Yes a good thing to point out, however the American initiative was more successful, was it not?

Largely because raw numbers aside, most of the top talent wanted to avoid the Soviets and thus the US was the only logical option. That is, part of what made the American job on this easier is top German talent anticipated some "Operation Osoaviakhim" (or worse) scenario and thus sought out the US as the only way to get out ahead of it.

von Braun made major contributions to NASA. My understanding is relatively speaking, the Soviets got the scraps. Not that it made no impact, but just to say the impact of the Germans on the American space program should not be understated, and I don't think it would be accurate to assess the fruits of these two competing operations as equivalent.

von Braun and others had a major hand in the Saturn V. Who did the Soviets manage to seize of equal caliber?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers, who actually did the work with their hands and built the parts for the rockets. (One exception was Helmut Gröttrup, the head of the V-2’s guidance and telemetry systems.)

In fact, after the war the USSR has briefly reconstituted the manufacturing of V-2 in Germany, employing thousands of people, before transplanting this entire industry to the USSR. This dramatically lifted the level of Soviet manufacturing and relevant metallurgy.

von Braun's dissertation was on engine design and testing. But when he built the Redstone missile in the USA, he ordered the engine from a US company -- the engine which was already a generation ahead, compared to the imported German engines which the US engineers studied after the war.

Meanwhile, the Soviets have developed even better engines, completely on their own, though with the important parts built using the materials and the equipment brought from Germany.

So it is debatable whether having the German higher-ups and having a greater continuity with German design philosophy was a good thing or a liability.

It is less well known, but France have also imported a significant number of ex-Peenemunde engineers for their program. And their engines developed in a way different from both the American ones and the Soviet ones -- which definitively shows that although internalizing the German know-how was the starting point for everyone, it did not define the path of subsequent development.

Of course, the engines were not the whole story. The Germans took to the USA the advanced prototypes of the inertial guidance systems which were developed for the missiles that were supposed to come after the V-2. And the Soviets got Helmut Gröttrup. This did have its effects in both cases.

Would you say von Braun is your favorite SS officer? Or are there other contenders for your most favorite high 'caliber'!? Nazi?