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Philip Spiess
Bruce (and others):
Edgar Loar, our WHHS band director (7th through 11th grades), at some point showed us (I do not know why, unless he was having a boring day), old newsreels from Nazi Germany of the early days of Wernher von Braun's rocket launches in Germany (I have no idea of where he had acquired these, since this was before the Internet, though they're probably all on the Internet now). They were (to me) hilarious: you'd see a rocket go up. -- and then come down (BOOM!); you'd see a rocket standing on the launch pad, and then it would topple over and take off horizontally at ground level; you'd see a rocket take off, make a mighty parabolic arc and come down behind some trees -- and you'd wait for the explosion (BOOM!); you'd see a rocket take off, turn horizontal, and shoot in the direction of scientists running like crazy for cover before it would blow up what appeared to be, say, a lab building. All good fun (for us latter day Americans). It gave special meaning to Harvard math student and M.I.T. professor Tom Lehrer's later satiric song, "Wernher von Braun," the lyrics of which included: "'Vonce ze rockets are up, who cares vere ze come down? Zat's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."
At the end of World War II, both American and Russian armies were eager to find and capture top German scientists, particularly those who had been working on weapons of war and those who, it was believed, had been working on developing an atomic bomb. Of the first group, Wernher von Braun and 87 other German rocket scientists (as well as a total of 1,600 German scientists) were smuggled out of Germany under Operation Paperclip into the United States because of their work on the V-1 and V-2 rockets (not that those had been any great success -- see above). [N.B.: President Harry Truman forbade any Nazi party members being recruited for scientific work by our government, but our military forces deemed their work so important that their Nazi pasts were downplayed or otherwise whitewashed -- remember it was President Eisenhower, former Supreme Allied Commander, who started our rocket program.] Of the second group (and Germany had a nuclear weapons program, begun in 1939, called the Uranverein), the top scientist in Nazi Germany, Werner Heisenberg, who had won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "creation of quantum mechanics," was captured with his associates (Nazi Germany's experimental nuclear reactor was captured at Haigerloch and dismantled); they were taken to Farm Hall in England, where they were housed together and their conversations among themselves secretly recorded. Heisenberg later returned to Germany to become head of several prestigious scientific institutes. Wernher von Braun, who became head of the Saturn, Explorer, and Apollo space programs, is buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery on King Street in Alexandria, Virginia, in a grave marked only by a simple bronze plaque.
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