German, later American, rocket engineer: technical director of the V-2 programme at Peenemunde, brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip, later director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the man most responsible for the Saturn V.
The part the space history usually skips
The V-2 was built at Mittelbau-Dora with concentration-camp labour, and more people died making the rocket than were killed by it. Von Braun visited the tunnels. That fact belongs in the same node as the Saturn V, and it is the reason the transfer of German rocketry to the American programme is a moral question and not only a technical one, which is the register The Hunt for Zero Point keeps when it walks the same tunnels.
Why the UFO literature calls on him
He is cited at second hand for Hermann Oberth’s remarks of the 1950s about craft from another solar system, and The Day After Roswell routes part of its transistor claim through an account of 1947 briefings attributed to both men. Neither claim has a document behind it. What is documented is the transfer itself, and von Braun is its central figure.
Connections
Operation Paperclip · Mittelbau-Dora · Hermann Oberth · The Day After Roswell · The Hunt for Zero Point · Hans Kammler · Redstone Arsenal · Project Horizon