Helmut Hoelzer was a

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...

V-2 rocket The V2 (), with the technical name ''Aggregat (rocket family), Aggregat-4'' (A4), was the world's first long-range missile guidance, guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the S ...

engineer who was brought to the United States under

Operation Paperclip The Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US for government employment after the end of World War I ...

. Hoelzer was the inventor and constructor of the world's first electronic analog computer.

Life

In October 1939, while working for the

Telefunken Telefunken was a German radio and television producer, founded in Berlin in 1903 as a joint venture between Siemens & Halske and the ''AEG (German company), Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft'' (AEG) ("General electricity company"). Prior to ...

electronics firm in Berlin, Hoelzer met with Ernst Steinhoff, Hermann Steuding, and Wernher von Braun regarding guide beams for a flying body.p. 107 In late 1940 at

Peenemünde Peenemünde (, ) is a municipality on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom in the Vorpommern-Greifswald district in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in north-eastern Germany. It is part of the ''Amt (country subdivision), Amt'' (collective municipality) of Used ...

, Hoelzer was head of the guide beam divisionp. 140 (assistant Henry Otto HirschlerH. Otto Hirschler, 87, Aided Space Program
/ref>), 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 () which corrected for momentum that would perturb an object that had been moved back on-track.p. 104 By the fall of 1941, Hoelzer's "mixing device" was used to provide

rate measurement instead of rate gyros.p. 106 Then at the beginning of 1942, Hoelzer built an

analog computer An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computation machine (computer) that uses physical phenomena such as Electrical network, electrical, Mechanics, mechanical, or Hydraulics, hydraulic quantities behaving according to the math ...

to calculate and simulate

trajectoriesp. 106 Hoelzer's team also developed the Messina telemetry system. After evacuating Peenemünde for the Alpenfestung (Alpine Fortress), Hoelzer returned to

via motorcycle to look for portions of his PhD dissertation prior to surrendering to United States forces at the end of World War II. Hoelzer was a student of Alwin Walther.

Family

One of his grandchildren is Olympic swimmer Margaret Hoelzer.

References

Sources

External links

Helmut Hoelzer Collection, The University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections
{{DEFAULTSORT:Holzer, Helmut 1912 births 1996 deaths Technische Universität Darmstadt alumni Early spaceflight scientists German aerospace engineers V-weapons people NASA people German rocket scientists German spaceflight pioneers Operation Paperclip Engineers from Thuringia People from Wartburgkreis