Article 032: WERNHER VON BRAUN, THE MAN WHO TOOK US TO THE MOON AND DREAMED OF MARS

Nazis, Operation Paperclip, the Moon, “Elon,” Mars, Secret Weapons and the Strange Stories That Followed Him to the Grave

Few lives in the history of science are as difficult to explain as Wernher von Braun's.

He helped Nazi Germany build the world's first long range guided ballistic missile.

His rockets were manufactured using concentration camp prisoners under horrific conditions.

He joined the Nazi Party.

He became an SS officer.

Then Nazi Germany collapsed.

The United States brought him to America.

Less than 25 years later, the enormous Saturn V rocket developed under his leadership launched Apollo 11 toward the Moon.

But even that is not the strangest part of the story.

Years before humans reached the Moon, von Braun was already designing enormous expeditions to Mars.

He also wrote a science fiction story about a civilization on Mars whose elected leader carried a title that today seems almost impossible to ignore:

Elon.

Then there are the stories that move far beyond conventional history.

Nazi flying saucers.

The mysterious device called Die Glocke, or “The Bell.”

The supposed Vril Society.

Claims of antigravity technology.

Rumors that Nazi scientists somehow received knowledge from extraterrestrials.

And finally Carol Rosin, a woman who says she worked with von Braun during the final years of his life and that he repeatedly warned her that the ultimate justification for putting weapons in space would someday become an extraterrestrial threat.

Some of this history is documented beyond dispute.

Some comes from testimony given decades later.

And some appears to have grown almost entirely from postwar legend.

So rather than treating all of it as equally true or equally ridiculous, let's separate the history from the mystery.

Because the real story of Wernher von Braun is strange enough.

Before the Nazis, There Was a Boy Who Wanted to Reach Space

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun was born March 23, 1912, in Wirsitz, then part of the German Empire and today Wyrzysk, Poland.

He came from an aristocratic Prussian family.

His father, Magnus von Braun, was a government official who would serve as Germany's agriculture minister during the Weimar Republic.

But young Wernher became interested in something considerably farther away than politics.

Space.

According to NASA's biography, his fascination was fueled by science fiction and especially the work of rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth.

Oberth's 1923 book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space had an unusual effect on the young von Braun.

Von Braun initially could not understand the mathematics.

So he learned it.

NASA records that Oberth's work motivated him to master calculus and trigonometry because he wanted to understand how rockets could actually reach space.

Read NASA's biography of Wernher von Braun

He joined Germany's Society for Space Travel and became immersed in experimental liquid fueled rocketry.

His ultimate obsession was not originally London, missiles or warfare.

It was spaceflight.

But rockets were expensive.

And somebody else was willing to pay.

The German Army.

The Deal That Changed Everything

In late 1932, before Adolf Hitler became chancellor, the German Army recruited the young von Braun to conduct secret research into liquid fueled rockets.

This point matters.

Von Braun did not begin building rockets because Hitler personally recruited him.

His relationship with the German military began before Hitler took power.

But when Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, von Braun remained.

And the amount of money available for weapons research began growing enormously.

Von Braun had found something every ambitious young engineer dreams about:

Resources.

Facilities.

Engineers.

Money.

And the ability to build machines that previously existed mostly in imagination.

The price was that those machines belonged to a dictatorship preparing for war.

Historian Michael Neufeld of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum describes von Braun as coming from a conservative nationalist aristocratic background but not initially appearing particularly interested in Nazi ideology or antisemitism.

As German rearmament accelerated, however, the rocket program expanded and von Braun advanced with it.

Read the National WWII Museum interview with historian Michael Neufeld

This is where the comfortable version of the story begins falling apart.

Was Wernher von Braun Actually a Nazi?

Yes.

That part is not a rumor.

NASA records that von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and became a junior SS officer in 1940.

He had also belonged to an SS equestrian organization during 1933 and 1934.

See NASA's historical account

The more difficult question is what those memberships tell us about what he actually believed.

Von Braun later portrayed his political memberships as something closer to career necessity than ideological devotion.

There is evidence that he was not a committed Nazi ideologue in the mold of Heinrich Himmler or other senior Nazis.

But there is also a danger in turning that fact into an excuse.

Von Braun benefited enormously from the regime.

He became technical director of the Peenemünde rocket center at only 25.

He accepted Nazi Party membership.

He accepted an SS commission.

And his rocket program became increasingly intertwined with the machinery of Nazi Germany.

Historian Michael Neufeld has described the relationship as essentially a Faustian bargain.

Von Braun wanted the resources to build rockets.

