It's an exaggeration to say that Nazi technology allowed the United States to pull off the moon landing — but not very much of one. Wars drive innovation, as participating armies strive to figure out how to kill their enemies more efficiently, effectively, or dramatically, and these inventions sometimes find better uses later. So it was with rockets. As part of Germany's plan to extract a blood price for every inch of occupied Europe it lost to the Allied invasion, its scientists invented modern rocket technology and deployed it in the V-2 bomb. While the first exemplars of this new flight mechanism were pointed at London and Paris, after the war, scientists aimed for the stars instead.

In a morally dubious move, the United States also snagged one of the Nazis' best rocket scientists from

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