Wernher Von Braun was the second of three sons born to Baron Magnus von Braun and Baroness Emmy von Quistorp. He was born on March 23, 1912 in Wirsitz, Posen. Wernher was always a visionary, and when he was ten years old he decided his goal in life would be to "help turn the wheel of time." His interests led him to do many things in his early life including composing several pieces of music and recycling old automobile parts to build a new car. Because of spending so much of his time building a car, he flunked in mathematics and physics. However, it was his decision to explore rocketry that led to his great impact on history.
Von Braun, at the age of 16, organized an observatory construction team. His volunteers built a complete observatory in their spare time, working as diggers, bricklayers, and carpenters. In 1930, when he was 20, he enrolled at the Berlin Institute of Technology. He received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, and was offered a grant to conduct and develop scientific investigations on liquid-fueled rocket engines. A few years later Wernher received his PhD in physics from the University of Berlin. In the mid 1930's, rocket clubs sprang up all over Germany. One of these clubs, the Verein fur Raumschiffarht had engineer Wernher von Braun as a member.
By 1934 von Braun had a team of 80 engineers building rockets in Kummersdorf. With the launch of two rockets, Max and Moritz, in 1934, von Braun's proposal to work on a jet-assisted take-off device for heavy bombers and all-rocket fighters was granted, But Kummersdorf was too small for the work he needed to do, so a new facility had to be built. Peenemunde, on the Baltic coast, was picked as the new site. Peenemunde was large enough to launch and monitor rockets over ranges up to about 200 miles, with observing instruments, with no risk of harming people and property. He was then arrested by the SS and the Gestapo for crimes against the state because he kept on talking about building rockets which would go into orbit around the Earth and perhaps go to the Moon. His crime was indulging in frivolous dreams when he should have been concentrating on building bigger rocket bombs for the Nazi war machine. After arriving back, von Braun immediately assembled his planning staff and asked them to decide how and to who they should surrender to.
Wernher von Braun. Idealist and visionary. Braun began his career in 1925 with the hopes and dreams of leading humanity to the stars. Do you know what he said when the first rocket hit London? He said that “the rocket performed perfectly, it just landed on the wrong planet.”
The development of the V weapons were extremely important to the Nazi regime. In 1941 the United States entered the war; the Germans felt right away that they were outmatched in the weapons category. The Nazi’s could not produce enough weapons, and the weapons they did produce were not extremely powerful. This is when the Nazi leader and Germany’s chancellor Adolph Hitler decided that the only way to compete and beat the Allies was to make new and innovative weapons. Now the “Vergeltungswaffen” or “weapons of revenge” were now made a priority by the Nazi’s. The weapons of revenge were named the V-1 and V-2. Germany’s Air Force started to develop the V-1 “flying bomb”, while the Army took to the V-2 rocket bomb (Sheehan). To make these advanced weapons work a lot of testing would be needed. The earltesting took place at Kummersdorf, which is about 27...
Robert Hutchings Goddard was a futurist. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on October 5, 1882. He was the son of a machinist and his father was known for his brilliance with machinery and tools. The Goddard’s moved from Worcester to Boston while Robert was just an infant, because his father went in half and half on a local machine tools shop. In Boston, is where the young Robert Goddard spent his youth as an only child, and most of his younger years were spent alone at home due to his mother’s illness with tuberculosis.
Heinrich Himmler was born on October 7, 1900 to a humble Catholic family in Munich, Germany. His father, Joseph Gebhard Himmler, was the headmaster of a school and had once tutored Bavarian princes, and his mother, Anna Maria Himmler was a housewife and took care of Himmler and his two siblings. He went to grammar school in Landshut, Germany, and received a diploma in agriculture from Munich Technical University. In school, he was studious, slightly nerdy, had superior organizational skills, and tended to avoid his Jewish classmates. He originally wanted to be a chicken farmer, but he ended up not enjoying it after a brief apprenticeship. After fighting during World War I, Himmler began to gain interest in the Aryan myths of blonde-haired, blue-eyed supermen, the occult, and anti-Semitism.
Wernher von Braun, one of the most important engineers that once began his career in Germany, played a major role in the outcome of World War II. The astute rocket scientist altered plans by Robert Goddard and invented the powerful V-2 Combat Rocket. He was known the most for rocketry in Germany, and for helping to design the series of booster rockets used for the Saturn V Rocket, at NASA. Throughout his lifetime, he had occupations ranging from being an aerospace engineer and architect, to leading as a rocket scientist. His determination to study aerospace engineering led to his accomplishments and inventions that have influenced the world.
