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- BIOGRAPHY
Son of Freiherr Magnus von Braun and Emy von Quistorp, Wernher was born 23 March 1912 in Wirsitz, Posen. Wernher von Braun studied engineering at Berlin and Zürich. Infatuated with space travel, he founded a society in 1930 for space travel which maintained a rocket-launching site near Berlin by charging an admission fee to spectators. Since rockets were outside the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the German army authorities became interested and by 1936, with Hitler's backing, von Braun was director of a properly organized rocket research station at Peenemünde, where he perfected and launched the famous V-2 rockets against Britain in September 1944. At the end of the war, von Braun hid from Himmler's henchmen in Bavaria and surrendered to the Americans.
On 1 March 1947 in Landshut, Bavaria, he married Maria von Quistorp and they had two daughters, Iris and Margrit. Both were born in the United States. Wernher became a naturalised American and a director of the U. S. Army's Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama, and was chiefly responsible for the manufacture and successful launching of the first American artificial earth satellite, the _Explorer_ at Cape Canaveral on January 31, 1958. Freiherr Wernher von Braun died 16 June 1977 in Alexandria, Virginia.
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