This is an edited excerpt from 10 Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped Justice Because They Were Useful to the US by Khalid Elhassan (2018);
it removes positive attributions to the subject, including the claim that, “We went to the Moon, in large part, thanks to him [von Braun]”.

Wernher von Braun Was a Malignant War Criminal
Who Got Slave Workers Killed by the Tens of Thousands

Wernher von Braun (1912 – 1977) was a war criminal, responsible for the deaths of thousands of slave laborers who perished while toiling on his rockets in atrocious conditions, of which he was fully aware.

During WW2, von Braun was a loyal Nazi and an SS Sturmbanfuhrer — equivalent to an army Major — who developed and oversaw the manufacture of the V-2 rockets, the world’s first ballistic missiles. His rockets, carrying a one-ton explosive warhead, rained down terror and claimed the lives of thousands, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, in London, Antwerp, and other cities. After the war, he pretended to have been an oblivious scientist, too engrossed in his blueprints, calculations, and other sophisticated scientific work, to fully comprehend the horrors of the regime he served.

In reality, he had been quite comfortable with the Third Reich, the Nazi party, and the SS, until late in the war. Far from being oblivious to Nazi horrors, von Braun was personally involved in Nazi atrocities and was a direct, hands-on participant in war crimes. Among other things, he personally supervised the manufacturing of rockets, using tens of thousands of slave laborers. An estimated 20,000 slave workers toiling to build von Braun’s rockets died of starvation, maltreatment, or were murdered by their guards while building his rockets. He was often at the slave labor facilities, and he had firsthand knowledge of the horrific workplace conditions.

After the war, he was one of the first Germans secretly moved to the US in Operation Paperclip. He was put to work by the US Army to develop its intermediate range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rocket that launched America’s first space satellite. When NASA was created, he joined it as Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, was put in charge of the Saturn V rockets, and lead a NASA expedition to Antarctica in January 1967. In recognition of his services, he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975.

Source (Recommended — get to know the other 9 vile Nazi war criminals who the “Deep State”
             secretly welcomed and elevated to positions of power and authority right after WW II.)