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He only joined the Nazi party because they told him he wouldn't be allowed to build rockets any more if he didn't. Then it was Himmler who, for some weird reason, decided von Braun "had to" join the SS and gave him an honorary rank. Eventually von Braun started dissenting about Germany's chances for success in the war (he wasn't stupid) and the Ghestapo arrested him and threw him in jail for daring to question party orthodoxy. It's true that concentration camp prisoners were used to build the von Braun designed V2 rockets, but that wasn't his idea. Near the end of WWII, after he had been in jail, von Braun called his engineers together, hid all their rocket plans from the Nazis, and fled for Allied territory on a hijacked train. The SS was ordered to kill them.
Lastly, if the US military had listened to von Braun after he defected, during the 1950's we probably would have beaten the Russians into orbit. He wanted to go to space since he was a little kid, and later in life he was talked about going to Mars way back in the 1960's. He developed the Redstone rocket that would later launch the first American satellite into orbit. He was also director of the Saturn rocket program that took our astronauts to the moon.
von Braun's crime was only that he didn't realize soon enough that he was on the wrong side. Once he did, he gathered up his crew and his plans and fled straight towards the USA - under threat of death. And when he got here, he helped us to achieve what is arguably the most impressive achievement in the history of mankind: launching ourselves off this little mudball.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_Von_Braun
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