ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER

Issue #041   ·   This Changed Everything   ·   July 2026

Everyone knows a Nazi rocket scientist took America to the Moon. It’s become a sort of cocktail-party fact, delivered with a raised eyebrow: did you know the bloke behind Apollo used to work for Hitler?

The eyebrow is doing a lot of work there, because it lets you file the thing away as a curiosity. One awkward hire. A single deal with the devil, safely in the past.

It was not one hire. It was roughly sixteen hundred of them, brought to the United States over fourteen years. And it was not just an American story. On the other side of a ruined Germany, the Soviet Union was running the identical operation — same rocket, same engineers, same logic — and it was their half of the haul that put the first satellite and the first man into orbit.

The uncomfortable truth underneath the cocktail-party version is this: the two nations that spent the next forty years pointing rockets at each other got those rockets from the same place. The Cold War’s two space programmes were built from a single German source, divided up like furniture between the people who reached it first.

To understand why both superpowers wanted these men so badly, you have to understand what they had built.

The V-2 — the Germans called it the Vergeltungswaffe, the “vengeance weapon” — was the first object humans ever built that touched the edge of space on its way to a target. It flew faster than sound, so the people it killed never heard it coming; the first they knew of a V-2 was the explosion. More than 3,000 were fired at London, Antwerp and other Allied cities in the last months of the war. They killed somewhere around 5,000 people, possibly more.

Here is the fact that ought to stop you. The V-2 killed far more people in the factory than it ever did at the target.

The rockets were assembled by concentration-camp prisoners in a vast underground tunnel complex called Mittelwerk, in the Harz mountains, served by a camp called Mittelbau-Dora. Prisoners dug the tunnels by hand, then lived and died in them — starved, beaten, worked past collapse, hanged in batches when the SS suspected sabotage. Around 60,000 people passed through the Dora camp system. An estimated 20,000 of them did not come out. The historian Michael Neufeld, the leading scholar of the programme and curator of the V-2 at the Smithsonian, put the arithmetic plainly: roughly twice as many people died producing the rocket as were killed by it.

Keep that tunnel in mind. Everything that follows — Sputnik, Gagarin, the flag on the Moon — comes out of it.

The man at the top of both superpowers’ shopping lists was Wernher von Braun: charming, brilliant, thirty-three years old, and the technical director of the V-2 programme.

The myth, carefully tended for decades afterwards, was that von Braun was a dreamer — a starry-eyed spaceflight romantic who held his nose and worked for the regime because it was the only way to build his rockets. There is a sliver of truth in it. He genuinely did dream of spaceflight, and had since he was a boy.

But the documented record is harder than the myth. Von Braun was a member of the Nazi Party and held a commission in the SS, rising to the rank of Sturmbannführer — major. He visited Mittelwerk, where the slave labour worked; this is not seriously disputed. What is disputed is how much he saw, how much power he had to change it, and how much he simply chose not to. He always insisted he was powerless to object and had no role in the abuses. Some camp survivors remembered it differently and testified that he was present for brutality. Historians have argued about it ever since.

None of which mattered to the United States in 1945, because von Braun and his team had done something clever as the Reich fell apart: they’d hidden fourteen tons of V-2 blueprints in a mine shaft, then deliberately surrendered to the Americans rather than the advancing Soviets. They were, in effect, offering themselves for sale to the highest bidder. The Americans bought.

There was a problem. President Truman had authorised the recruitment of German scientists on one explicit condition: no active Nazis, no war criminals.

A significant number of the men on the wanted list were exactly that.

The agency running the programme — the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, or JIOA — solved the problem the way institutions usually do, which is to say they cheated. They rewrote the files. Security assessments that described recruits as ardent Nazis or security threats were quietly edited into portraits of harmless apolitical engineers. Von Braun’s own military-government file reportedly called him a security threat; the version that reached the visa desk had softened that into a man whose politics were merely “inward.”

This is where the operation got its name. Recruiters clipped a paperclip to the folder of any scientist whose record had been cleaned up enough to slip past the rules. Operation Paperclip. The paperclip was the whitewash.

Around 1,600 German scientists and engineers came to America this way between 1945 and 1959. The most consequential were von Braun’s rocket men, who went first to Texas, then to Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the US Army’s early missiles — and then, when the civilian space agency was created, walked those same skills straight into NASA. Von Braun became the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V: still the most powerful rocket ever successfully flown, and the one that carried every Apollo crew to the Moon.

His deputy at Mittelwerk, a man named Arthur Rudolph, had been the operations director of the slave-labour factory itself. In America he became the project director of the Saturn V. He received one of NASA’s highest honours in 1969. Then, in 1984 — his usefulness long spent — the US government confronted him with his own wartime record, the record it had once buried to bring him in, and he agreed to renounce his citizenship and leave the country rather than face prosecution. The same file, weaponised twice: once to get him in, once to push him out.

Here is the part the cocktail-party version leaves out entirely, and the part that makes this a story about the whole Space Age rather than just an American embarrassment.

