Seeking a local angle on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landings this week, Washington DC news station WTOP published a glowing biography of the “brilliant” rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was laid to rest in nearby Alexandria in 1977. The article caused uproar, however, and was swiftly retracted. The reason? It had failed to mention that von Braun was a Nazi.

There are few corners of scientific progress that are not tainted at some point in their history by immoral or unethical behaviour. Physics, biology, zoology, medicine, psychology, vaccine science, anthropology, genetics, nutrition, engineering: all are rife with discoveries made in circumstances that can be described as unethical, even illegal. How should we feel about making use of that knowledge? Especially when it could be of great service to civilisation and even save lives?

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Von Braun’s presence on the Apollo programme was no outlier. More than 120 German scientists and engineers joined him there, including fellow SS officer Kurt Debus (who became director of Nasa's Launch Operations Center) and Bernhard Tessmann (designer of the colossal Vertical Assembly Building at what is now Kennedy Space Center).

They were among 1,600 scientists recruited by spies as part of Operation Paperclip at the end of World War Two – all shielded from prosecution, given safe passage to the US, and allowed to continue their work.

Allied forces also snapped up other Nazi innovations. Nerve agents such as Tabun and Sarin (which would fuel the development of new insecticides as well as weapons of mass destruction), the antimalarial chloroquine, methadone and methamphetamines, as well as medical research into hypothermia, hypoxia, dehydration and more, were all generated on the back of human experiments in concentration camps.

Particleboard, forms of synthetic rubber and the soft drink Fanta were also developed by the Germans under Nazi rule.