Helmut Hölzer

Helmut Hölzer (English: Hoelzer)
Helmut Hölzer in Huntsville, Alabama
Born	February 27, 1912 Bad Liebenstein, Thüringen, German Empire
Died	October 12, 1996 (aged 84) Huntsville, Alabama, United States
Fields	Electrical Engineering,[1] Applied mathematics
Institutions	1933-tbd: teaching 1939: Telefunken (Berlin) 1939-1945: Peenemünde 1940's-1950's: Fort Bliss/WSPG 1950's-1950's: Redstone Arsenal 1950's-1960's: ABMA 1960-1970's: Marshall Space Flight Center (Director, Computation Division)[2]
Alma mater	Darmstadt
Known for	Designing an electronic simulator for the V-2 rocket control system.[3][4]

Helmut Hoelzer^[5] was a Nazi Germany V-2 rocket engineer who was brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip.

Life

In October 1939, while working for the Telefunken electronics firm in Berlin, Hoelzer met with Ernst Steinhoff,^[6] Hermann Steuding, and Wernher von Braun regarding guide beams for a flying body.^{[Neufeld 1]} In late 1940 at Peenemünde, Hoelzer was head of the guide beam division^{[Neufeld 2]} (assistant Henry Otto Hirschler^[7]), which developed a guide-plane system which alternates a transmitted signal from two antennas a short distance apart, as well as a vacuum tube mixing device (German: Mischgerät)^[8] which corrected for momentum that would perturb an object that had been moved back on-track.^{[Neufeld 3]} By the Fall of 1941, Hoelzer's "mixing device" was used to provide V-2 rocket rate measurement instead of rate gyros.^{[Neufeld 4]}

Then at the beginning of 1942, Hoelzer built an analog computer to calculate and simulate^[7] V-2 rocket trajectories^{[Neufeld 5][9]} Hoelzer's team also developed the Messina telemetry system.^[1] After evacuating Peenemünde for the Alpenfestung (Alpine Fortress), Hoelzer returned to Peenemünde via motorcycle to look for portions of his PhD dissertation^[5] prior to surrendering to United States forces at the end of World War II.

Family

One of his grandchildren is Olympic swimmer Margaret Hoelzer.

References

1. Wade, Mark. "Hoelzer". Astronautix. Retrieved October 19, 2008.
2. June 6, 1960
3. Tomayko, James E. "Computers Take Flight: A History of NASA's Pioneering Digital Fly-by-Wire Project" (PDF). p. 13. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2004-07-19. Retrieved October 18, 2008.
4. Tomayko, James E. (July 1985). "Helmut Hoelzer's Fully Electronic Analog Computer". Annals of the History of Computing 7 (3): 227–240.
5. Ordway, Frederick I, III; Sharpe, Mitchell R (1979). The Rocket Team. Apogee Books Space Series 36. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. pp. 46,294. ISBN 1-894959-00-0.
6. Ernst Steinhoff
7. H. Otto Hirschler, 87, Aided Space Program
8. Ley, Willy (1951) [1944]. Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel (Revised edition 1958). New York: The Viking Press. p. 257.
9. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MAHC.1985.10025

Sources

• Neufeld, Michael J (1995). The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. New York: The Free Press. pp. 104, 106, 107, 140.

1. p. 107
2. p. 140
3. p. 104
4. p. 106
5. p. 106