Forbidden History - Nazi Rocket Scientist to NASA Engineer: Wernher von Braun

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Wernher von Braun was vital to NASA's Apollo 11 mission to put a man on the moon, but this controversial 'American hero' had his Nazi past kept under wraps…    Cast List: Dr. Katherine Landdeck: Texas Woman’s University  Michael J. Neufeld: The National Air and Space Museum  Shalina Patel: Historian  Nigel Jones: Author & Historian  Guy Walters: Author & Historian  Bernd Crabs: Museum Kummersdorf Magnus Brechtken: Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History Philipp Aumann: Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum  Stephen Waring: University of Alabama, Huntsville Luisa Hulsrøj: Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp  Michael Allen: Author, The Business of Genocide  Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. In 1969, mankind took its first steps on the lunar surface. But it wouldn't have happened without one engineer who rose through the Nazi ranks, built a deadly weapon, then became an American hero. His name was Dr. Werner von der Leyen.

Vanne Brown. Vanne Brown was born into a privilege. He wanted to go to the moon. I mean, personally, he wanted to lead an expedition to the moon. To get there, he would use the power and resources of the Third Reich and commit to the regime. Those B-2 rockets were incredibly useful as terror tools. You had no idea it was there until the ground around you exploded.

These were the super weapons that Goebbels boasted about in his propaganda that was going to the tide of the war. Thousands died at the hands of von Braun's rocket. Yet somehow, he was able to escape justice and realize his greatest dream. I find it complete and total bullshit. The difference between being able to deny that and admit it could have been,

you're sitting in the dock in Murrenberg or you're not. Van Braun was one of the most famous people in the entire world in 1960. He was seen as a hero of space. Thanks to the backing of the Nazi regime, regime and the secret support of the U.S. government, one of Hitler's most notorious engineers helped in mankind's greatest achievement. Four years into the Second World War, Germany was in retreat for the first time. The British had reclaimed North Africa. German soldiers

were surrendering en masse to Soviet forces. Germany had been able to blitzkrieg their way across the continent, taking everything they saw. By 1943, the tide had turned. The Soviet Union had survived and were beginning to push back. Italy had fallen or was getting ready to fall. The Germans had to fight for themselves. Hitler desperately needed to change the initiative. And he turned to a new kind of weapon, one he didn't fully understand.

Two decades previously, rockets that could fly into, space existed only in the realms of science fiction. There were science fiction movies made about space travel, so space travel was a topic of considerable interest to the public, especially at the very end of the 1920s. These films are a real time capsule of moments in German history in the 20s where actually things were looking bright, things were looking really positive for Germany. Eccentric aristocrats toyed with the technology, creating a fad for cars, and planes with oversized fireworks at their rear.

The middle and upper classes of Germany were interested in car racing, in air racing, in the possibilities of new technology. So it was definitely an age of pushing back the boundaries, going faster and further. Among those inspired by rocketry was the firstborn son of the noble von Braun family. von Braun, von Braun came from an aristocratic German family with scientific interests. He started off as a teenager, fascinated with outer space. That von in his name denotes nobility. He was posh.

And his dad was a minister in a Weimar Republic. He wanted for nothing as he grew up. On Werner's 13th birthday, his mother gave him a telescope so he could view the skies from his bedroom. Just observing the stars wasn't enough for the young von Braun. The story is that he installed a bunch of sky rockets on a wagon, and he launched it down Tiergartenstraza in Berlin, well off street. And it crashed into some fruit vendor's store and created a mess.

And his father had to come down and essentially haul him out of there and pay the vendor for the damage he's caused. Von Braun's aristocratic status had helped him out of a tight corner. It was something he came to rely on in later life. The family didn't understand obviously these crazy experiments nor his enthusiasm for spice flight and rocketry. It was a very out of character for the Prussian aristocracy to be doing this kind of thing. The fruit vendor incident was the first time people were hurt as a result of von Braun's experiments. The 1920s allowed Germany to imagine a brighter future. But by the

By the 1930s, the optimism turned to depression. And the stage would be set for von Braun's rebirth of the rocket. On a summer's morning in 1932, a car carried two men through a thick forest. Their journey was kept off the record. The site was not open to the public. It was secured and not freely accessible. The institution was kept secret. Germany was prohibited from developing weapons.

