Despite the stigma of having worked for the Nazis during World War II, the German scientists led by Wernher von Braun became heroes of the U.S. space program in the 1950s and '60s.  They were...   Apollo's Rocketeers   By MARCIA DUNN The Associated Press Konrad Dannenberg, pauses during an interview at the Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.  He is one of 30 to 40 surviving scientists of the 118 the U.S. brought over from Germany after World War II.  The men were key players in the American space program culminating in the forst manned moon landing on this date 30 years ago.  At top, Wernher von Wernher, leader of the group, explains his design for a moon rocket.   HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Rudi Beichel is still crunching numbers for a better rocket engine.   Ernst Stuhlinger is still writing about rocket science. So is Gerhard Reisig.   And Konrad Dannenberg is still going to launches and organizing space confabs, only now they're really just reunions, and they are getting smaller and fewer each year.   These men are Apollo's rocketeers, old and overlooked but as passionate as ever about the frontiers they blasted open, with the world's first space shot in 1942, and then by helping put human beings on the moon 30 years ago July 20.   At best guess, only 30 of the 118 original rocket men who came here from Hitler's Germany are still alive. Many are too frail to leave home because of strokes and arthritis. Those who can -- Dannenberg, most notably -- speak for all when they say that what NASA needs is another Wernher von Braun.   Yet many of them fear there will never be another von Braun, the mastermind who led them to America and America to the moon.   And even now, in their late 70s to early 90s, they have yet to outlive the Nazi taint, and they feel deprived of the recognition they deserve.   The fact is that these scientists have led two very different lives: first as loyal subjects of the Third Reich, then as loyal Americans.   Wernher von Braun's wartime rockets indiscriminately killed thousands of people and were built with slave laborers provided by concentration camps. But as World War II ended, the Soviets and Americans found themselves in competition to acquire Germany's rocket expertise. The moral debate was sidelined and von Braun and his men were transformed from servants of Hitler's war machine to heroes of America's race to space.   Von Braun died of cancer in 1977, at age 65, without realizing his fondest dream: leading America to Mars.   Five of his team's sturdier souls gathered last month at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, their adopted hometown and birthplace of the Saturn V moon rocket, to celebrate their achievements and reminisce in fluent but still German-accented English.   "This work we did changed the whole society, the whole life, the whole technology," said the small, smiling Beichel. At 85, he had traveled all the way from Sacramento, Calif., for the big event and was savoring every moment.   "We go to the moon, the biggest industrial revolution the world has ever seen ... and that's only the beginning, ja."   Although as many as 400,000 Americans worked on the $24 billion Apollo program, the Germans contend that without them, the nation never would have put men on the moon by the end of 1969 as President Kennedy decreed.   "It was von Braun's initiative and his drive and motivation and his gift of persuasion, of interesting other people, which enabled us to go to the moon at that relatively early time," said Stuhlinger, also 85, who was von Braun's chief scientist.   As incredible as man's journey to the moon was, so too was these men's journey: launching the first rocket to skim space, the German V-2, V for Vengeance, in 1942; the first American satellite, Explorer I, in 1958; the first American into space, Alan Shepard, in 1961; the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who blasted off on July 16, 1969.   Of all the launches, the one that stands out most for Dannenberg, an 86-year-old propulsion expert, was the first successful test flight of the V-2.   The rocket took off Oct. 3, 1942, from Peenemünde, a German Army research center north of Berlin on the Baltic Sea. It soared 53 miles high (space officially begins 50 miles up) and 118 miles downrange. The army officer in charge of rocket research proclaimed:   "Today the spaceship has been born!"   "At that time, it was clear it would be used by the military," Dannenberg explained. "On the other hand, of course, it was a big step ahead and if you look at the V-2 today and see it next to the Saturn V, you probably think it's tiny. But for us, it was a HUGE rocket, much bigger than any amateur rocket I'd ever seen or even imagined."   