CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Limelight
America’s Cold War biological and chemical weapons programs existed in the shadows, and the majority of the Nazi scientists who worked on them maintained anonymity for decades. Their JIOA case files and OMGUS security reports were classified, as were the programs they worked on. But some of the Operation Paperclip scientists enjoyed the limelight for their work, notably in instances where their work crossed over from weapons projects into space-related endeavors. In this manner, Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun, and Hubertus Strughold attained varying degrees of prominence and prestige in the 1950s and 1960s and onward.
Within two years of his arrival in the United States, Dornberger had transformed from public menace to American celebrity. In 1950 he left military custody at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to work for Bell Aircraft Corporation in Niagara Falls, New York, quickly becoming vice president and chief scientist. His vocation was now to serve as America’s mouthpiece for the urgent need to weaponize space. Dornberger was given a Top Secret security clearance and a job consulting with the military on rockets, missiles, and the future of space-based weapons. In his desk diary, housed in the archives at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, he kept track of his cross-country business trips with an engineer’s precision. He attended “classified meetings” at U.S. Air Force bases including Wright-Patterson, Elgin, Randolph, Maxwell, and Holloman, as well as at Strategic Air Command headquarters, in Omaha, Nebraska, and the Pentagon. He also became a consultant to the Joint Chiefs on Operation Paperclip, visiting the inner circle in the Pentagon to discuss “clearance procedures” and the “hiring of German Scientists.” As a Paperclip scout, in 1952 Dornberger traveled with what he called “Pentagon Brass” to Germany to “interview German scientists and engineers [in] Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Witzenhausen.”
In his desk diary Dornberger also detailed an ambitious schedule of public appearances, carefully noting the places he traveled and the people he met with. They were the kinds of engagements usually reserved for congressmen. Throughout the 1950s, he jetted from one event to the next, lecturing at dinners and luncheons and sometimes weeklong events. His speeches were always about conquest, with titles like “Rockets—Guided Missiles: Key to the Conquest of Space,” “Intercontinental Weapons Systems,” and “A Realistic Approach to the Conquest of Space.” He orated to anyone who would listen: the Men’s Club of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, the Boy Scouts of America, the Society of Automotive Engineers. When the Rochester Junior Chamber of Commerce hosted General Dornberger for a women’s luncheon in the spring of 1953, the local press covered the event with the headline, “Buzz Bomb Mastermind to Address Jaycees Today.”
Dornberger became so popular that his memoir about the V-2, originally published in West Germany in 1952, was published in America in 1954. In these pages, Dornberger was able to reengineer his professional history from that of warmongering Nazi general to beneficent science pioneer. According to Dornberger, the research and development that had gone into the V-2 at Peenemünde was a romantic, science-laboratory-by-the-sea affair. There was no mention made of the slave labor facility at Nordhausen or the slaves at Peenemünde. The book was originally titled V-2: The Shot into Space (V-2: Der Schuss ins All). “It would be nice to know who invented the subtitle,” says Michael J. Neufeld, “which so neatly captures the reinvention of a Nazi terror weapon as the space rocket it most certainly was not.”
In 1957, Dornberger seemed to have found his true post-Nazi calling, attempting to sell Bell Aircraft’s BoMi (bomber-missile) to the Pentagon. BoMi was a rocket-powered manned spacecraft designed for nuclear combat in space. Occasionally, and behind closed doors, usually at the Pentagon, Dornberger faced challenges. He was once pitching the benefits of BoMi to an audience of air force officials when “abusive and insulting remarks” were shouted at him, according to air force historian Roy F. Houchin II. In that instance, Dornberger is said to have turned on his audience and insisted that BoMi would receive a lot more respect if Dornberger had had a chance to fly it against the United States during a war. There was “deafening silence,” in the room, Houchin noted.