It was one of the terms of the treaty that ended the First World War. But in a secret location 20 miles south of Berlin, the government opened a research bureau. They called it Kumersdorf. After the Treaty of the Sae, we were not allowed to have certain certain things. However, rockets were not in the treaty, so that meant they could devote time to rocket research. The two men were members of an amateur rocket club in Berlin. They came at the invitation of the Army to show the potential of the technology. The group leader was one Rudolf

Nabil, a former pilot and engineer. He had history with the military. The Army was disillusioned with Rudolph. Naval because he was a bit of a con man. They had already been burned once because in 1930 they had secretly given him 5,000 marks to finish this rocket. He claimed was going to be developed and never got launched. This was Navel's last chance to prove that he could be trusted. But his rocket test failed.

What happens is that a weld on the rocket bursts and it just sends it flying sideways. No Navel's reputation lay in tatters, the generals took a keen interest in his assistant. A 20-year-old Werner von Braun. Von Braun's boyhood dream turned into an obsession, and he became fixated on building a rocket capable of reaching space. He took the first few steps at the University of Berlin, but it was clear that a revolution in rocket engineering would be needed to succeed. It was the army that offered von Braun the opportunity to do what Rudolf Nable couldn't. Werner von Braun played a major role in shaping this place.

The oldest test stands at the Kummastorff site still remained to this day. I think the old German army was traditionally dominated by the aristocratic Prussian officer Corps who weren't particularly schooled in modern technology. If rocketry worked, I think they could see the possibilities of this. And people like von Braun were like enthusiastic schoolboys. With the Army's resources, von Braun designed and built rocket engines of the kind that had never been seen before. The first rocket he launched was called the A2.

The A2, which was about the size of a person in size and about 300 kilograms of thrust. They went up a couple of miles and it seemed like a good first step towards liquid repellent rocketry being a useful weapon in the future. Despite these encouraging signs, the rocket program had financial problems from the very start. It was just a small part of the German secret army plans and its budget was too limiting to match von Braun's great

ambitions, but events in Germany were about to intervene. The following year, Germany's new Chancellor vowed to rebuild Germany. When Hitler came to power, he had a certain image of what Germany should be in mind, namely a superior role of the German Reich within Europe and perhaps in the global sphere. Hitler defied the treaty that had shackled Germany. He publicly announced the creation of a new Air Force, the Luftwaffe. He also invested hundreds of millions of rocksmarks into rebuilding the rest of Germany's military. When Brown was sympathetic to Hitler's funding of the military.

It was good for the little tiny rocket program on the margins of the army, growing into something much bigger. But the rocket program was about to get a welcome shot in the arm from an unlikely source. He is invited to a meeting with the leaders of the Luftwaffe, and they're also exploring rocketry, and they've become really interested in his research. You know, and they want it in. The Luftwaffe offered five million Reichs marks in funding. Von Braun reported the meeting to his army commander. General Becker said,

Can't let the upstart Luftwaffe get ahead of us, and I'll put down six million marks. for the new station. So all of a sudden, they had 11 million marks to build a brand new rocket testing station like nothing that had existed in the world before. With Hitler, as its increasingly powerful dictator, the eyes of the world were on Germany,

never more so than when it hosted the Olympic Games in 1936. And all the while, the rocket program continued, cloaked in secrecy. But von Braun was about to learn the full scale of the challenge ahead of him. The Army leadership were really enthused about the idea that the ballistic missile would be this surprise weapon that would change the course of a war. But it was a huge jump to get from a few hundred kilograms of thrust to tens of thousands

of tons of thrust. To design, build, and test a rocket on that scale, the program needed a bigger site, where rockets could be fired across hundreds of miles. He talked to his mother, and his mother said, why don't you go look at Payne Amunda? Your grandfather used to go duck hunting up there. And so von Braun went up to Payne Munda and fell in love with the place.

Little of the old facility survives today. Philip Orman curates the museum inside the largest building. The power station provided electrical power for the whole armament's side of Pene Munde. This military idea was always present. Let's win a war by a technological revolution. Armament Minister Spears said, quality beats quantity,

and this was the idea from the beginning. But the power plant was only a small part of the Pina Munda facility. There was also a fact for liquefying oxygen, a rocket assembly building, plus officers' quarters and test stands. It was the only facility this size anywhere in the world. Pena Munde was at its peak, 25 square kilometers wide,

more than 900 buildings, and up to 12,000 people working here at one time. Pina Munday for von Braun and the German team became an engineering utopia, where they were living in isolation, where they had plenty of resources, and before the war, they could sort of imagine themselves as space pioneers rather than military engineers. The High Command had given von Braun everything he needed to supercharge the development of the rocket. But it meant he could no longer separate his own work from the politics of the governing power.