The V-2 was 47 feet tall. The Saturn V was 363 feet, more than twice the height of the space shuttle and the biggest, mightiest rocket that ever carried a human being. A 6.4 million-pound monster, it had up to 5 million parts.   Within months of the first successful V-2 launch, Adolf Hitler ordered the production of thousands of these "wonder weapons" and put the SS in charge. Production moved to an abandoned mine near the Harz Mountains of central Germany after Peenemünde was bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1943. Slave labor was used in the underground factory.   In an attempt to lure him over from the army, the SS made von Braun an honorary second lieutenant, then major. He accepted for fear of retribution but stuck his SS uniform in a closet, Stuhlinger said.   The Gestapo, nonetheless, arrested von Braun in 1944. The charge: He intended his rockets for space travel, not weaponry. He spent only two weeks in jail.   By the fall of 1944, V-2's were being launched at Paris and London. But Germany was losing the war and in May 1945, following Hitler's suicide, von Braun and his team surrendered to the U.S. Army. That September, the exodus began under the code name Operation Paperclip; 118 Germans were brought to America along with blueprints and enough parts to build 100 V-2's. Twenty-four more Germans eventually followed.   They quietly settled in Fort Bliss, Texas and helped the Army launch rebuilt V-2's from White Sands, N.M. (One accidentally soared across the border into a hill next to a Mexican graveyard.)   When the rocket and missile effort moved to the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville in 1950, so did the Germans. They became U.S. citizens five years later. When NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center opened at Redstone Arsenal in 1960, von Braun was its first director.   The Germans' presence initially posed a public relations challenge to the U.S. government. On one occasion soon after their arrival, to avoid inflaming the fresh wounds of World War II, they were passed off as a Hungarian Gypsy band.   Later, when von Braun emerged as America's top rocket scientist, Tom Lehrer, the satirical songwriter, lampooned him as an opportunist tailoring his loyalties to whoever employed him: "Don't say that he's hypocritical, say rather that he's apolitical. `Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."   Irene Willhite was walking with her husband, a missile instructor, and their five children through a dark parking lot in Huntsville in 1957 when she first saw the Germans.   "I can see this to this day: four long, black, leather coats. And I thought, they didn't even leave the coats behind," she recalled. "I had total resentment. And I'll tell you the truth, only since I have come to work here, I know their contributions."   "Here" is the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, a visitor complex and Space Camp hub, where she has been the archivist for four years.   She counts the Germans as good friends, and they are entrusting their most valuable possessions to her: books, journals, anything to do with rocketry.   Reisig, 90, wants her to get a truck to empty his house. Stuhlinger and Dannenberg already have sent over loads of boxes.   Stuhlinger published a definitive biography of von Braun in 1994 and still writes scientific essays. Reisig recently published a book about rocket technology in German. Dannenberg is collaborating on a book about early rocketry. Beichel is a consultant for Aerojet, a California-based aerospace and defense company, and works on calculations for future generations of rockets.   Cartons of their work crowd the hallway outside Willhite's cluttered office. Some 3,800 books already fill ceiling-to-floor shelves. There are six V-2 parts, as well as the Army's microfilm of the translated V-2 documents and albums filled with photos of a smoldering Peenemunde.   The subject of Nazis and World War II never came up during the space race, said Ed Buckbee, a NASA PR man in the 1960s who went on to direct the center.   It wasn't until after the rocketeers had retired that stories resurfaced linking at least one of them to the slave labor at Mittelwerk, the underground V-2 factory. Old and ailing, Arthur Rudolph relinquished his U.S. citizenship and returned to Germany in 1984 rather than fight war crimes charges, which he denied. He died in 1996 at age 89.   Of the survivors, Reisig is most distressed by the accusations. He refuses to talk to reporters, saying he has been "back-stabbed."   "It's a situation which is very depressing for us old-timers," Stuhlinger said.   After everything the Germans did for NASA and America, it seems terribly ungrateful, Buckbee thinks.   "We were all working as a team, working day and night," he said. "As von Braun used to say, 'Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.' "   Dan Heald was a young Army corporal assigned to von Braun's team in the early 1950s.   "I don't know if I can judge genius. What I can judge is hard-working and thorough," said Heald, 71, a retired engineer. "Often a boss, particularly a big boss like von Braun, will sit in an office and act important. These guys never were sitting and doing nothing.   They were always checking on every single little detail, asking questions. 'Is that right? Is that right?' Even in the shop."   They still take pride in their meticulousness. When name tags issued at the reunion kept falling off, 86-year-old rocketeer Dieter Grau remarked with a chuckle that they should have been sent to his lab for a checkout.   Their painstaking approach paid off in six moon landings from July 1969 through December 1972. Three additional missions were canned; President Nixon had had enough, especially after the harrowing Apollo 13. President Bush tried to resurrect the program on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 1989, but his pitch for moon colonies and a Mars expedition went nowhere.   Nothing has been officially done -- or said -- since.   "To make it happen that somebody went to the moon and came safely back to Earth ... it was amazing that it all worked," said Ursula Mueller, 77, who worked with von Braun in Berlin.   "And then what we have now is the shuttle to go a little bit around." She sadly shook her head.   Müller went alone to the reunion; her husband, Fritz, 91, one of the 118 original rocketeers, was under doctor's orders to stay home.   The official reason for the get-together was a rare visit by von Braun's thirtysomething nephews (his niece, their sister, just moved to Huntsville), not to mention the 30th anniversary of that giant leap for mankind.   The real reason, Elizabeth von Braun confided, was that the only other excuse to gather the old-timers is a funeral, "and we just felt that we need to get them together, as many as we can ... it may be the last time."   The five rocketeers in attendance seemed as much a relic as the artifacts surrounding them, only far more fragile.   A Saturn V rocket lay majestically on its side, collected piecemeal by von Braun in the late 1960s for exhibit at the Space & Rocket Center. Nearby, ground had recently been broken for a full-scale, vertical model.   Down the hall from the gathering was a recreation of von Braun's 1960s office at Marshall Space Flight Center; two of his slide rules were displayed in a quaint, quiet reminder of the times.   Hardly any NASA brass attended the reunion, but Jim Dunn, one of two latter-day space station engineers who dropped by, couldn't help but marvel at the Germans' accomplishments.   "And they did it without computers!" ARTHUR RUDOLPH OF DORA AND NASA By Linda Hunt In 1969, Americans cheered as our astronauts took their first steps onto the moon. The giant rocket that blasted them into space was Arthur Rudolph's crowning achievement as NASA's project director for Saturn V. Fifteen years later, Rudolph relinquished his U.S. citizenship and left the country rather than face Justice Department charges that he had committed war crimes while working in an underground factory that had used Dora concentration camp prisoners as slave labor. The charges stemmed from Rudolph's "complicity in the abuse and persecution of concentration camp inmates who were employed by the thousands as slave laborers under his direct supervision," according to former Justice prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum, who directed the Rudolph case. Dora played a significant role not only in Hitler's efforts to win the war, but in the lives of Rudolph, Wernher von Braun, and other German rocket scientists who are now touted as American heroes in our history books. Ironically, except for two books by French survivors, Dora's history has been totally ignored by Holocaust historians. Rudolph's supporters, however, currently use every opportunity to claim there were no Jews at the factory, prisoners were "well fed," and reports of "alleged" deaths were nothing but KGB propaganda. As a result, publicity surrounding Rudolph's case reeked with Holocaust revisionism, perpetuating what survivor Jean Michel describes in his book Dora as the "monstrous distortion of history" that "has given birth to false, foul, and