The Atomic Rocketeer Tells the Story of the German Rocket Scientist Who Helped America Get to the Moon

The Atomic Rocketeer, a new feature documentary directed by Larry L. Sheffield and Trent J DiGiulio, tells the story of Wernher Von Braun, a German rocket scientist who was brought to America along with his team of rocketeers by the U.S. Army right after the fall of Germany in 1945.

Von Braun is credited with helping NASA develop the Saturn V rocket that was used by the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

The Atomic Rocketeer played at the Coronado Island Film Festival on Saturday, where Sheffield gave a Q&A afterwards about the film.

Sheffield says the story of Oppenheimer and Von Braun are connected.

"This is our third documentary, and all these subjects deal with the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer, Operation Paperclip — they all are subjects that happened between 1945 and 1950 out in the New Mexico desert. A lot of this footage was footage that hasn't really been seen in a lot of places, and they're in archives, some in the U.S., some in Europe," Sheffield explained at the Q&A.

"I felt like it was important to try to preserve this little particular period of time, because so much was going on out in the New Mexico desert with the Manhattan Project, and everybody's familiar with Oppenheimer, the movie and the documentary that we produced last year. That next chapter is what happened in White Sands with von Braun and the German scientists. So they're all kind of connected, and it's an interesting piece of American history."

It's worth noting that Von Braun is a polarizing figure due to his past as a former member of the Nazi party. He was an officer in the SS and served under Hitler as a rocket scientist. But after the fall of Germany, he surrendered to the U.S. Army and was brought to Texas in order to help the U.S. with his knowledge of V-2 technology. He was part of Project Paperclip, a secret U.S. intelligence program that imported over 1,600 German scientists from Nazi Germany to work for the U.S. government.

In 1969, Von Braun was made to testify at a trial of three former SS men in West Germany regarding his involvement in the use of slave labor from Nazi concentration camps to build the V-2 ballistic missile. He denied personal responsibility, according to PBS, which added that Von Braun likely joined the SS out of fear that his career would be damaged if he refused.

Von Braun was also investigated by the FBI in 1961 regarding his involvement with the Nazi party and was found to have not been politically active in the war. The FBI records state that he was actually arrested in Germany in 1944 and jailed for two weeks because of "anti-Nazi utterances," but was released due to a lack of evidence and an obligation to continue his work in the country's rocket program. The FBI report also states that the U.S. Army did not consider Von Braun a war criminal and found no evidence that he was an "ardent Nazi."

Below, Sheffield discusses The Atomic Rocketeer; his other documentary, Oppenheimer After Trinity, which came out a few months before Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, and an upcoming documentary he's working on about a man who he says inspired both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to become tech moguls.

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Larry L. Sheffield on The Atomic Rocketeer , Oppenheimer, and a Mysterious Man Who Inspired Two Tech Giants

To secure the footage for the documentary, Sheffield went to great lengths and spent quite a bit of his own self-funded budget to gather it all from different sources.

"Some of it is available in archives. Some of it, we go to great lengths to get permission to use. And then some of it, you can only purchase it because there's people that have control of it and they want you to pay. And of course, there's different levels.

"You can buy footage for fairly cheap. And then there's some places that it's just really cost prohibitive and even just 10 or 15 seconds is a little bit of a stretch on budget, but we try to tell the story and the film is important, and so, you know, that's why it usually takes about a year, year and a half, to make one of these things, because we try to make sure that what we want to get in for the story is in but we spend several 1000s of dollars on the footage."

Sheffield tried to interview some of Von Braun's relatives for the documentary as well.

"We reached out to Bernard von Braun's daughter, as you saw in the film, he had two daughters, and I was able to locate one. She lives in Idaho, and we reached out to her to see if she would be interested in being in the film or being interviewed. And I know she received my communications, but she didn't respond, so I didn't further bother her anymore," he says.

However, for his film Oppenheimer After Trinity, he was able to interview Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb.

"We did in a film last year, Oppenheimer After Trinity, we were one of the first documentary features that had the blessing of the Oppenheimer family, and we were able to land a interview with Charles Oppenheimer, who's Dr. Oppenheimer's grandson. He still has one son that's living and but he's never been on camera before, and but his grandson is kind of the spokesman for the family right now. So we were able to get his interview, and then since then, we've stayed in close touch," Sheffield says.

"There's been some wonderful conversations I've had with him. So we tried real hard to reach out to the families, because we want to make sure they have a chance to be a part of the process."

Sheffield also teased a little bit of information about his upcoming projects, including a documentary about a man who he says inspired Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to found Microsoft and Apple.

"I have two films I'm working on now, two more documentaries — one having to do with New Mexico history. It's kind of the final chapter of this part of New Mexico military history," he says.

"I also have another documentary, and it's a little bit confidential," he adds. "We are doing the story about a gentleman that no one knows about, and he was a he was a scientist at Sandia Labs. Him and another gentleman started a company 1975 and made the first electronic calculator. And then they sold quite a bit, like $3 million worth of calculators. People were buying them. It was right when the electronics age was kind of coming out, and they decided, let's build the world's first kit computer."

Here's where it gets interesting.

Sheffield continues: "This gentleman hired Bill Gates as a junior in Harvard. This is the reason Bill Gates left Harvard. He went out to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to program the computer, tried to sell the software back to this gentleman. I personally knew this gentleman, which is the reason I know all these stories. [Gates] tried to sell the code, the basic code, back to my friend, and he said, 'No, I think that's a little more than I want to pay.' So Bill Gates started Microsoft."

He wouldn't reveal the name of the man in question, but he continued to speak about his involvement with Apple founder Steve Jobs.

"I will tell you one last thing, and that is at the same exact moment in time, there was two guys out in California that purchased one of the kit computers... they built this little kit and said, now these things are great. Why don't we do this in our garage? And they started a company. They call it Apple Computers. So two titans got started from this one guy's work, and no one knows about it. So we're going to tell that story."

Main Image: A still from The Atomic Rocketeer, Coronado Island Film Festival