The Soviets were doing the identical thing.

The Americans had grabbed von Braun and the top tier, but they hadn’t got everyone — and they hadn’t got the Mittelwerk tunnels themselves, which sat in what became the Soviet occupation zone. So the USSR set up its own recovery operation, rebuilt V-2s from the leftover parts, and put German engineers back to work under a young Soviet rocket designer named Sergei Korolev.

Then, on the night of 21–22 October 1946, they made it permanent. In an operation code-named Osoaviakhim, Soviet forces knocked on doors across their zone in the small hours and deported around 2,000 to 2,500 German specialists — with their families, some 6,000 people — to the USSR by train, with no notice. Roughly 500 worked in rocketry. A team of about 170 of them, led by Helmut Gröttrup, a former deputy of von Braun’s, ended up on an island in a lake near Moscow, helping Korolev reverse-engineer the V-2 into the first Soviet ballistic missile, the R-1. It flew in 1948: a Russian-built copy of a German rocket designed in the same programme that produced the American one.

Follow the two threads forward and they end in the same decade.

The German source, split in 1945, became two rocket programmes. The American branch ran V-2 to Redstone to Saturn V, and put twelve men on the Moon. The Soviet branch ran V-2 to R-1 to R-7, and in October 1957 used that R-7 to put a beeping metal sphere called Sputnik into orbit — the shock that started the Space Race in earnest — and then, in 1961, to make Yuri Gagarin the first human in space.

Every one of those milestones traces, by a short and well-documented path, back to the same weapon: the first machine humans ever built that could reach space, assembled by prisoners who were worked to death making it.

This is why it belongs in This Changed Everything and not merely in a folder marked “awkward history.” The satellite over your head right now, the GPS in your phone, the images from Mars, the very idea that humans are a spacefaring species — all of it grew from a vengeance weapon and the deal two governments made to get their hands on the people who built it. Both superpowers decided, independently and at the same moment, that the men who made the rocket were worth more than the crimes attached to them.

They may even have been right about the strategic value. That is precisely what makes it uncomfortable. This isn’t a story where the villains lose. It’s a story where the calculation worked — where expedience paid off so handsomely that we named a decade after the result and put it in the science books, with the tunnel edited out.

And it isn’t over. In April 2026, four astronauts flew around the Moon on Artemis II — the first humans past low Earth orbit since 1972 — and America and China are now openly racing to land there again before 2030, with SpaceX and Blue Origin building the machines. It is a new space race, and the politicians say so out loud. But every rocket in it, on every side, is descended from the same one: the vengeance weapon from the tunnel in the Harz. We are still, in the most literal sense, flying on it.

We didn’t reach the stars in spite of the V-2. We reached them because of it.

The first step towards the Moon was taken underground, in the dark, by people who never saw the sky.

Michael J. Neufeld — Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007) and The Rocket and the Reich (1995); and Neufeld’s essays for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (“‘Wonder Weapons’ and Slave Labor,” 2020). Source of the estimate that roughly twice as many people died producing the V-2 as were killed by it, and of von Braun’s role as technical director. Neufeld is the leading academic authority on the programme.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia — “Mittelbau (Dora)” / “Dora-Mittelbau: Overview”: ~60,000 prisoners through the camp system, ~20,000 deaths, and the caution that the camp’s emphasis on weapons production has sometimes been overstated (per historian Jens-Christian Wagner).

Annie Jacobsen — Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (2014); and Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda (1991). Source of the ~1,600 figure, the JIOA file-whitewashing, the origin of the “paperclip” name, and von Braun hand-picking labourers.

History.com — “What Was Operation Paperclip?”: Truman’s ban on recruiting active Nazis, and the JIOA/OSS practice of whitewashing incriminating records to bypass it.

Smithsonian Magazine — “Wernher von Braun’s V-2 Rocket” (Neufeld interview) and “The Rest of the Rocket Scientists”: V-2 effectiveness, casualty context, and the Soviet recruitment of German engineers around Moscow.

Encyclopedia Astronautica (Mark Wade) and the standard reference literature — “Operation Osoaviakhim,” “German influence on Soviet rocketry,” “Helmut Gröttrup”: the 21–22 October 1946 deportation of ~2,200 specialists, Gröttrup’s ~170-strong team, Korolev and NII-88, and the R-1 as a V-2 copy first launched in 1948. Cross-checked against Boris Chertok, Rockets and People (NASA History Series) and Matthias Uhl’s archival work.

Arthur Rudolph: US Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations case record and contemporaneous reporting on his 1984 departure and renunciation of US citizenship; NASA biographical records on his Saturn V project directorship.

Note on von Braun’s culpability: this remains genuinely contested among historians. His SS membership (rank of Sturmbannführer/major) and his visits to the Mittelwerk factory are documented. His personal role in, or knowledge of, the mistreatment of prisoners is disputed — he denied involvement; some survivors testified otherwise; he was never charged.

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