suspect myths." Dora's camp records, however, quickly dispel those myths. Sixty thousand prisoners passed through Dora in the brief year and a half the camp existed. United Nations and U.S. Army records reveal that at least 25,000 never got out alive. They were starved, beaten, hanged, and literally worked to death building Hitler's secret weapon, the V-2 rocket. "The method of extermination was not the gas chamber, but .of working them to death," said a U.S. Army prosecutor in 1947. This account is based on records from U.S. Army v. Kurt Andrae, Albert Speer 's Inside the Third Reich, U.S. Army 104th Infantry reports, personal interviews, and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the National Archives, Army Intelligence and Justice Department Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Dora's history began as a result of British air attacks in 1943 that blasted the Peenemünde rocket base into ruins. Peenemünde, located on the Baltic Sea, was a testing ground for Nazi "buzz bombs" and the V-2 rocket. With its building leveled and rocket engineers scattered into the hills, the Nazis sought a safer location to mass-produce V-2 rockets, a site guaranteeing both secrecy and protection against further air attacks. In the Hartz mountains, located near the city of Nordhausen in central Germany, two enormous tunnels ran parallel through Kohnstein mountain, providing a perfect location for the new factory, called Mittelwerk (Central Works). WIFO, a government company, excavated the tunnels as a bomb-proof storage place for oil and gasoline. Two railroad lines ran the entire length of both tunnels, with enough space for trucks and huge, intricate machinery to line the walls. Mittelwerk was a combined effort of the Armaments Ministry and the SS. The engineering staff was headed by technical director Albin Sawatzki, an engineer who produced the Tiger tank. Rudolph, who worked at Peenemunde on rocket development and production, was named operations director in charge of V-2 production. When Rudolph was told by Peenemünde's director, Army General Walter Dornberger, "You go with Sawatzki," he and his staff dismantled a pilot production plant and moved to Mittelwerk. One underground tunnel was complete; the other, partially finished, opened out on the northern side of the mountain. SS General Hans Kammler, who headed the SS construction branch that build Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the gas chambers, was in charge of completing Mittelwerk's tunnels in order to make room for the factory. Dora was founded as the out-camp of Buchenwald to supply the slave labor to reconstruct Mittelwerk's tunnels and work under SS and civilian engineer supervision building rockets. According to armaments minister Albert Speer, using concentration camp prisoners, who had no contact with the outside world, was SS chief Heinrich  Himmler's way of guaranteeing that the plant would be kept secret. "Such prisoners did not even get mail," said Himmler. Beginning on September 3, 1943, a steady stream of convoys into Dora unloaded 60,000 prisoners from 31 nations - Russians, Poles, Belgians, Italian prisoners of war, members of the French resistance, Jewish children, even a black American flier named Johnny Nicholas. According to Army records, Nicholas told other prisoners he was captured when his plane crashed in France. He worked as a doctor in Dora's hospital. "he was to everybody a mystery, someone unusual because we had never seen a black person in Europe," remembers Dora survivor Sam Taub. Yves Beon was a member of the French resistance when he was arrested, sent to Buchenwald, and then to this secret place beneath the mountain where he worked as an SS slave. For months, Beon was one of as many of 4,000 prisoners at a time who lived in the freezing cold tunnels, amid lice and filth, digging and carrying huge boulders to clear area for a rocket factory. "We were in the center of the mountain with no air," Beon recalls. "We slept there, we ate there, we spent months there before going outside." The prisoners - called Häftlinge, "men in arrest" - lived and slept in barracks in the tunnels, surrounded by choking dust and fumes. Hundreds were crushed by rocks, beaten to death, starved, or died from tuberculosis and other diseases. After a December 10, 1943, visit to Mittelwerk, even Speer described conditions as "barbarous" and said his men "were so affected that they had to be forcibly sent off on vacations to restore their nerves." Bodies of the dead were taken to Buchenwald for burning until Dora's own crematory was built. Dora camp records describe Buchenwald prisoners as so horrified at