mittelwerk tunnels are part of the Mittelbau-Dora memorial.