The Nazi state gave them to him.

But the state wanted weapons in return.

What Did He Really Think of Hitler?

This question is harder than simply asking whether von Braun possessed a Nazi Party card.

Von Braun met Hitler several times.

His surviving recollections do not sound like those of an enthusiastic Hitler worshiper.

In an interview published in The New Yorker in 1951, von Braun recalled a 1942 meeting in which Hitler initially remained skeptical about the rocket program.

According to von Braun, Hitler had even dreamed that the rockets would fail.

After successful tests, von Braun and General Walter Dornberger returned to Hitler's headquarters in 1943.

This time Hitler became enthusiastic.

Read the contemporary New Yorker profile

Later in the war, von Braun's relationship with the Nazi leadership became considerably more dangerous.

Historian accounts indicate that Heinrich Himmler attempted to gain greater control of the rocket program.

Von Braun resisted transferring the program away from the Army.

Then, in 1944, the Gestapo arrested him.

The Nazi Rocket Scientist Arrested by the Nazis

This is one of the strangest chapters in his life.

Von Braun and several colleagues were arrested by the Gestapo in early 1944.

Among the accusations were remarks suggesting that von Braun cared more about spacecraft than weapons and pessimism about Germany winning the war.

NASA's historical work notes that von Braun later described drunken conversations in which he and colleagues said they would rather build spaceships than weapons.

General Dornberger and Armaments Minister Albert Speer intervened because von Braun was considered indispensable to the V 2 program.

He was released.

That episode provides real evidence that von Braun's ambitions and Nazi Germany's ambitions were not identical.

But it does not erase what happened around his rockets.

The V 2

At Peenemünde, von Braun's team developed the A 4 rocket.

Hitler's government renamed the operational weapon the V 2, for Vergeltungswaffe 2, or Vengeance Weapon 2.

It was revolutionary.

It was also terrifying.

The V 2 was approximately 46 feet tall and could travel faster than 3,500 miles per hour.

Unlike aircraft, there was effectively no warning before impact.

The rocket climbed high above the atmosphere, followed a ballistic trajectory and crashed onto its target at tremendous speed.

Beginning in September 1944, V 2 rockets struck London, Antwerp and other European targets.

The technological ancestor of the rockets that would eventually carry humans into space had become a weapon of war.

But an even darker story was occurring underground.

The People Who Died Building the Rockets

After Allied bombing damaged Peenemünde, V 2 production was moved underground to the Mittelwerk complex near Nordhausen.

The labor came heavily from prisoners associated with the Mittelbau Dora concentration camp.

Conditions were horrific.

Prisoners endured hunger, disease, exhaustion, violence and deadly working conditions.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes Mittelbau as a massive forced labor system connected to underground armaments production.

Read the US Holocaust Memorial Museum history of Mittelbau Dora

Von Braun's defenders once portrayed him as largely isolated from this system.

The historical record makes that increasingly difficult to maintain.

NASA now states that von Braun visited the Nordhausen area approximately 15 times and was well aware of the terrible conditions.

NASA further states that he participated in decision making concerning the use of forced labor.

Read NASA's account of von Braun and Mittelwerk

This is one of the most uncomfortable contradictions in the entire history of spaceflight.

A man who dreamed of humanity reaching other worlds helped develop technology produced through one of humanity's darkest systems.

Then Germany Lost the War

By late 1944, von Braun understood that Germany was going to lose.

His attention turned toward survival and toward what would happen to his rocket team afterward.

He did not want to fall into Soviet hands.

Von Braun and members of his team eventually surrendered to American forces in 1945.

And America faced a decision.

Punish these scientists for working for Nazi Germany?

Or use what they knew?

The United States chose the second option.

Operation Paperclip

The program became known as Operation Paperclip.

Von Braun and roughly 125 members of his rocket team were brought to the United States.

They were initially based at Fort Bliss, Texas, and worked with captured V 2 rockets launched from White Sands, New Mexico.

Read NASA's history of von Braun and Operation Paperclip

The moral contradiction is impossible to miss.

American soldiers had liberated concentration camps.

American investigators had seen the conditions at Mittelbau Dora.

Yet American military planners also knew the Soviet Union wanted the same German scientists.

The Cold War was beginning.

Knowledge had become a strategic weapon.

So the man who had developed rockets for Hitler began developing rockets for the United States Army.

From Nazi Missile to American Space Program

Von Braun's team eventually moved to Huntsville, Alabama.

There they worked on the Redstone, Jupiter and other missile systems.

Then the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.

America suddenly realized that the country possessing superior rocket technology might dominate not only military missile development but space itself.