seeing bodies crushed by boulders or mangled from beatings that they committed suicide upon learning they were to be sent to Dora. On November 1, 1944, Dora became an independent camp located near the tunnel entrance, with 31 sub-camps scattered around the mountains. While the Häftlinge now lived outside the tunnels, living and working conditions grew worse. Prisoners were hanged, beaten, and terrorized by brutal SS guards from the moment they arrived. A transport of Hungarian Jews, arriving half-dead from Buchenwald, were forced to carry heavy boards to build their own barracks until many dropped dead from exhaustion. Children who arrived with the group were beaten to death in the camp yard because they were too young to work. Eli Pollach, 16, who lost his family at Auschwitz, worked on the "Sawatzki commando" team in the tunnels loading rocket parts on wagons. Before working a 12-hour shift in the tunnels, Pollach and other prisoners were forced to stand for hours in the camp yard for roll call, then walk for miles under SS guard into the mountain. "We had to go in at six o'clock in the morning into the tunnel," said Pollach. "Some didn't come out, because they died in there." Mittelwerk's management changed after the Dora camp was built. In the spring of 1944, prisoners and engineers assembled in the tunnels as Georg Rickhey, dressed in full Nazi uniform, announced that he was Mittelwerk's new general manager. Rudolph gained more influence when Sawatzki returned after a month of illness and was transferred to V-1 production. "I was free of his darn interfering," Rudolph told OSI. Rudolph said he walked through the tunnels once or twice a day and even visited Dora's SS camp commandant Otto Foerschner for a glass of schnapps on a few occasions. Army records show he received daily reports containing information about prisoner's deaths. "I knew that people were dying," he told OSI. One department subordinate to Rudolph was the Prisoner Labor Supply Office, which West German court records show was responsible for "the quantity of food" the prisoners received, which was "completely inadequate." The department also was in charge of requesting "the required prisoner labor supply" from Dora's SS labor allocation office headed by SS officer Wilhelm Simon. When asked by OSI if he had gone to the SS and requested that more prisoners be taken from Dora and brought down into that subterranean hellhole to be used as slaves, Rudolph replied, "Yes, I did." Rudolph claimed that he and Simon tried to improve the prisoners' conditions. In 1947, Simon used that defence when he was tried for war crimes by the U.S. Army. It is significant to note that Army prosecutors rejected his defence, convicted him for being a "sadistic" killer, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. There is extensive evidence that civilian engineers subordinate to Rudolph beat prisoners and caused some to be hanged. Army records identify Rudolph's subordinates, including his deputy, Karl Seidenstucker, by name as abusers of prisoners. Georg Finkenzeller testified, "practically all civilians who were working in the Prisoners' Labor Allocation" either ordered the punishment of prisoners or "carried out beating on their own." Abuses by civilians became so widespread that on June 22, 1944, Mittelwerk personnel, including Rudolph, were warned in writing by the SS and Rickhey that punishment of prisoners was supposed to be the SS's exclusive domain. Dora's camp doctor had complained that prisoners were being hospitalized for being "beaten or even stabbed with sharp instruments by civilian employees for any petty offense." Peenemünde officials were well aware of Mittelwerk's deplorable conditions. Army documents show that Wernher von Braun, whose brother Magnus was in charge of gyroscope production at Mittelwerk, frequently visited the factory. "I saw Mittelwerk several times, once while these prisoners were blasting tunnels in there, and it was really a pretty hellish environment," said von Braun in a 1971 interview. "The conditions there were absolutely horrible." Knowing about the conditions didn't stop von Braun from attending a meeting in Rickhey's office on May 6, 1944, to discuss slave labor, according to documents found by Eli Rosenbaum. Other Nazis on the list as attending the meeting, and who later lived in America, include Rudolph, Rickhey, General Walter Dornberger, Hans Friederich, Ernst Steinhoff, and Hans Lindenberg. The group discussed bringing more innocent civilians from France to Mittelwerk as slaves and the requirement that Frenchmen wear striped prisoner uniforms. "it will be possible to utilize French workers in the