He was told you should join the party. There were a lot of occupations in which it was hard not to be a party member. You know, if you said no or you weren't a party member, you could attract unwanted attention. In 1937, von Braun became Nazi member number 5,738,692. And he always said, I had to keep my job. It was something I had to do. It was not something I really cared about or wanted. As time went on, I think von Braun did become wedded to Nazi ideology.

He thought that the Germans could and would win the war. I don't think he was particularly interested in politics. The main interest in his life was Rockets and the career of Fenerner von Braun. But just as von Braun joined the party, the work at Pinamunda was not going well. They concluded that they needed an engine of 25 metric tons of thrust. Well, that was, you know, a scale-up of a factor of, what, a hundred? They had to develop an engine that wouldn't blow itself up, and this was a major problem in the early years. I mean, as they began developing these large, large rocket engines, they very often self-destructed on a test stand.

For nearly a thousand years, the rocket had been a simple concept. A flammable substance, not dissimilar to gunpowder, was compacted into a tube. When it was ignited, the energy expelled from the open end created thrust, sending the rocket into the air. But to make a rocket powerful enough to travel longer distances and into space, von Braun needed to harness the potential of liquefied fuels, which contain more energy for their mass. So you have these separate chambers where you have the fuel and the liquid oxygen, and they have to be blended at exactly the correct pace. A mechanical turbopump controls the mix of propellants and pressurizes them into the combustion chamber. If it's done poorly, it ends in disaster.

All this has to happen while the vehicle flies at thousands of miles per hour on a plume of flame. and while carrying a one-ton warhead in the nose cone. The A-4's failures put the Pina Munda Project in desperate need of cash. But now, Germany had a more immediate concern. Money was needed for tanks, money was needed for small arms, money was needed for munitions. So all these were in competition with the rockets. Only Germany's commander-in-chief had the authority to grant more funds for the rocket program. But so far, Adolf Hitler had shown little interest in the project.

Hitler's first encounter with rocket program in person was a visit to Comerzorff in spring of 1939. Hitler was known to be fascinated by the inner workings of his tanks and aircraft. This was von Braun's opportunity to get the Fuhrer excited about the rocket. Hitler was now viewed as this incredibly great man in Germany, so I'm very sure that von Braun was taken, and I think he says so in some places, was taken by Hitler's charisma and his reputation as a great leader. Von Braun demonstrated the power of the rocket engines he created by firing them inside concrete chambers.

There would have been lots of noise and a lot of heat, and they were trying to get Hitler really excited about rockets, but it doesn't work. While most were bowled over by the spectacle, Hitler remained unmoved. Hitler was a grease monkey. He liked to be on hand with new tanks and planes and guns and things like that. But he was very much a product of the First World War. You know, he looked at conventional weapons and thought, yeah, that's what I like. He could identify with them. He kind of knew how to use them. But rocketry to him seemed, yeah, it's way too complicated.

The plan to excite Hitler about rockets was a failure. The program would have to continue without extra funding. Von Braun would have to wait another two years for an opportunity to make his case. By August 1941, Hitler's war was going well. It kept Britain locked on their side of the channel, and German forces were rapidly marching towards Moscow. For von Braun's team, this presented an opportunity. Hitler was at the peak of his success, apparently, of the invasion of the invasion.

of the Soviet Union. And the Army wanted to make a new presentation of the missile and said, after you win the battle over the Soviet Union, you have to return to attacking Britain. And maybe in the future, America will come into the war. And so we need these wonder weapons to change the course of the war. Von Braun was sent to the Army headquarters in the East. There he met with the Fuhrer for the second time

and explained how the rocket could help win the war. This time, Hitler was convinced. Hitler said, fuel rockets aren't going to make a big difference. What we need are hundreds of thousands of them. We need huge numbers in order to knock Britain out of the war, you know, change the course of a war in the West. The 1941 meeting effectively helped to continue the development of the rocket. But the question was,

When are you actually going to demonstrate this thing works? Now that it had the support of high command, Pina Munda received the funding it needed to develop the A4 rocket. A year on from the meeting, the team prepared to test four versions of the A4. The first exploded on the test stand. The following two went out of control after they were fired. Everything depended on the fourth. On the 3rd of October, 1942, like about 4 in the afternoon,

they finally succeeded in launching the A4, and it worked. Not quite to the edge of space, but close, like 80 or 90 kilometers in the altitude. At 30 years old, Werner von Braun had finally achieved his boyhood dream. He'd built a rocket that could harness the power of liquid fuel and propel itself to the edge of space. His commander said, this afternoon, the spaceship was born.

