Original subtitles

Five, four, three, two, one.

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. Wernher von Braun.

Wernher von Braun 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 V2 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 gonna turn the tide of the war.

Thousands died at the hands

of von Braun's rocket.

Yet somehow, he was able to escape justice

and realise his greatest dream.

I find it complete and total (beep).

The difference between being able to deny that

and admit it could have been

you're sitting in the dock in Nuremberg or you're not.

Von 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

and the secret support of the US government,

one of Hitler's most notorious engineers

helped in mankind's greatest achievement.

Engineers were the beating heart of the Third Reich,

forging advanced weapons,

feeding the Nazi war machine,

and motivating the masses.

They executed history's greatest horrors.

And yet for some, their true role

would remain hidden for decades.

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.

Amongst those inspired by rocketry

was the firstborn son of the noble von Braun family.

Wernher 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.

Yeah, he was posh.

And his dad was a minister in the Weimar Republic.

You know, he wanted for nothing as he grew up.

On Wernher's 13th birthday,

his mother gave him a telescope

so he could view the skies from his bedroom.

But just observing the stars

wasn't enough for the young von Braun.

The story is that he installed

a bunch of skyrockets on a waggon,

and he launched it down Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin,

a 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 space flight and rocketry.

It was very out of character for

the Prussian aristocracy to be doing this kinds 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 1930s, 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.

Germany was prohibited from developing weapons.

It was one of the terms of a 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 Kummersdorf.

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 Nebel,

a former pilot and engineer.

He had history with the military.

The Army was disillusioned with Rudolf Nebel

'cause he was a bit of a con man.

They had already been burned once, 'cause in 1930,

they had secretly given him 5,000 marks

to finish this rocket he claimed

was gonna be developed and never got launched.

This was Nebel's last chance to prove

that he could be relied upon, but his rocket test failed.

What happens is that a weld on the rocket bursts,

and and it just sends it flying sideways.

Although Nebel's reputation lay in tatters,

the generals took a keen interest in his assistant,

a 20-year-old Wernher 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 Nebel couldn't.

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 kilogrammes 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 programme had financial problems

from the very start.

It was just a small part of the German secret army plans,

and its budget was too limited

to match von Braun's greater ambitions.

But events in Germany were about to intervene.

Hitler, leader of the German

national movement, is made Chancellor of Germany,

and Berlin goes wild in celebration of his victory.

The following year,

Germany's new chancellor vowed to rebuild the country.

When Hitler came to power, he had a certain image

of what Germany should be in mind,

namely, a superior role of the German rise 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 Reichsmarks into rebuilding the rest of the military.

Von Braun was sympathetic

to Hitler's funding of the military.

It was good for the little, tiny rocket programme

on the margins of the army,

growing into something much bigger.

But the rocket programme was about to get

a welcome shot in the arm from an unlikely source.

He's invited to a meeting

with the leaders of the Luftwaffe,

and they're also exploring rocketry,

and they're become really interested in his research,

you know, and they wanted in.

The Luftwaffe offered

5 million Reichsmarks 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 6 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 programme 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 kilogrammes

of thrust to tens of thousands of tonnes of thrust.

To design, build, and test a rocket

on that scale, the programme 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 Peenemunde?

Your grandfather used to go duck hunting up there."

And so von Braun went up to Peenemunde

and fell in love with the place.

Little of the old facility survives today.

Philipp Aumann curates the museum

inside the largest building.

The power station provided electrical power

for the whole armament side of Peenemunde.

This military idea was always present.

"Let's win a war by a technological revolution."

Armament Minister Speer said, "Quality beats quantity,"

and this was the idea from the beginning.

But the power plant was only a small part

of the Peenemunde facility.

There was also a factory for liquefying oxygen,

officers' quarters,

plus a rocket assembly building and test stands.

It was the only facility this size anywhere in the world.

Peenemunde was, at its peak, 25 square kilometres wide

in the modern 900 buildings,

and up to 12,000 people working here at one time.

Peenemunde 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 granted von Braun

everything he needed to supercharge

the development of the rocket.

But it meant he could no longer separate his 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 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 Wernher von Braun.

But just as von Braun joined the party,

the work at Peenemunde was not going well.

They concluded that they needed an engine

of 25 metric tonnes of thrust.

Well, that was, you know,

a scale up of a factor of, what, 100?

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 1,000 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 liquified 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 turbo pump

controls the mix of propellants

and pressurises 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 tonne warhead in the nose cone.