Mittelwerk only if dressed in appropriate clothing," notes the menu, which does not indicate any objections to the proposal. Despite vicious living and working conditions, Dora prisoners found subtle ways to fight back. When the V-2s produced at Mittelwerk were test-fired at a proving ground in Poland, many of the missiles disintegrated soon after launch. Dieter Grau, a Peenemünde engineer, was sent by Wernher von Braun to Mittelwerk to find out why the rockets failed to operate properly. During an inspection, Grau found that prisoners had sabotaged the rockets. "They knew where they could tighten or loosen a screw, and this way tried to interfere with the proper function of the missile," Grau said in a 1971 interview with another author. The prisoners sabotaged rockets by urinating on wiring, removing vital parts, and loosening screws. "It was common practice," says Beon, who sabotaged the rockets he worked on as a welder by making his welding appear sound when, in fact, the rocket parts were not welded at all. Beon believes their sabotage saved Americans' lives - U.S. troops landing at Normandy would have been killed if the rockets had functioned. "It would have been terrible for the Allies and for the American Army," says Beon. More than 200 prisoners suspected of sabotage were hanged at Dora or on overhead electric cranes in Mittelwerk's tunnels, in some instances as a direct result of civilians reporting them to the SS. Cecil Jay described to Army prosecutors how one prisoner was caught making a metal spoon, accused of sabotage, and hanged over his workbench. "The order was given from the civilians to the SS that the prisoners be punished for sabotage, and it was carried out," Jay said. In one case, 12 prisoners were simultaneously hanged on an overhead crane near Rudolph's office. With their hands tied behind their backs and wooden sticks in their mouths to stifle screams, the electric crane slowly lifted them above a crowd of engineers and prisoners gathered in the tunnel. "Instead of letting them drop and killing them on the spot immediately, they let them hang very slowly with pain that's absolutely horrible," says Beon, who knew if he was caught sabotaging rockets he could be hanged next. "But as I knew I would never get out of Dora, what's the difference?" When they died, prisoners were taken to Dora's crematory and burned. Bodies were emaciated to such an extent that the oven could take as many as four at a time. "They would pull out from the hospital hundreds of people," remembers Taub. "They were put into the crematory - it was going day and night, burning." As the war progressed, frantic work speed-ups to mass produce more rockets caused prisoners to drop dead like flies. Those who became ill or too weak to work were sent to other camps and killed. Dora hospital records show from January 6 to March 26, 1944, 3,000 "sick and exhausted liquidation camp Lublin. Reports note that except for a few, there was "no chance" for prisoners, riding in cold freight cars in the middle of winter with no food, even to live out the trip. Jean Michel had been a leader of the French resistance in Paris before his imprisonment at Dora. In late 1944, he organized a French underground movement among prisoners. "Everybody knew that the SS had decided to kill everybody at the end of the war," Michel said in an interview. "So, I decided to try to do something about it." The group was caught, arrested by the SS, and jailed. Some of the group were beaten to death by the SS during interrogations in a small cell. "I would have been hanged if the end of the war didn't arrive as it happened," says Michel, who was awarded the French Legion of Honor and the American Medal of Freedom after the war. In the beginning of April 1945, as American troops advanced rapidly into the area, Mittelwerk's civilian engineers fled into the mountains amid rumors that the SS would kill them rather than let their secrets fall into Allied hands. For some, such as Arthur Rudolph, the end of the war was the beginning of a new adventure and life in America, where he would eventually work for the U.S. Army and NASA. For the Häftlingen, it was a massacre. The SS planned to force the prisoners into the tunnels, wall them in, and gas them. Instead, 2,000 were taken from Dora and its sub-camps under heavy SS guard on foot, by cart and train, westward to the town of Gardelegen. Less than half survived the trip after days of being starved, beaten, and shot. On the afternoon of April 13, 100 SS. Luftwaffe, and labor front soldiers forced the 1,100 remaining prisoners inside a barn. SS troops spread gasoline on the straw-covered floor and locked