For Adolf Hitler, the breakthrough couldn't come soon enough. He was relying on the rocket to help turn the tide of the war. But it would fail to bring about a German victory. After the war, von Braun remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life. Even when he joined NASA, he couldn't escape his Nazi past. And for some, he became a figure of parody. Like Kubrick's masterpiece, in which the von Braun figure, Dr. Strangelove, has to bite his own fist to stop him giving a Nazi salute

and calls the president of the U.S. Mime Fuhrer and all that. But even in the 1960s, the public still didn't know the price that was paid for the rocket revolution. Werner von Braun had a secret about his time in the Third Reich, one that could have jeopardized his new life in the United States. When Von Braun and his fellow German rocket engineers came to the United States, there was a sort of collective decision

never to talk about the darker side of their experiences in Germany. All through his American career, von Braun was able to essentially not talk about it or talk about it very, very passingly, because he knew it was dynamite. He knew it was dangerous to talk about. The true story begins 10 months after the A-4's first successful launch.

Von Braun was in his quarters at Pena Munda when the alarm started blaring. The British Air Force realized what's going on here in Pena Munde, and they made aerial photos of Pena Munde Munde, during the 1940. British spies had received intelligence from loose-lipped engineers close to the rocket program.

The reports were initially dismissed as propaganda, but aerial reconnaissance confirmed their target. And finally, they bombed Pena Mende in August 43. This was a huge air raid to Pena Munde to kill the leading engineers in science engineers and scientists while sleeping. Von Braun survived the onslaught. But with their location exposed,

the entire rocket program was moved 200 miles inland to a series of tunnels. What happened inside was kept secret for decades. Von Braun knew that if the truth came out, his life in America could be over. Dr. Louisa Holsroy reveals what happened at the facility. and what von Braun really saw. He would have encountered hundreds of thousands of prisoners

working in assembly in the now inaccessible further parts of the tunnel. He would have seen that they're dressed in these classic striped linen prisoner uniforms. He would have seen that they're not particularly well-fed. Most of the prisoners that von Braun witnessed didn't see daylight for weeks. on end. When they were allowed to rest, they slept in sections of the tunnel in four-story bunk beds. There would be about 1,300 people resting in here. Also, because they're still expanding the tunnels and just because generally working in here stirs up dust, many prisoners develop

lung diseases very quickly, and many people die, including while supposedly rest. thing and they're not necessarily even taken out. So it means that there's basically rotting corpses on the floor underneath the bunk beds. Although von Braun later acknowledged that the conditions at Middlewerk were harsh, he swore he knew nothing about the sufferings of the prisoners. But eyewitness accounts proved that was a lie. Von Braun not only saw the horrors here, he also took part in them. There are stories that he hit prisoners. One of them, I think, may be true. A French survivor tells a story that he was standing inside the tail of the rocket,

doing some construction work, and he was standing on one of the servo motors for the control surfaces when he was doing that. And he feels this tug on his leg, and he's pulled down, and he comes down, you know, comes down, standing in front of him is a young man, very well dressed, and says, you know, you shouldn't be doing that and slaps him on the face a couple of times. If evidence had emerged earlier that von Braun beat prisoners, his career in America would be put in jeopardy. In March 1944, he was inside a Gestapo jail cell. Von Braun was arrested after apparently talking down Germany's chances of winning the war.

And that was in a private conversation, but that was all the Nazis needed. Von Braun was arrested on charges of treason. He was told that if found guilty, he faced execution. But after 10 days in jail, he was given a reprieve. Hitler's trusted engineer, Albert Speer, had managed to convince Hitler that without von Braun, the rocket program would fail. Despite the lucky escape, things had changed. Von Braun now had a target on his back.

