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Their leader, Wernher von Braun, was a handsome, charming ex-SS officer who had been the chief architect of an ambitious rocket program that had killed thousands during the war—and who now spread the gospel of space exploration to Americans in Walt Disney TV specials.
Over the next five years, von Braun and his colleagues spent most of their time assembling V-2s, launching them at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, seventy-eight miles north, and training personnel in the use of rockets and guided missiles, all the while avoiding the subject of Nazi war crimes and adjusting to their new lives.
The Disney movie about his life was produced and titled I Aim at the Stars. The film was neither dramatically effective nor factually accurate—the former SS major was depicted as being persecuted by the Nazis, and his Peenemünde secretary became an Allied spy, two of many perversions of the truth.