The A4's failures put the Peenemunde 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 programme.

But so far, Adolf Hitler had shown

little interest in the project.

Hitler's first encounter with the rocket programme in person

was a visit to Kummersdorf in the 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 sure that von Braun was taken,

and I think he says so in some place,

he was taken by Hitler's charisma

and his reputation as a great leader.

von Braun demonstrated the power

of the rocket engines he'd created

by firing them inside concrete chambers.

There would've 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,

"Well, yeah, that's what I like."

He could identify with them.

He kind of knew how to use them.

But rocketry to him seemed, "It's way too complicated."

The plan to excite Hitler

about rockets was a failure.

The programme 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.

He'd 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 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 know, 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 gonna 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,"

or, 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

gonna demonstrate this thing works?"

Now it had the support of the high command,

Peenemunde received the funding it needed

to develop the A4 rocket.

A year on from that 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 four 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 kilometres in the altitude.

At 30 years old,

Wernher 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 US,

"Mein Fuhrer," and all that.

But even in the 1960s,

the public still didn't know the price

that was paid for the rocket revolution.

Wernher von Braun had a secret about his time

in the Third Reich, one that could have

jeopardised 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 A4's first successful launch.

Von Braun was in his quarters at Peenemunde

when the alarms started blaring.

The British Air Force realised

what's going on here in Peenemunde,

and they made aerial photos of Peenemunde during 1943.

British spies had received intelligence

from loose lipped engineers close to the rocket programme.

The reports were initially dismissed as propaganda,

but aerial reconnaissance confirmed their target.

And finally, they bombed Peenemunde in August '43.

This was a huge air raid to Peenemunde

to kill the leading engineers

and scientists while sleeping.

Von Braun survived the onslaught,

but with their location exposed,

the entire rocket programme 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. Luisa Hulsroj Roy reveals what happened here,

and what von Braun really saw.

So this particular tunnel is one of the two main tunnels

that would've gone all the way

kind of south to north through this mountain.

He would've encountered hundreds,

if not thousands of prisoners working in assembly

in the now inaccessible further parts of the tunnel.

He would've seen that they're dressed

in these classic striped, linen prisoner uniforms.

He would've 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.

This was one of four dormitory chambers.

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 resting,

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 Mittelwerk were harsh,

he swore he knew nothing about

the sufferings of the prisoners.

But eyewitness accounts suggest 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, you know, comes down,

and 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.

But is it possible that his alleged actions

were necessary to save his life?

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 programme 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,

you know, well born German.

You know, 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 Wernher von Braun.

Von Braun wrote this letter

on August 15th, 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 Mittelwerk."

We know not just that he visited here over 20 times,

but with this letter, we also have evidence that, you know,

he's personally going into a 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 travelling 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 Mittelwerk, over 20,000 people died building the V2.

What happened with von Braun 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 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 colleague

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

Huntsvilles knight in shining armour.

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 designing rockets large enough

to carry nuclear warheads across continents.

But the Cold War presented another

unexpected opportunity for von Braun.

America's new large rockets would be able to realise

von Braun's boyhood dream after all.

There is no space programme 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 to the public.

Von Braun used his characteristic charm

to sell his idea of space flight to the American people.

He did this working with the media,

first with Collier's magazine,

and second, with Disney.

Von Braun'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 communism.

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 V.

It was the largest rocket the world had ever seen.

Five, four, three,

two, one, zero.

All engines running.

That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

The crew of Apollo 11

became global celebrities.

But back home in Huntsville, von Braun was the local hero.

There was a community celebration here downtown.

In a moment of manufactured spontaneity,

von Braun 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 reinvented 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 programmes as a cuddly Uncle Wernher.

Well, cuddly Uncle Wernher was a member of the SS.

Cuddly Uncle Wernher was making rockets that killed people.

Wernher 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,

'cause otherwise, the Soviets would've taken him

or somebody else would've 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 realised their personal ambition so completely.

♪ Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun ♪

♪ A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience ♪

♪ Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown ♪

♪ Nazi, schmazi, says Wernher von Braun ♪

♪ Don't say that he's hypocritical ♪

♪ Say rather that he's apolitical ♪

♪ Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ♪

♪ That's not my department, that's Wernher von Braun ♪

♪ You too may be a big hero

♪ Once you've learned to count backwards to zero ♪

♪ In German or English, I know how to count down ♪

♪ Und I'm learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun ♪