In 1958 the FBI opened an investigation into General Dornberger based on an insider’s tip that he might be engaged in secret discussions with Communist spies. The special agent who interviewed Dornberger did not believe he was spying for the Soviets but honed in on Dornberger’s duplicitous nature: “It is believed that subject [Dornberger] could carry on satisfactorily in the role of a double agent.” Dornberger was a cunning man, and this quality, coupled with his scientific acumen, served him. No matter what the circumstances, Dornberger always seemed to come out on top.
Wernher von Braun became the biggest celebrity of the Operation Paperclip scientists. By 1950, the army decided that it required a much larger facility to research and develop longer-range rockets, so the Fort Bliss rocket team moved from Texas to the Redstone Arsenal, near Huntsville, Alabama. There, the German scientists began work on the army’s Jupiter ballistic missile. The group had launched sixty-four V-2s from White Sands. At the same time, von Braun was ambitiously developing a persona for himself as America’s prophet of space travel. Rockets, outer space, and interplanetary travel had gained a foothold in American culture. It was the dream of many 1950s American children to fly into outer space, and von Braun and Dornberger became national spokesmen on this issue. They promised the nation that the army’s development of a ballistic missile was the necessary first step in reaching outer space.
In 1952, von Braun experienced a breakthrough in his role of national space advocate when Collier’s magazine paid him $4,000 (approximately $36,000 in 2013) to write the lead article in what would eventually become an eight-part series on future space travel, edited by Cornelius Ryan. “Within the next 10 or 15 years,” von Braun wrote, “the earth will have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite that could be either the greatest force for peace ever devised, or one of the most terrible weapons of war—depending on who makes and controls it.” This space satellite, or station, would also be a “terribly effective atomic bomb carrier,” von Braun added. From its earliest days, space travel would be intertwined with war making. It still is.
In addition to earning von Braun a small fortune, the Collier’s magazine series propelled him into the national spotlight, increasing his fame and affording him additional writing opportunities. Most important, this newfound limelight provided von Braun with a platform to recast himself as a patriotic American. In the summer of 1952, American Magazine published a piece with von Braun’s byline entitled “Why I Chose America,” in which he professed a deep love for America, Christianity, and democracy. In the article, von Braun claimed that during the war he opposed Nazism and was never in a position to do anything but follow orders. The piece earned him an award for “patriotic writing,” even though it had been written by a ghostwriter. The article was reprinted in at least one book and, explains Michael J. Neufeld, would thereafter be “taken as a fundamental source by many later journalists and authors.”
The national attention caught the eye of Walt Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, and an executive called von Braun to see if he wanted to film a couple of space-related shows for a new television series that Disney was working on. For over a year, von Braun had been trying to find a New York publisher for the science fiction novel he had written while living in the Texas desert. By this time, the novel had been rejected by eighteen publishers. The Disney contract offered a wider road to fame and von Braun signed on. The first Disneyland TV broadcast in which von Braun appeared, in 1955, called Man in Space, had an estimated 42 million viewers and was reported to be the second-highest-rated television show in American history at the time. The following month, on April 15, 1955, von Braun and many of his fellow German rocket scientists became U.S. citizens, in a public ceremony held in the Huntsville High School auditorium. In 1958, von Braun and his team launched America’s f
irst successful space satellite, Explorer I, as a quick response to the Soviets’ Sputnik. Kurt Debus was in charge of the launch.
In 1960, von Braun and a group of approximately 120 Operation Paperclip scientists, engineers, and technicians were transferred from the army to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, with a mandate to build the Saturn rockets designed to take man to the moon. Von Braun was made director of the new NASA facility, the Marshall Space Flight Center, also located at the Redstone Arsenal, as well as chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, or “superbooster” rocket, as it would become known. Von Braun’s deputy developer on the Saturn program was Arthur Rudolph, the former operations director at the Mittelwerk slave labor facility.
