Helmut Hölzer

Helmut Hölzer (1912-1987) was a German-American engineer whose career was devoted to the electronics that steered and monitored large rockets. He began studies at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, lost his scholarship in 1933 after an argument with a Nazi student organization, later finished his degree and took a job with Telefunken in Berlin. Wernher von Braun recruited him to Peenemünde, where he arrived in 1939 and worked first on the guidance system of the V-2 and on its Messina telemetry system. After the war he stayed with the same rocket team at Fort Bliss, White Sands and then Huntsville, Alabama, and by 1960 he was Director of the Computation Division at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, leading comparable guidance and computing work for the missiles that followed the V-2. He died in Huntsville in 1987.