Von Braun's team helped launch Explorer 1, America's first satellite, in 1958.

Then came NASA.

In 1960, von Braun became director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

His team received responsibility for developing the Saturn family of rockets.

And eventually came the machine for which von Braun would become immortal.

The Saturn V.

The Rocket That Took Humanity to the Moon

The Saturn V remains one of the most extraordinary machines ever constructed.

Von Braun served as the chief architect of the launch vehicle program that produced it.

On July 16, 1969, a Saturn V launched Apollo 11.

Four days later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon.

Read NASA's history of von Braun and the Saturn V

Think about that timeline.

1944:

His rockets are falling on European cities.

1945:

He surrenders to the United States.

1969:

A rocket developed under his leadership sends humans to another world.

Twenty five years.

But the Moon was never the final destination in von Braun's imagination.

He had been thinking about Mars for decades.

Von Braun's Enormous Plan for Mars

Von Braun began writing a detailed Mars concept while working for the U.S. Army after World War II.

NASA historians describe it as one of the earliest serious engineering studies of how humans might actually travel to Mars.

And his plan was enormous.

Not three astronauts.

Not one spacecraft.

A fleet.

His early concept envisioned ten spacecraft carrying approximately 70 people.

The spacecraft would be assembled in Earth orbit after hundreds of launches.

NASA's historical account describes a flotilla of ten vessels and an expedition lasting hundreds of days on Mars.

Read NASA's history of early human Mars planning

Von Braun was thinking about Mars before humanity had even placed a satellite into orbit.

But while working through the engineering, he did something else.

He wrote fiction.

And this is where the story becomes almost unbelievable.

The Book That Had an “Elon” Ruling Mars

Around 1948 and 1949, von Braun wrote a science fiction manuscript generally known as Marsprojekt.

The full fictional narrative was not published during his lifetime.

Its technical appendix was published separately in Germany in 1952 and in English as The Mars Project in 1953.

The complete fictional story eventually appeared in English decades later as Project Mars: A Technical Tale.

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum confirms that von Braun wrote this fictional Mars narrative while developing his technical Mars concepts.

Read the Smithsonian history of von Braun's Mars fiction

And inside the story is a passage describing the government of Mars.

The government is directed by ten men.

Its leader is elected through universal suffrage for five years.

And the title given to that leader is:

Elon.

Not president.

Not king.

Elon.

This is where an important internet myth needs correcting.

Von Braun did not write that a man named Elon Musk would rule Mars.

“Elon” is presented as a governmental title.

But the coincidence is still extraordinary.

Decades later, a man named Elon Musk would establish SpaceX and make establishing a self sustaining human civilization on Mars one of the most famous technological goals on Earth.

Five Years or Ten Years?

There is confusion online about this passage, so let's clear it up.

The Martian government was described as being directed by ten men.

The leader, titled the Elon, was elected for five years.

So:

10 = number of men directing the government

5 years = term of the Elon

There was not a ten year term in the passage.

There is another ten in von Braun's Mars work that probably makes the confusion even worse.

His technical expedition envisioned ten spacecraft.

So von Braun's Mars material contains multiple important tens, but the fictional Elon serves a five year term.

Did Von Braun Predict Elon Musk?

Not in any conventional sense of the word “predict.”

There is no evidence von Braun knew a future billionaire named Elon Musk would create a rocket company and attempt to reach Mars.

And “Elon” was already an existing name and word before Musk.

But coincidences can still be fascinating without pretending they are prophecies.

A German rocket scientist writes a story about human beings reaching Mars.

Mars has a leader titled Elon.

Decades later, Elon Musk becomes arguably the most recognizable advocate on Earth for colonizing Mars.

That happened.

What it means is another question entirely.

Now We Enter the Stranger Territory

Everything up to this point is rooted in substantial historical documentation.

This next part requires a different standard.

Because surrounding Nazi technology is an enormous mythology involving flying saucers, occult societies, antigravity machines and extraterrestrial assistance.

One of the most famous stories is called:

Die Glocke.

The Bell.

Die Glocke: The Nazi Bell

The story describes an alleged Nazi device shaped roughly like a bell.

Different versions claim it involved rapidly rotating cylinders, a strange substance sometimes called Xerum 525, intense radiation and experiments involving gravity or other exotic physics.

Some versions go much further.

Antigravity.

Time distortion.

Free energy.

Even propulsion technology for flying saucers.

There is a major problem.

The Bell does not appear in the established wartime documentation surrounding von Braun's rocket program.

