Wernher von Braun: War Criminal to Moon Rocket

The Saturn Five rocket that lifted Apollo Eleven off the launchpad in July of nineteen sixty-nine was designed at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The man who led that design effort, and who became the first director of Marshall Space Flight Center when it was established in July of nineteen sixty, was Wernher von Braun. He was a celebrated figure in American aerospace, a face on the cover of Time magazine, a collaborator with Walt Disney on television programs about space exploration.

Before all of that, he had built rockets for the Third Reich.

Von Braun's V-Two ballistic missiles were produced at an underground facility called the Mittelwerk, in the Harz Mountains of Germany. The labor that built them came from the Dora concentration camp. Prisoners who could not work were killed. The historical record on this is extensive and unambiguous. More people died building the V-Two at the Mittelwerk than were killed by the rockets in the field.

Operation Paperclip was the American program that brought von Braun and over one hundred of his colleagues to the United States in nineteen forty-five. Their records were altered. Their affiliations with the Nazi Party and the Waffen-SS were minimized or withheld from public scrutiny. They were given new identities as American scientists and set to work first at Fort Bliss in Texas and later at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

None of them were prosecuted for what happened at the Mittelwerk.

The Apollo program required their knowledge, and the cold war created the context in which the United States decided that their knowledge was worth more than the accounting. The Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville celebrates the achievement. It is not wrong to celebrate it. The full story requires both the achievement and what preceded it.