The Saturn V rocket would need its own launch complex and hangar. Cape Canaveral, on Florida’s east coast, was chosen as the perfect site. On July 1, 1962, NASA activated its Launch Operations Center there, naming Kurt Debus as director. Debus was the ardent Nazi who, during the war and on his own volition, had turned an engineering colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Hitler remarks. To house the giant Saturn rocket, NASA constructed the Vertical Assembly Building on nearby Merritt Island. The structure would soon become the most voluminous building in the world—larger than the Pentagon and almost as tall as the Washington Monument. It was designed by Bernhard Tessmann, former facilities designer at Peenemünde and Nordhausen, and one of the two men who, at war’s end, stashed the V-2 documents in the Dörnten mine.
As had Dornberger, von Braun worked carefully to whitewash his Nazi past. He knew never to speak of the fact that he had become a Nazi Party member in 1937. When a reporter once asked him, incorrectly, about his joining the party “in 1942,” von Braun put his scientist’s precision aside and chose not to correct the newsman. Instead von Braun did what he always did—he said that he’d been coerced into joining the Nazi Party. Never did von Braun speak of the SS cavalry unit he joined, in 1933, or that he was made an SS officer in 1944 and wore the SS officer’s uniform, with its swastika on the armband and its cap with the death’s-head image. With a revelation like that, he could have been deported under the Internal Security Act of 1950, which was meant to keep Communists out of the country but also covered anyone who had held membership in a “totalitarian dictatorship.” Instead, the fact that he was an officer with the SS remained a jealously guarded secret by all parties—von Braun, the U.S. military, and NASA until CNN journalist Linda Hunt broke the story in 1985.
But the dark shadow of von Braun’s complicity in Nazi war crimes followed him around. Sometimes it snuck up on him from behind. One day, while visiting the Collier’s offices, he was riding in the elevator with fellow Paperclip Scientist Heinz Haber, from the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base, and Cornelius Ryan, his editor. Also in the elevator were a few Collier’s magazine staffers, one of whom reached out to Haber, rubbed a piece of the scientist’s leather coat between his fingers, and said wryly, “Human skin, of course?”
As man got closer and closer to the moon, Wernher von Braun enjoyed a parallel ascent in fortune and in fame. Because von Braun was a public figure, his Nazi past was always there, but in shadow. By the 1960s, it was sometimes treated as a joke. One night, before an Apollo mission, von Braun stormed out of a press conference after a reporter asked him if he could guarantee that the rocket would not hit London. Tom Lehrer wrote a song famously satirizing von Braun: “ ‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick created a von Braun–inspired character in his black comedy Dr. Strangelove, in which a mad scientist famously gets out of a wheelchair and cries, “Mein Führer, I can walk!” But in 1963, in East Berlin, a popular author and lawyer named Julius Mader wrote a book called The Secret of Huntsville: The True Career of Rocket Baron Wernher von Braun. On the dust jacket there was a drawing of von Braun wearing a black SS-Sturmbannführer’s uniform. Around von Braun’s neck was the Knight’s Cross, bestowed upon him by Albert Speer at the Castle Varlar event. The book, published by Deutscher Militärverlag, portrayed von Braun as an ardent Nazi and included detailed pages about the murderous conditions at the slave labor facility at Nordhausen, where von Braun oversaw work, and at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp, which supplied the slave laborers.
Several German-speaking U.S. citizens alerted NASA about the allegations against von Braun, as if NASA did not know. The space agency’s three top officials, James E. Webb, Hugh Dryden, and Robert Seamans, discussed the situation with von Braun and counseled him on how to handle it. If anyone were to ask him about this matter, NASA administrator James Webb told von Braun pointedly, his answer was to be, “Everything related to my past activity in Germany… is well known to the U.S. Government.” In the end, nothing much came of the book in the Western world. The narrative mixed “damaging facts” with “completely fabricated scenes,” explains von Braun’s biographer Michael J. Neufeld, which made the book easy to discount. When NASA learned that the book’s author, Julius Mader, worked as an intelligence agent for the East German secret police, the revelations lost their potential power. If need be, Mader’s book could be discounted as Soviet-engineered lies, meant only to damage the prestige of the U.S. space program.