The modern story appears to trace primarily to Polish author Igor Witkowski, who published claims about it around 2000 and said his information came from interrogation records that he had been allowed to examine.

Those alleged original records have not become independently available in a form that allows historians to establish the story.

The Bell was later popularized internationally by other writers.

That does not prove some unknown German project could not have existed.

Nazi Germany absolutely operated secret weapons programs.

But there is currently no solid historical evidence connecting von Braun to Die Glocke.

That distinction is essential.

The Vril Society and the Women Who Contacted Aliens

The story becomes even stranger with the alleged Vril Society.

Modern versions describe mysterious female mediums, sometimes including a woman named Maria Orsic, supposedly communicating telepathically with extraterrestrial beings.

According to the legend, these beings transmitted technical information that helped Germans construct advanced flying machines.

It is an incredible story.

It is also extraordinarily poorly supported historically.

The term “Vril” itself originated long before Nazi Germany in Edward Bulwer Lytton's 1871 science fiction novel The Coming Race, which imagined a powerful energy called Vril.

The alleged Nazi era Vril Society appears much later in postwar occult and conspiracy literature.

The earliest influential accounts tying a secret Vril organization to Nazi Germany appeared after the war, particularly in literature published around 1960 and afterward.

No authenticated wartime documentation has established a technologically advanced Vril Society receiving spacecraft plans from extraterrestrials.

So when images online supposedly show “Vril spacecraft” or Maria Orsic transmitting alien engineering information, we should not treat those images and stories as equivalent to the documentation surrounding Peenemünde or the V 2.

One is documented history.

The other is postwar legend.

But Why Did the Alien Story Become Attached to Nazi Rockets?

There is an understandable reason.

The technological leap looked astonishing.

Germany went from experimental rockets to the V 2.

The V 2 reached the edge of space.

After the war, German scientists entered American and Soviet missile programs.

Within little more than two decades, humans were standing on the Moon.

If someone looks only at the beginning and the end, the advancement can seem almost impossible.

But there is a substantial documented engineering trail connecting those developments.

Hermann Oberth.

Robert Goddard.

German amateur rocket societies.

Army funding.

Kummersdorf.

Peenemünde.

The A series rockets.

The V 2.

Captured German hardware.

Redstone.

Jupiter.

Saturn.

Saturn V.

There is no missing extraterrestrial step required to explain the technological progression.

That does not prove extraterrestrial intelligence has never interacted with humanity.

It means we currently do not have reliable evidence showing extraterrestrials taught von Braun how to build rockets.

And if evidence of that magnitude ever appears, it should be examined rather than assumed.

Then Comes Carol Rosin

This is where the extraterrestrial story becomes directly connected to von Braun himself.

Carol Rosin says she met von Braun in 1974.

Rosin later worked at Fairchild Industries, where von Braun had gone after leaving NASA.

She became an activist against space based weapons.

Years later, most famously in testimony associated with Steven Greer's Disclosure Project around 2000 and 2001, Rosin publicly described extraordinary conversations she says she had with von Braun.

According to Rosin, von Braun warned that a sequence of enemies would be presented to the public to justify putting weapons in space.

The sequence she recalled was approximately:

The Russians

Terrorists

Third World or rogue nations

Asteroids

And finally:

Extraterrestrials

Rosin says von Braun repeatedly emphasized that the extraterrestrial threat would be the “last card.”

Did Von Braun Really Say It?

This is where evidence standards become extremely important.

We have Rosin's testimony.

What we do not have is a known recording of von Braun saying these things.

We do not have a verified von Braun document laying out this sequence.

We do not have a known letter from him saying that governments would manufacture an extraterrestrial enemy.

And von Braun died in 1977.

Rosin's widely circulated public testimony came many years later.

So the historically responsible description is:

Carol Rosin says Wernher von Braun told her this.

Not:

Wernher von Braun proved governments are planning a fake alien invasion.

Those are two completely different claims.

Rosin's account is still historically interesting, especially because she says she knew him personally during his final years.

But testimony should remain testimony unless independent evidence confirms it.

Was This a Deathbed Confession?

Another phrase often attached to this story is “deathbed confession.”

That description is misleading.

Von Braun was seriously ill during the period Rosin says she knew him, and she has described him as visibly sick.

But she says these conversations occurred repeatedly over several years beginning around 1974.

Von Braun did not die until June 16, 1977.

So this was not a conventional scene in which von Braun supposedly whispered a final secret minutes before dying.

Rosin portrays it instead as a warning repeated during the final years of his life.

That is still dramatic.

But accuracy matters.

