Michael Neufeld, a historian and curator at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, said it's important to remember that von Braun and many members of his team were to some degree complicit in Hitler's Nazi regime.

Von Braun, who died in 1977, would eventually become a hero to many for enabling the United States to beat Russia to put a man on the moon. But his legacy includes the production of V-2 rockets with the help of Russian, French and Polish prisoners of war working under deplorable conditions, Neufeld said. About 10,000 of the prisoners died of malnutrition and disease.

``I think he blinded himself to the kind of government he was working for,'' he said.

Only about a dozen of the group of German scientists who first began arriving in the United States in late summer 1945 are still alive and residing in Huntsville.

All are in their 80s and 90s, and only one, aerodynamics expert Werner Dahm, still works for the space program. Two team members, Otto Hirschler and Werner Rosinksi, have died in the past two years.

The first group of six of von Braum's German team came over in 1945 after surrendering to American soldiers advancing toward Berlin. They set up shop under strict oversight of the Army at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas.

The number of rocket team members, primarily electrical engineers with varying degrees of academic training, increased in the ensuing months as von Braun assembled his team.

They labored at Fort Bliss until moving to Huntsville as part of the newly christened Redstone Arsenal Ordnance Rocket Center in 1949.

Despite von Braun's lifelong ambition of sending rockets into orbit and landing men on the moon _ he devoted his life to rocketry at the age of 13 _ Army brass were mostly interested in ballistic missile development as a countermeasure to communist Russia under Stalin.

``The space function was really an afterthought,'' said Konrad Dannenberg, a member of the original team who retired from NASA in 1973.

With ``Project Paperclip'' under way, Army officials essentially gave the German team the task of continuing work on the V-2 rocket that had been developed under Hitler.

The V-2 had been created and produced by von Braun's team during 1940-45 at an isolated outpost on the Baltic sea near a town called Peenemuende. V-2 work later was also done at Mittelwerk at the foot of the Harz mountains in central Germany.

The V-2, shrieking across the sky and exploding into homes and buildings, was used on England in the closing months of World War II.

``They wanted to know everything about the (V-2s),'' Jacobi said of the U.S. Army officials who first worked with the physicist von Braun and his team. ``Quite a few people thought that going into space was a crazy idea.''

Dahm, who still works at the Marshall center, said one part of the group's legacy is their contribution to America's efforts during the Cold War arms race after World War II.

Russia was aggressively building intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons even as the German team's work led to the creation of the Redstone missile in 1954.

Dahm said it was essential to build rockets for military purposes: ``If we had not done this, we would be Reds nowadays because Stalin would not have stopped.''

Dannenberg and others who knew him say space flight was always the driving force behind von Braun's work. That was the case even while he was working on the V-2 in Germany and during the years of missile development in the United States.

Indeed, a story in The Huntsville Times on Sunday, May 14, 1950, had the headline: ``Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon.''

In Germany before the rise of Hitler, von Braun knew that the only way to get the kind of funding and resources necessary to develop his rocket science would be through the military.

In the United States, von Braun again saw his chance to realize his dreams of space flight. By 1959 the Army began to turn its attention to the stars, in no small part because of von Braun's efforts to sell the idea to his military superiors and the American public.

None of his American accomplishments, including creation of the Saturn V rocket that propelled Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon in 1969, were seriously clouded by the team's work in Germany. For years, few knew details of that work.

It is now well-known that von Braun was an honorary officer in the S.S., Hitler's feared security police, and that V-2 production was made possible by slave labor at both Peenemuende and Mittelwerk _ facts that were hidden or glossed over by the U.S. government and von Braun himself.

But scrutiny from journalists and scholars intensified in 1984 after one of von Braun's top men, Arthur Rudolph, left the United States and renounced his citizenship rather than face being tried for war crimes. The Department of Justice determined he was culpable for the condition of slave laborers at Mittelwerk; Rudolph, who died in Germany, said the S.S. was responsible, not him.

Von Braun's complicity in Nazi atrocities is less clear, Neufeld said. But there is at least one document _ a letter _ in which von Braun discusses a trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he apparently spoke to the commandant about obtaining more skilled laborers to use at Mittelwerk.

``The floodgates (of scrutiny) opened with Rudolph,'' said Neufeld, who published a book on the rocket team, ``The Rocket and the Reich.''

In ensuing years, newspaper and magazine stories as well as several books critical of von Braun were published. The accounts were fueled in part by concentration camp survivors angry that the scientist had become a hero in the United States.

The remaining members of the German rocket team say it's unfair to criticize them for their role at Peenemuende and Mittelwerk. They say that role must be viewed in the context of the times.

``During the war, practically everything was done with concentration camp labor,'' Dahm said.

Von Braun himself, Jacobi and others point out, was briefly imprisoned by the S.S., supposedly for talking about going to the moon. Germany was losing the war and the government wanted him to concentrate on missile production.

``What's the definition of slave laborer?'' said Jacobi. ``In a certain sense we were slave laborers. Under certain dictatorships you have to do certain things.''