As Germany crumbled towards the end of World War II, the Allies began a frantic search for the terrifying V-2 missile and the team that had designed it. Since the Peenemunde firing range where the V-2 had been developed fell within the designated Soviet zone in Germany, the Russians should have been the first to find the work of master rocketeer Wernher von Braun. But when the Red Army arrived at Peenemunde in the summer of 1945, they found nothing that would help them build their own supersonic missiles.
Thanks to information given to them by von Braun himself, U.S. troops entered Peenemunde and the V-2 construction facilities at nearby Nordhausen ahead of the Soviets and stole every scrap of worthwhile V-2 technology before the Red Army got there. But American troops not only found blueprints and rocket parts at Nordhausen. They also stumbled upon a gruesome secret and a controversy that von Braun would never fully live down.
The Nazis had forced slave laborers to assemble the V-2s, and at the barracks at Nordhausen lay thousands of corpses. By the end of the war an average of 150 slave laborers per day had died at the plant -- more people than the V-2 bombs themselves had killed falling on their targets in London and Antwerp.
Throughout the rest of his life Von Braun was accused of making a hellish bargain with Hitler and for ignoring the deaths of so many innocent people. But just how much did he really know? To his interrogators just after the war, von Braun denied he'd had any detailed knowledge of what was happening. Years later, however, he would confess to a friend, "I did not know what was going on, but I suspected. And in my position I could have found out, but I didn't and I despise myself for it."