The Secret of Huntsville: The True Career of Rocket Baron Wernher von Braun was a success in the Eastern bloc. It was also translated into Russian and sold half a million copies in the Soviet Union. The book inspired a Soviet-sponsored film, Die Gefrorenen Blitze (Frozen Lightning), also written by Mader and released by the East German state film studio, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), in 1967. The same year, West German prosecutors opened a new Dora-Nordhausen trial, this one called the Essen-Dora trial. An SS guard, a Gestapo official, and the chief of security for the V-2 were all charged with war crimes that took place while V-weapons were being built in the Mittelwerk tunnel complex. Mittelwerk general manager and former Paperclip scientist Georg Rickhey was called as a witness, as was Wernher von Braun. Rickhey, who lived in Germany, took the stand. He testified under oath that he did not know about the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp; that he learned about it after the war. “I don’t know much more because they were secret [concentration] camps,” Rickhey told the court. “It was a secret commando group in charge. Eyes only. There were bad catastrophic conditions [at Nordhausen] but I learned about this only after the war.” This was an absurd misrepresentation of the truth.
Back in America, NASA general counsel refused to send the star of their space program to Germany; this would open Pandora’s box. Instead, they allowed von Braun to deliver oral testimony at a West German consulate in the United States. As a venue, NASA lawyers suggested New Orleans, Louisiana—a place about as far away from the media glare as there was. Representing the Soviet-bloc survivors of Dora-Nordhausen was an East German lawyer by the name of Dr. Friedrich Kaul. Upon learning that von Braun would not be coming to Germany, Dr. Kaul arranged to travel to New Orleans to take von Braun’s testimony himself. Kaul was a supremely skillful lawyer, and he had information on von Braun that was damaging.
According to Michael J. Neufeld, the U.S. government knew that Dr. Kaul had served as legal adviser on Die Gefrorenen Blitze, and that Kaul’s goal in interviewing von Braun was “to broadcast the connection between the rocket engineer, the SS and the concentration camps.” NASA’s moon program would never survive that kind of publicity, and the State Department denied Dr. Friedrich Kaul a visa.
Instead, at the courthouse in Louisiana, von Braun answered questions put to him by a German judge. As the U.S. Army had done with the 1947 Nordhausen trial, the government sealed von Braun’s testimony. Word leaked to the news media that von Braun had been deposed for a war crimes trial, causing von Braun to issue a brief statement on the matter. He said he had “nothing to hide, and I am not implicated.” When a reporter asked if there had been any concentration camp prisoners used as slave laborers at P
eenemünde, von Braun said no.
The judge prosecuting the Essen-Dora trial also took the testimony of General Dornberger, in Mexico, where the now-retired Dornberger spent winters with his wife. Some months later, von Braun and Dornberger corresponded about the matter. “In regards to the testimony, fortunately I too have heard nothing more,” wrote von Braun. No news was good news for both men.
After the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, columnist Drew Pearson—whose fierce exposés of Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber had helped to banish the man from America—wrote in his column that von Braun had been a member of the SS. But von Braun’s glory had reached epic proportions, and Pearson’s article went by relatively unnoticed. Von Braun was an American hero. Citizens all across the nation showered him with praise, glory, and the confetti of ticker-tape parades.
After the Apollo space program ended, von Braun moved into the private sector. In his new life as a defense contractor, he traveled the world and met its leaders, including Indira Gandhi, the Shah of Iran, and Crown Prince Juan Carlos of Spain. In 1973, he decided to take up flying, and in June of that year he applied to get his pilot’s license with the Federal Aviation Administration. This required a physical and a body X-ray, which revealed a dark shadow on his kidney. Von Braun had terminal cancer but would live for another four years.