Wernher von Braun joined the SS in November 1933. It’s difficult to be sure of the precise reason why, but it was believed that he entered in order to keep his career. Keeping his goal of space exploration a possibility was important to him than his moral and ethical values. Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket was produced by laborers mainly from the Mittelbrau-Dora camp. He was most likely not given a choice in the decision to use them, but because of the Nazis extremes had no other choice. Wernher von Braun may not have been fully aware of the horrors but there is evidence that he knew of the horrors of starvation and death going on inside. Allied troops were sent to Germany to search down the Nazi scientists and their rockets. The U.S. troops were competing against Soviet troops for the scientists to aid them in their future Cold War. Von Braun escaped westward to meet the advancing U.S. troops...
Heinrich Himmler was born on October 7, 1900 in Munich. His father was Joseph Gebhard Himmler, a secondary-school teacher and principal, and his mother was Anna Maria Himmler, a devout Roman Catholic and attentive mother. Heinrich had one older brother, Gebhard Ludwig Himmler, and one younger brother, Ernst Hermann Himmler. Himmler’s childhood was quite normal for the time. His father and mother were strict but were actively involved in the rearing of their three children. Growing up Himmler struggled in athletics, but did well in his schoolwork. He enjoyed playing chess, harpsichord, stamp collecting, gardening, and other extracurricular activities. From 1919 to 1922 Himmler studied agronomy and had an apprenticeship on a farm (Heinrich Himmler).
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Württemberg Germany in a middle class Jewish family as the first child of Hermann Einstein, a successful entrepreneur and Pauline Einstein. Both of his parents had a long established family roots in southern Germany. After Einstein’s birth his family moved to Munich where his father along with his Uncle founded Elektrotechnische Fab& Cie, a company for the manufacturing of electrical equipments. Einstein’s sister Maja was born one year after their arrival in Munich He was sent to Catholic school at first and then to Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich.Eventhouht he had a pleasing childhood, He was a poor student and had trouble speaking leading everyone to think him as retarded. He also struggled with Prussian education but at the same time was interest in math and science. Both his parents taught Einstein to be self-relia...
During World War II, Hitler was developing the sciences to use an extremely dangerous weapon that is widely known as the Atomic Bomb. The United States was completely unaware of the advances Germany was making at the time; however, Albert Einstein informed President Truman about what was actually occurring through a letter that explained in coherent detail what this bomb was capable of and how Hitler was going to use it. It was now a race between countries on who would be the first one to develop this bomb. Thus the research to build an Atomic Bomb commenced for the United States; a project known as the Manhattan project in 1942 involved more than 100,000 scientists who were participating in secret research, but not before the bombing of Pearl
...agner, a local Nazi party leader, Felix Wankel was arrested and imprisoned in 1933 when the Nazi party took control of Germany. But soon after he was pardoned by Wilhelm Keppler who was an old friend of Wankel’s and also Adolf Hitler’s lead economic advisor. With the help of Wilhelm Keppler, Wankel was given funding’s for his own workshop and research center in Lindau to design and produce rotary valves and seals for the German Air Force’s aircraft and the German Navy’s torpedos, but all this ended with the war. In 1957 Felix Wankel produced the first working model of the Wankel Engine, only producing 21 horsepower it was still a great achievement.
In 1939 rumor came to the U.S. that Germans had split the atom. The threat of the Nazis developing a nuclear weapon prompted President Roosevelt to establish The Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer set up a research lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico and brought the best minds in physics to work on the problem of creating a nuclear weapon. Although most the research and development was done in Los Alamos, there were over 30 other research locations throughout the project. After watching the first nuclear bomb test Oppenheimer was quoted as saying simply “It works.”.
were all the other scientists as a means to keep the project a secret. After his successful
Richard P. Feynman was born in 1918 in Brooklyn; in 1942 he received his Ph.D. from Princeton. Already displaying his brilliance, Feynman played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb through his work in the Manhattan Project. In 1945 he became a physics teacher at Cornell University, and in 1950 he became a professor at the California Institute of Technology. He, along with Sin-Itero and Julian Schwinger, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work in the field of quantum electrodynamics.
Richard Feynman was born on May 11, 1918 in Brooklyn to Lucille and Melville Feynman. Feynman's childhood home was in the community of Far Rockaway, in the outskirts if Manhattan.
He continued to work on theoretical physics research in Germany for twenty years before retiring in 1979. In 1988, the life of this physicist who truly changed history came to an end. The exceptional success of his spying career was due to a combination of factors: the strength of his belief in Communism, his quiet and likable personality, and his inability to understand the consequences of his actions, which kept away the weight on his conscience. The Manhattan Project, with all the unprecedented measures taken to ensure its security, was not able to stop Fuchs, or even suspect him capable of any spy activities. The espionage of Klaus Fuchs not only changed the course of nuclear research of the Soviet Union, but affected world politics as well as internal security policies of Britain. Klaus Fuchs may have been one of the physicists who left the greatest marks on history, not just for his scientific talent, but for his remarkable espionage