Wernher von Braun, engineer of the V-2 and the Saturn V

Updated October 19, 2026 · 5 min read

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) was the German engineer who led the design of the V-2 missile for the Nazi regime and later of the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo astronauts to the Moon. A Nazi Party member and SS officer, he worked knowingly within a weapons program that worked concentration camp prisoners to death. He became a US citizen in 1955 and served as the first director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center from 1960 to 1970.

A young aristocrat drawn to space

Born into a Prussian noble family, the son of a senior civil servant who served as agriculture minister in the last governments of the Weimar Republic, Wernher von Braun was hooked on astronomy early. Hermann Oberth's book on rockets and interplanetary travel set his course: around 1930 he joined the German Society for Space Travel (VfR), an amateur group testing small liquid-fuel rockets near Berlin.

In 1932 the German Army, which saw rockets as a weapon not banned by the Treaty of Versailles, hired him under Captain Walter Dornberger. Von Braun completed a physics doctorate on liquid-propellant rocket engines in 1934.

Peenemünde and the V-2

In 1937 the program moved to Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, and von Braun, aged 25, became its technical director. That same year he joined the Nazi Party; in 1940 he joined the SS, eventually reaching the rank of Sturmbannführer (major). He later described these memberships as formalities he could not refuse. Historians, notably Michael Neufeld, judge them at the very least opportunistic career moves, without evidence of fervent ideological commitment, but made with full knowledge of the regime.

The A4 missile, renamed V-2 ("Vergeltungswaffe 2," retaliation weapon) by Nazi propaganda, first flew successfully on 3 October 1942. In June 1944 a V-2 fired vertically passed 100 km in altitude, the first human-made object to reach space. From September 1944, more than 3,000 V-2s were fired at London, Antwerp, Paris and other cities, killing about 5,000 people, most of them civilians. Briefly arrested by the Gestapo in March 1944 for remarks deemed defeatist, von Braun was released after Dornberger intervened.

Dora: the human cost of the V-2

After Allied bombing of Peenemünde in 1943, V-2 production moved into tunnels in the Harz mountains, the Mittelwerk, worked by prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. In appalling conditions, thousands of prisoners, including many members of the French Resistance, died of starvation, disease, exhaustion or execution. Common estimates put deaths among the complex's prisoners at 10,000 to 20,000: building the V-2 killed more people than its attacks did.

Von Braun visited the Mittelwerk several times and knew the conditions there. A 1944 letter shows he took part in selecting skilled prisoners at the Buchenwald camp to work on the program. No evidence shows him personally committing violence, but his moral responsibility within the system is now widely acknowledged. During his lifetime, he spoke of it only in minimizing terms.

Paperclip and Huntsville

In spring 1945 von Braun and part of his team surrendered to the US Army. Under Operation Paperclip, which recruited German scientists while downplaying their political records, they were based at Fort Bliss, Texas, and launched captured V-2s at White Sands. In 1950 the team moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where it designed the Redstone and then the Jupiter missiles.

Von Braun also became a star science communicator: a series of articles in Collier's magazine (1952–1954) and Walt Disney television programs from 1955 popularized his vision of space stations and voyages to the Moon and Mars. On 31 January 1958 (1 February UTC), a Juno I rocket derived from the Redstone launched Explorer 1, the first American satellite.

NASA and the Saturn V

In 1960 the Huntsville team was transferred to the young NASA, which created the Marshall Space Flight Center around it. Von Braun was its first director. He oversaw the Saturn I and IB and then the Saturn V, championing its staged design and conservative engineering. In 1962 he endorsed lunar orbit rendezvous, which other NASA engineers had championed, and in 1963 he accepted George Mueller's "all-up" testing, against his own habit of qualifying one stage at a time. The success of Apollo 11 in July 1969 crowned his team's work.

Moved to NASA Headquarters in Washington in 1970 to lead long-range planning, he found an agency with shrinking budgets and left NASA in 1972 for Fairchild Industries. He died of cancer in June 1977, aged 65.

A contested legacy

In his lifetime von Braun was celebrated as a hero of the space age. The gradual rediscovery of Dora in the 1970s and 1980s hardened judgments. In 1984 his former colleague Arthur Rudolph, who had managed production at the Mittelwerk, left the United States to avoid prosecution over the use of slave labor. The satirical line attributed to comedian Mort Sahl about the 1960 biopic I Aim at the Stars, "but sometimes I hit London," captures the ambivalence. Historians today hold both sides together: an exceptional engineer and organizer, and a man who put his talent at the service of a criminal regime.

The Mittelbau-Dora site in Thuringia is now a memorial. In Huntsville, the Saturn Vs described on where to see a Saturn V stand for the other side of his career.

Sources

• Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
• Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, Free Press, 1995.
• Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial (KZ-Gedenkstätte Mittelbau-Dora), Nordhausen.
• NASA History Office