16 Terrible People Who Knew How to Lay on the Charm or Inspire Others

16. The Founding Father of NASA and the Space Age Was a War Criminal

Wernher von Braun (1912 – 1977) was a genius, visionary, and brilliant engineering manager who created America’s space program. He is why we went to the Moon, and why someday we might go to and colonize Mars. A charismatic figure, he had a hit kids’ TV show to proselytize science and space. He was also responsible for the deaths of thousands of slave workers, who perished while building his rockets in WWII.

Von Braun was an SS officer who developed and built the world’s first ballistic missiles, the V-2 rockets. His rockets, with a one ton warhead, killed thousands of civilians in London, Antwerp, and other cities. After the war, he put up an oblivious scientist act, and pretended to have been too focused on his egghead work to have fully understood the horrors of the regime he served.

In reality, far from being oblivious, von Braun was a hands-on participant in war crimes. He personally supervised the manufacturing of rockets, using tens of thousands of slave laborers. About 20,000 of von Braun’s slave workers died of starvation, maltreatment, or were murdered by guards while building his rockets. He had firsthand knowledge of the horrific workplace conditions.

He was secretly moved to the US after the war in Operation Paperclip, which sought to make use of Nazi scientists, irrespective of their wartime activities. He worked for the US Army in developing a ballistic missile program, and he developed the rocket that launched America’s first space satellite. He joined NASA when it was created, oversaw the Saturn V rockets that got us to the Moon, and received the National Medal of Science in recognition.

Von Braun was history’s most influential rocket engineer. He contributed greatly to advancing the space sciences, and if we ever become a multiplanetary species – something many scientists see as the only safeguard against our extinction in the next millennium – it will be thanks in large part to him. Does that remove the stain of having been a loyal Nazi and member of the SS? Does that make up for the tens of thousands of slave laborers who died under his supervision in WWII? On balance, was the man a monster or a hero?

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources & Further Reading

Air & Space Magazine, January 1st, 2008 – How Much Did Wernher von Braun Know, and When Did He Know It?

All That is Interesting – Gilles de Rais, the Child Serial Killer Who Fought Alongside Joan of Arc

Cracked – 5 Reasons Horrible Dictators Always Catch Us Off Guard

Encyclopedia Britannica – Alcibiades, Athenian Politician and General

Encyclopedia Britannica – Mao Zedong

English Monarchs – Edward I, 1272 – 1307

Guardian, The, March 31st, 2011 – Dictator Lit: Saddam Hussein Tortured Metaphors, Too

Guardian, The, April 9th, 2017 – Eric Gill: Can We Separate the Artist From the Abuser?

Head Stuff – Jonathan Wild, the Thief-Taker General

Listverse – 10 Brutal Dictators With a Secret Soft Side