Wernher von Braun, featured in a 1955 Disney tv special called Man and the Moon and on a Time magazine cover in 1958, was a leading architect of America’s successful space program after World War II. He became the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, developing the Saturn V rocket that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969. 

He was an American hero, an icon of a rocket engineer, and a master of the art of image-making. 

The truth behind his image?  He was brought to the US in a clandestine intelligence program called Operation Paperclip, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were secretly taken from Nazi Germany to work for the US. 

Everyone wanted these brilliant Germans who had created Germany’s phenomenal war effort:  rockets, missiles, deadly biological agents, and more.  We wanted their expertise, and we didn’t want anybody else to have it, and certainly not the Soviets, our rival for space and for global hegemony. 

U.S. Space shuttle taking off

Who WAS Wernher von Braun?  As a young boy, so the story goes, he was intrigued with space travel.  He studied engineering and rocket science, and when the Nazis came to power, he became a member of the Nazi Party and the SS.  

He was a key figure in Germany’s development of the V2 rocket program, so nicknamed because its purpose was to take vengeance on England for that country’s bombing of Germany.  In retaliation, Germany launched more than 3,000 missiles against Britain that Braun designed, indiscriminately killing at least 9,000 people, according to the BBC.  American satirist Mort Sahl is credited with mocking von Braun by saying, “I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London.” 

The V2 program was intended to make Britain surrender, and Hitler took great interest in the V2 production at Pennemünde.  Von Braun personally recruited prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp for slave labor at Pennemünde, where more than 20,000 people perished from brutal conditions, disease, lack of food, and torture. 

But in America, von Braun was a hero.  In 1967, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science. 

Was he a Nazi villain who successfully whitewashed his image, courtesy of the U.S. space race?  Was he a Cold War hero, helping to position America as top dog in the power race?  Or was he something in between? 

The Germans who were part of Operation Paperclip faced no accountability for their roles in the global devastation of World War II or the extermination of millions of innocent people in the Holocaust. 

A 1967 song by satirist Tom Lehrer has a line about complicity: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.” 

We suggest that some are guilty, but all are responsible.