Von Braun was this blonde and handsome, well-born German. He sailed through the Third Reich without ever having any real reason to fear for his personal safety. It's after his rest that he knows firsthand, how dangerous it is to be on the wrong side of the Nazi high. command. From that point onward, it would be advantageous for von Braun to make sure no one questioned his loyalty to Nazi Germany. One piece of evidence, however, directly connects von Braun to the worst crimes of the Third Reich. This is basically the most incriminating piece of evidence we have regarding Werner von Braun. Von Braun wrote this letter on August 15, of 1944 and signed it.

The letter is regarding a trip von Braun made to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. So he says, yeah, I drove to Buchenwald and selected some suitable prisoners to work in the Middleberg. We know not just that he visited here over 20 times, but with this letter we also have evidence that, you know, he is personally going into a concentration. concentration camp, sees what that camp is like, and selects prisoners. I think a lot of them were just complete enthusiasts for the Third Reich, for whatever reason. There were many reasons to support Hitler, just like there are many reasons to support any political figure, and not everyone has the same motive in doing so.

And those guys got swept up in it. Six months after von Braun's release from prison, the rocket bombardment of London and Antwerp began, and the A4 gained a new unofficial designation. V2. So those V2 rockets were incredibly useful as terror tools. One of the scariest aspects of it is you never knew when it was coming. It was traveling at Mach 4 by the time it was coming in to hit. You had no idea it was there until the ground around you exploded.

Nearly 1,400 rockets fell on London. At Middlewark, over 20,000 people died building the V2. What happened with Finn Brown was that he was not an enthusiastic Nazi in the sense of believing in the ideology, but he gradually became co-opted by the Third Reich, like so many other people, in part because he was raised in a very conservative nationalist family, and the Nazis were representing themselves as the new modern version of the people. version of old conservative values, family, land, you know, the military, national greatness. But the V2 failed to deliver a Nazi victory.

As the Third Reich crumbled, it seemed von Braun's dream of spaceships lay in tatters. However, he was about to be given a second chance by another state with an interest in rockets. Two days after Hitler shot himself, von Braun and his colleagues surrendered to an American platoon. Eventually, they ended up in Huntsville, Alabama. Dr. Stephen Waring has researched how the Germans changed the city. Von Braun is seen as sort of a Huntsville's Night in Shining Armor. The government brought von Braun and his colleagues to the United States, on the condition that they continue developing the rocket.

The American military was concerned about falling behind the Soviet Union, and one way to make a leap ahead was to bring German rocketry experts to the United States. America was preparing for the next battleground, a fight for global dominance against the Soviet Union. Now with American funding, von Braun began to Brown began designing rockets large enough to carry nuclear warheads across continents. But the Cold War presented another unexpected opportunity for Von Brown. America's new large rockets would be able to realize von Brown's boyhood dream after all. There is no space program in the United States.

So he's trying to sell it to the military. He's trying to sell it to the leadership. But he also understands, in a democratic society, you have to sell from the United States. the public. Von Braun used his characteristic charm to sell his idea of spaceflight to the American people. He did this working with the media, first with Collier's Magazine and second with Disney. Von Brown's campaign helped convince the United States to open a second front in the Cold War. It began a race to the moon, Western democracy versus Eastern Communists. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy,

but because they are hard. The United States approved the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. To get a man on the moon, they built the mighty Saturn 5. It was the largest rocket the world had ever seen. The crew of Apollo 11 became global celebrities. back home in Huntsville, Von Braun was the local hero. There was a community celebration here downtown. In a moment of manufactured spontaneity, von Brown was lifted on the shoulders of some younger men and carried through the crowd

where he made a brief speech. It's extraordinary how quickly von Braun is sort of reinventing after the war. When he's in America, he starts becoming this public figure. You know, he's appearing on sort of kind of children's TV programs as a cuddly Uncle Werner. Well, Cudley Uncle Verna was a member of the SS. Cudley Uncle Verna was making rockets that killed people. Werner von Braun spent nearly half his life living as a US citizen, and he became an American hero. It was made possible by officials who helped author a more palatable past. and made a decision to leave some stones unturned.

I mean, the question is whether we should have taken him or not, I've been asked that question many times. It was very hard to imagine that we didn't take him because otherwise the Soviets would have taken him or somebody else would have taken him. Of course, he got away without being held accountable, you know, and so little knowledge was actually available to the general public that he never had to really

demonstrate any concern, or never had to pay any career price for it. Of all of Hitler's engineers, none shed the baggage of their Nazi past so effectively or realized their personal ambition so completely.