Do we like Wernher von Braun?
Our score: 2 out of 10. His role in decisions on prisoner labour for the V-2 outweighs a late, mixed civil rights record and the Apollo-era work.
Born in 1912 into a Prussian baron's family, von Braun was a rocket obsessive who ended up running the Army's rocket centre at Peenemünde while still in his twenties. He got a physics doctorate in 1934 from army-funded rocket research, and his team built the V-2, the first long-range ballistic missile. Everything he wanted to do with rockets was paid for by a regime that wanted weapons.
Here's where the story turns ugly. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and, by his own later account, the SS in 1940 after being told refusing would be politically inconvenient. By 1943 he held the SS rank of major. Once production went underground, PBS reports, he was in direct contact with prisoners and with decisions on how to use them.
NASA's own biography says he was well aware of the terrible conditions at the underground Mittelwerk factory and was involved in decision-making about the use of slave labour from the Mittelbau-Dora camp. He visited the site about a dozen times, and PBS notes he discussed bringing in skilled prisoners from Buchenwald. In 1969 he testified in a West German trial of three former SS men from Dora. He denied personal responsibility and distanced himself from the factory. A museum article on the history alleges he was aware of the labour despite his later claims.
He was never prosecuted. The Americans brought him over in 1945 because they wanted his rockets, and he sold himself as an apolitical scientist who called his party membership nominal and mentioned camp labour only obliquely. His SS membership didn't become widely known until 1984, after Justice Department records came out. That's not a man who faced it, which is the bit that matters for the good-person test.
The harm check isn't about gay or trans issues, because nothing in what I read touches them. It's about what he did to people. On race, the record is mixed. PBS calls his Huntsville record uneven at best: he did not back change during the lunch-counter sit-ins, scribbling “Let's talk this over” on a memo, and he objected when a hearing officer found discrimination. He did later help expand co-op programs with a dozen Black colleges, and with NASA's boss he used a Saturn V firing and a lecture to push back on Governor George Wallace.
The good stuff is real, but it's the kind you can't set against the other pile. He consulted for Disney on its 1950s space television programs, and Huntsville gave him a hero's welcome after Apollo 11. PBS also reports he tried in 1944 to help a French physicist who was a prisoner. Nothing recent has come up on him, no fresh stoush or news, only the old argument about his name on buildings.