The history of American aeronautics, which von Braun is an integral part of, is presented in the United States in a quite exalted manner. Von Braun was a top design engineer. It was no longer possible to ignore that he was the one who designed the Saturn rocket that got a man to the Moon, even though you don’t run across his name much at Cape Canaveral. They came to collect him at Peenemunde Island, which was a secret facility for the development of German rockets. Von Braun
was a passionate physicist and design engineer whose sole interest was getting into space. Back then the Americans told him and his colleagues, “You’ve got an hour to decide – either the Russians will come here, or you’ll come with us.” The employees pulled themselves together, boarded the ship with their families and left. The Russians got the prototypes and documentation, but they didn’t get what was most important – the people.