German rocket scientist Konrad Dannenberg

[West-Front]

German rocket scientist Konrad Dannenberg, who worked on the Nazi V-2 rocket before helping NASA to develop the first moon rockets, has died at the age of 96 in Huntsville, Alabama, daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on Wednesday. During World War II, Dannenberg worked at the German research centre at Peenemunde developing the V-2 ballistic missile with Wernher von Braun. Though it was developed too late to affect the outcome of the war, the rocket, constructed largely using slave labour, was a weapon of immense power and constituted a major technological breakthrough, the paper said.

Dannenberg was one of 118 scientists sent to the United States at the end of World War II as part of “Operation Paperclip,” to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union, the paper said. Following the creation of NASA in 1958, Dannenberg became a researcher at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. There, he worked on the Redstone and Jupiter rocket programmes. He then became Deputy Manager of the Saturn programme, which produced the Saturn V, the first rocket to send human beings to the moon.

After retiring in 1973, Dannenberg became a lecturer and mentor at the famous Space Camp in Huntsville. Ed Buckbee, former director of the Alabama Space & Rocket Center, told the Associated Press that Dannenberg “personally engaged with thousands of young people, taking his time to share with them his experiences of flying people into space."

Looking back on his career in 1999, Dannenberg said that the first V-2 launch was the most memorable moment for him, AP reported. “If you look at the V-2 today and see it next to the Saturn V, you probably think it's tiny,” he said. “But for us, it was a HUGE rocket, much bigger than any amateur rocket I'd ever seen or even imagined."

The Local (news@thelocal.de)


Published: 18 Feb 09 16:04 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/society/20090218-17515.html

[Paulkd]

Thank you for posting.

We owe so much to him and the others of his generation.

They shaped so much of the modern world we live in, the food we eat, the cookware we use, the roads we drive on and the cars we drive in. The aircraft we see all around us, even the idea of a moving camera (the first ever tracking shot was used in the triumph of the will)...

[Peiper]

Greetings
Its funny we view people like him as a hero and yet if the programme
he was working on might have succeeded the outcome of the War would have been very
different indeed , infact certain Countries might have been flattened, our's included.
It reminds me of certain human research which the results and findings of this "research"
is still used today in Colleges and Universities, but at what cost?
Most of this research and experiments were carried out at death camps such as Auchswitz
and Belsen, the same as these V2/V1 rocket testing centres used slave labour to work on them,
at what cost?
An ex girlfriend's Grandfather who came from Estonia was forced to work on the "V2 Programme",
his sir-name was "Saan" and originally he was a University lecturer, he refused to work on the programme
and was thrown into a machine instead and killed
He originally had a big house which is still there today, at the time was confiscated by the Germans and the rest
of the family was kicked out, now some Russians live in it.
Apparantly everybody in the town where they lived knew them because nearby there is a mountain named after
the family name called "Saan-Mountain".
The only members of the family who survived were Mother and Son, the ex's Father and Grandmother,
who came to England at the end of the War after travelling from place to place.
I found it an intresting story, which i took my hat off to the guy who refused to do the Nazi's dirty work for them.
here is a lesson for us all.
It was told to me about eight years ago by the ex's father who was Seventy then, since he had passed away,
they have no other surviving relatives.

Regards Peiper