Close. The Dr Strangelove character was baed on Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun, who came to America after the war.
There were some sharper German, actually Prussian scientists who came here after the war. Or as they would say after displaying a week long mathematical argument on the boards, Yah, Yah,..If ve hahd dis methud bahck in the day ov da V-2, Ve'd all be speaking German now,,...Yah?
I thought it was Lloyd Braun...
I've heard the character was based in part on Edward Teller, who was unmatched in his enthusiasm for nuclear weapons. But Teller was Hungarian and came to the US to escape the Nazis. Between Teller's gung-ho attitude, Von Braun's Nazi past and Kaiser Wilhelm's arm tic, I think it's pretty safe to say the character was a composite rather than a character based on one person.
A recent PBS documentary on the space race portrayed von Braun as someone who was never a committed Nazi, but built weapons as a means to the end of putting satellites into orbit -- something he did extremely well for the US after the war. But it didn't shy away from the fact that he was a party member and an SS major whose V-weapon programs used a lot of slave labor.
Incidentally, the stiff-armed German also made a cameo in Young Frankenstein.