29 September 1945 - Wernher Von Braun arrives at Ft. Bliss, Texas, with six other German rocket specialists.
As part of Operation Paperclip, the US government got 1,600 German scientists into the US. A lot of them were key in the technological development of the German army.
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Fear was that they would fall into Soviet hands after the collapse of the Third Reich.
Amongst those scientists was an SS-Sturmbannführer that invented the devastating German V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun.
Wernher von Braun (dressed in civil clothes) together with Nazi generals in Peenemünde, Germany in March 1941.
After it became clear that Germany had lost WW2, Von Braun and his team fled to Austria and surrendered to the Americans.
Shortly after his surrender, Von Braun made the following speech to the press:
We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
When in the US he became the father of rocket technology and space science in the United States.
He played an essential part in the development of the Saturn V launch vehicle, that brought the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.
Read more about Wernher von Braun.
