5. Father of the Space Age, and Nazi War Criminal
Wernher von Braun was a visionary genius who created America’s space program. We went to the Moon, and might someday colonize space, because of him. He was also responsible for the deaths of thousands of slave workers, who perished while building his rockets in WWII. Before moving to the US, von Braun had been an SS officer who developed and built the world’s first ballistic missiles, the V-2 rockets, which killed thousands of civilians in London, Antwerp, and elsewhere. After the war, he put on an oblivious scientist act, pretending to have been too focused on his work to have fully understood the horrors of the regime he served.
In reality, von Braun personally supervised the manufacturing of rockets, using tens of thousands of slave laborers, about 20,000 of whom died of starvation, maltreatment, or were murdered by SS guards while building his rockets. He was brought to America after the war in Operation Paperclip, which sought to make use of Nazi scientists, regardless of their wartime activities. He was instrumental in developing America’s ballistic missile program, and the rocket that launched America’s first space satellite. He joined NASA, oversaw the Saturn V rockets that got us to the Moon, and received the National Medal of Science in recognition.
