Klaus Riedel

He attended a public lecture on rocketry by Rudolf Nebel on behalf of Germany's amateur rocket group, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR – "Spaceflight Society") and joined the group which included others such as Rolf Engel, Rudolf Nebel, Hermann Oberth or Paul Ehmayr, straight away, becoming very active in its efforts to build a working rocket based on liquid oxygen and gasoline, initially providing his grandmother's farm in Bernstadt as a testing ground.

[2] In May 1932, Riedel became a founding member of the Panterra society for international projects of large-scale peaceful research, as initiated by Albert Einstein and headed by Friedrich Simon Archenhold.

After the VfR disbanded in 1933, Riedel refused to join Wernher von Braun in the army's rocket programme and worked for Siemens.

He accepted von Braun's offer only in August 1937 after the army paid compensation for a 1931 rocketry patent "Thrust Engine for Liquid Propellants" owned by him and Rudolf Nebel.

A Gestapo report of March 1944 stated that he, Wernher von Braun, and his colleague Helmut Gröttrup were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening that they were not working on a spaceship and that they felt the war was not going well; this was considered a "defeatist" attitude.

Klaus Riedel was killed in a mysterious car accident on a straight road near Zinnowitz two days after his thirty-seventh birthday when travelling home from work.