Young Wernher von Braun

Wernher Magnus Maximilian was born Freiherr von Braun in Wirsitz, Prussia, which is now Wyrzysk, Poland. Von Braun came from a very wealthy family who were able to trace their ancestry all the way back to European royalty. His passion for astronomy started at a young again age when Wernher’s parents bought him a telescope as a gift.

Young Von Braun once tried to attach a small rocket to a toy car, at the age of 12, much like Fritz von Opel did with full size vehicles. He was even able to launch the vehicle and send it down a public street, unfortunately he was arrested later, for the disturbance. Undeterred by this trouble, von Braun was an avid student. With his early studies focused on music, he switched his interests to physics and mathematics in order to pursue his interest in rocket engineering. Later in life he would earn a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Berlin’s technical school, in order to help him in a career designing rockets.

Space travel always remained von Braun primary interest, in regard to rocketry. However, after he finished school, his focus shifted into building military rockets. This gains him access to membership in the Nazi party in 1939 and the SS in 1940, after successes in rocketry. With his new connections, Wernher was appointed as head technical director of Germany’s new rocket development facility at Peenemünde. It was located right next to the Baltic Sea, near an old fish village. Not only were they just going to be designing rockets here but also rocket powered systems to help conventional space crafts.

Later on, they would develop the V2 rocket, as part of the Aggregate project and after the war, hand over that technology to the Americans.