The V2 rocket

Witness History

Using eyewitness accounts from the BBC archives, we hear how the Nazis developed the world's first modern ballistic missile that killed thousands during World War Two. The Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was the principal architect of this revolutionary secret weapon. After the war he was recruited to work for the United States to develop its own missile programme and famously built the NASA rockets which put men on the Moon.

Photo: The launch of a captured German V2 rocket at the US military test site at White Sands, Nevada in 1946 (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)