What We Know About His Final Years

Von Braun left NASA in 1972 and joined Fairchild Industries.

By this period, his health was deteriorating.

He eventually became seriously ill with cancer.

He resigned from Fairchild in January 1977 and died in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 16, 1977, at 65.

NASA records his death and final career period.

Read NASA's von Braun biography

His grave contains a biblical reference:

Psalm 19:1.

“The heavens declare the glory of God.”

It is an appropriate ending for a man who spent most of his life looking upward.

So What Was Wernher von Braun?

A Nazi?

Yes, he joined the Nazi Party and SS.

A brilliant engineer?

Absolutely.

A war criminal?

That question has been debated for decades, particularly because of his knowledge of and relationship to forced labor at Mittelwerk.

A man obsessed with space?

The evidence for that stretches back to his youth.

An opportunist?

There is considerable reason to describe him that way.

A secret opponent of Hitler?

The evidence is more complicated. He was arrested by the Gestapo and appears to have become alienated from the Nazi leadership, but he also worked within and benefited from the regime for years.

The inventor of the American space program?

Not alone.

Thousands of engineers, scientists, technicians, astronauts and workers made Apollo possible.

But his influence on American heavy lift rocketry was enormous.

A man taught rocket science by extraterrestrials?

We have no reliable evidence establishing that.

Connected to the Vril Society?

No credible documentation currently demonstrates it.

Connected to Die Glocke?

Again, no reliable evidence has established that connection.

Did he write about an “Elon” ruling Mars?

Yes.

That strange part is real.

Did Carol Rosin say he warned about an eventual extraterrestrial enemy narrative?

Yes.

Did von Braun leave us independent documentation proving that conversation?

Not that we currently know of.

The Most Incredible Part May Be the Part We Can Prove

Sometimes a story becomes so surrounded by conspiracy theories that we stop noticing how unbelievable the documented history already is.

A boy becomes obsessed with reaching space.

He joins an amateur rocket society.

The German Army finances his research.

Hitler takes power.

The young engineer becomes one of the leaders of the world's first ballistic missile program.

He joins the Nazi Party.

He becomes an SS officer.

His rockets are manufactured using concentration camp labor.

The Nazis arrest him.

Germany collapses.

He surrenders to America.

The United States quietly brings him across the Atlantic.

He builds missiles for the U.S. Army.

Then satellites.

Then human spaceflight hardware.

Then the Saturn V.

And a rocket developed under his leadership takes human beings to the Moon.

Meanwhile, he had already written detailed plans for traveling to Mars.

And buried inside his fictional Martian civilization was a leader carrying the title Elon.

Then, during the final years of his life, a woman who says she worked with him claims he repeatedly warned her that someday the ultimate enemy used to justify weapons in space would be extraterrestrial.

Maybe the lesson isn't that every rumor surrounding Wernher von Braun must be true.

It is almost the opposite.

The documented story is already strange enough that we should not need to invent anything.

Separate the documents from the testimony.

Separate testimony from rumor.

Separate coincidence from prediction.

But never stop asking questions.

Because Wernher von Braun's life sits at one of the strangest intersections in modern history:

Nazi Germany.

Secret weapons.

Operation Paperclip.

The Cold War.

The Moon.

Mars.

Elon.

And eventually, aliens.

The farther we follow the story, the harder it becomes to believe that one human life could touch so many chapters of history.

And yet much of it did.

Sources and Further Reading

NASA

Wernher von Braun Biography

On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958–1978

MAVEN and the History of Mars Exploration

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Mars Project: Wernher von Braun as a Science Fiction Writer

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Mittelbau Dora and the V 2 Forced Labor System

National WWII Museum

Wernher von Braun and the Nazi Rocket Program: Interview with Historian Michael Neufeld

Contemporary Profile

The New Yorker: “A Romantic Urge,” 1951

A Note on the Extraordinary Claims

The sections concerning the Vril Society, Die Glocke and extraterrestrial technology are included because these stories have become attached to von Braun and Nazi technology in popular culture and alternative research.

They should not be confused with the documentary evidence supporting von Braun's work at Peenemünde, his Nazi Party and SS memberships, Operation Paperclip, the V 2, Saturn V or his Mars writings.

Likewise, the alleged “last card” warning comes from Carol Rosin's later testimony about conversations she says she had with von Braun. No known recording or contemporaneous document from von Braun independently confirms the famous sequence attributed to him.

That distinction is important.

The purpose of independent research should not be to believe everything or dismiss everything. It should be to determine what the evidence actually allows us to say.

Question. Research. Verify & Discover.