Bernhard Tessmann

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Walter Dornberger , Herbert Axster , Wernher von Braun , Hans Lindenberg and Bernhard Tessmann (from left) on May 3, 1945, after their arrest by US troops

Bernhard Robert Tessmann (born August 15, 1912 on Zingst ; † December 19, 1998 or January 2, 1999 in Huntsville , Alabama , United States ) was a German-American rocket expert.

His father worked at UFA .

After meeting Wernher von Braun in 1935 , he came to Peenemünde at the end of 1936 and supervised the construction and machine tests of Test Stand I. He also worked on wind tunnels and the thrust measurement of the A4 rocket (V2). After the bombing in August 1943, he was evacuated to Kölpinsee. Here he developed equipment for mobile V2 units and was involved in the planning of the cement project. As von Braun feared at the end of the war that the SS would leave scorched earth behind, Tessmann and Dieter Huzel hid the V2 plans on April 3, 1945 in an iron mine in the Harz Mountains .

He went to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip . From January 1947 Tessmann worked in the rocket team at Fort Bliss , then at the White Sands Missile Range and later in Huntsville . From 1960 he was Deputy Director of the testing department of the Marshall Space Flight Center .

With his wife Ilse E. Tessmann he founded the Ilse and Bernhard Tessmann Music Scholarship .

supporting documents

  1. http://www.genealogybuff.com/al/madison/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/201
  2. The Ilse and Bernhard Tessmann Music Scholarship ( Memento from January 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive )