Towards the end of World War II as Germany's Third Reich was falling, intelligence experts in Washington, Paris, London, and Moscow were working to find the brilliant engineering team, headed by Wernher von Braun, that had designed Hitler's Vengeance Weapon, the V-2 rocket.
The stakes in finding the V-2 technology were high -- the country that found it first would own the most advanced work in rocketry to date. Everyone wanted to get their hands on it, but no one knew where to look. The United States, however, had an advantage: while the Americans were looking for von Braun, von Braun and his team were looking for them.
The German rocket scientists wanted to surrender to the Allies because they knew their own SS troops would gun them down in order to keep the V-2 a secret. They chose the Americans because, as one of von Braun's team later explained, surrendering to the Americans was the team's only choice among the Allies: the Russians terrified them, they couldn't tolerate the French, and they didn't think Britain could afford them. In America they might at least have the chance to carry on their work.
Thanks to information that von Braun himself supplied, U.S. troops moved into the V-2 production facilities in Peenemunde just ahead of the Red Army, and, almost directly under the Soviets' noses, rushed the various rocket parts onto trains to be shipped stateside for reassembly and testing. As a result, the US got the coveted V-2 technology, and, even more importantly, the United States got von Braun.
