The entire V-2 team under von Braun from Peenemunde surrendered to the Americans on May 2, 1945 and brought with them more than 400 core scientific-technical employees, full documentation and reports and more than 100 intact copies of the A4/V-2 rockets ready to be shipped to the front, together with the combat launchers and the military personnel trained to operate the missiles.
The Peenemunde site was by then already deliberately destroyed to prevent anything useful from falling into the Soviet hands.
Operation “Ost” did happen, however, but the highest ranked German scientist they managed to recruit was Helmut Grottrup, who was von Braun’s deputy for missile radio-control and for electrical systems. He had claimed to be an anti-fascist, we may never know the truth, but he was indeed imprisoned by the Nazis for a time.
The vast majority of the German specialists who worked for the Soviets were not former associates of von Braun in Peenemunde, but were instead introduced to rocket technology when the Soviets established the Institutes RABE and Nordhausen in Germany after winning the war.
Werner von Braun later remarked:
“… the USSR nevertheless succeeded in acquiring the chief electronics specialist Helmut Gröttrup… But he was the only important catch from among the Peenemünde specialists.”
Other German scientists who worked for the Soviets such as Kurt Magnus and Hans Hoch (leading academics in gyroscopy) as well as Manfred von Ardenne (later awarded Hero of Socialist Labor) came from the academia and adjacent industries, and were not members of the Nazi Party.
They also managed to recruit workers and technicians who were POWs liberated from the Dora concentration camp (which supplied personnel for the notorious Mittelwerk factory, where von Braun had committed crimes against humanity including the torture, beatings and execution of the prison labor). Many of the POWs were involved in the sabotage of the A4 (V-2) rocket production at Mittelwerk, and resulting in substantial proportion of misfires and inaccurate flight trajectory when the Nazis used the rockets against England.
In other words, the Soviets had to reverse engineer pretty much everything from scratch (the R-1, which is the copy of A4/V-2), while the Americans got everything they needed. The Americans only fired the V-2 a few times, and then went on with their own “hybrid” designs such as the Navaho, Aerobee and Viking.
And in spite of all this, with such overwhelming advantage, the Americans still LOST the race against the USSR. The R-7 became the world’s first ICBM to be launched in 1957.
To put it in the terminology of you computer nerds, the Americans got the entire core dev team, with the complete source code and full documentations, and the whole tech support team, while the Soviets had to work with and piece together information from third party developers, and still raced ahead of the Americans.
Not much actually, you’ve put it very succinctly.
I do however find it bad taste to blame a failure in scientific endeavor on a country’s political leadership (which to be fair, deserves to be criticized in many other ways) while ignoring the fact that after the Space Shuttle program fraught with disasters ended in 2011, Russian spacecrafts were the only means to send American astronauts to space for nearly a decade (with near accident-free record) until SpaceX came along. If the Russians weren’t reliable on their space technology, do you think the NASA would even think about booking the Soyuz flights? (Keep in mind that the Columbia disaster killed all 7 astronauts, NASA would not even have considered Russian space flights if the risks would involve repeating such disasters)
Finally, I think many people who live in the first world Western countries seriously underestimated the consequences of what the Washington-led neoliberal shock therapy did to post-Soviet Russia. Entire industries were being carved out and mass unemployment and poverty happened in just a few years leading to crimes and even child prostitution (which had practically been eliminated during the Soviet times) were simply unthinkable for most people.
The modern day Russia is the consequence of Western imperialism, period. You can blame all the reactionary elements in the country and laugh at their poverty, but this is what being defeated by imperialism looks like. It will take decades if not longer to recover economically, especially under unprecedented sanctions, and all that has to factor into a lunar lander program that they last tried 47 years ago, no?