the prisoners inside. For the rest of the night, the troops threw hand grenades, shot flares, and fired bullets into the barn, burning it to the ground. Two days later, American troops found charred remains and fewer than 20 prisoners left alive. Meanwhile, the city of Nordhausen surrendered after American attacks on April 11, 1945. The battle-tired men of the 104th "Timberwolf" Infantry Division were combat wise - blood and all kinds of hell were daily routine - but what the Timberwolves found on the outskirts of Nordhausen made them howl with rage. Colonel James L. Collins was leading an infantry unit when his liaison officer called over the radio. "Colonel," he said, "you'd better get up here and see what we've got. It's terrible." Collins moved ahead of the unit and went into the camp. On the hill was the huge cavelike entrance to the factory; 6,000 bodies covered the ground as far as the eye could see. Rows upon rows of skin-covered skeletons were frozen solid in grotesque shapes, bearing bruises and wounds from beatings. "They had been starved to death," said Collins. "Their arms were just little sticks, their legs had practically no flesh on them at all." Army medic David Malachowsky heard machine guns fire. When he went over the hill, he found the SS frantically trying to finish the job. "They had a bunch of prisoners lined up against the fence and were gunning them down," said Malachowsky. As an infantryman, Hugh Carey saw Nazi cruelty when fighting SS divisions, but was unprepared for Dora. Survivors, barely alive, wandered around lost and dazed; others lay as they had fallen - starved, stacked like cordwood, discolored, and lying in indescribable filth. "We had never seen civilian human beings put into a mass torture shop in order to build weapons," said Carey. Bombs from Allied air attacks had ripped large holes in the two-story structures used to pen the prisoners. The bombs had ground flesh and bones into the cement floor. As the soldiers moved through the choking stench of death, they found the still-smouldering furnaces of Dora's crematory. "The doors were open when we got there, where they had been shoveling people in and burning them up," said Collins. As more American troops entered the area, Malachowsky and other medics fed and cared for those few prisoners who survived. Another unit stood guard as 100 Nordhausen townspeople and captured SS moved the dead and dug graves with their bare hands. In the tunnel, a special American unit called "T-Forces" loaded V-2 rockets on truckbeds, then searched the mountainside for Arthur Rudolph and other rocket scientists. Many of these scientists escaped prosecution for war crimes by being sent to the United States to work in its fledgling space program. Exactly 40 years after the liberation of Dora, in April 1985, the Alabama Space and Rocket Museum paid tribute to 40 Germans who stood surrounded by the press, in front of old V-2s and the Saturn V rocket they helped build for the United States. Inside the museum, dozens of awards lay encased in glass as a memorial to Wernher von Braun. There is no monument to Dora - Americans do not wish to be reminded of what Jean Michel said about the day that U.S. astronauts first walked on the moon: "I could not watch the Apollo mission without remembering that that triumphant walk was made possible by our initiation to inconceivable horror." Linda Hunt is a Washington DC, based investigative reporter. She won the 1986 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for her article "U.S. Cover-up of Nazi Scientists" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (April 1985). She is former executive producer of Cable News Network's investigative unit. Her book "Secret Agenda" details this horrible story and "Operation Paperclip" that brought over 1,600 Nazi scientist to the U.S. to work for the Pentagon. May 5, 1945  Soviet Army occupies Peenemünde.  Little is found. Western intelligence is convinced that the Soviets conduct missile tests from Peenemünde in the late 1940's (the Scandinavian 'ghost rockets'). But Russian historical sources available after the downfall of the Soviet Union do not support this belief.  July 5, 1945 Soviets occupy Mittelwerk as the Americans withdraw from the Soviet zone, having taken key V-2 tooling and parts.   Last Rocketeers Set Sights on Mars 8 December 2004   HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Four men and one woman, all around 90 years old, gather in a conference room and pour themselves coffee -- rocket fuel for the last of the original rocketeers.   Just outside, in Rocket Park, looms some of their handiwork: Gemini and Mercury rockets, a lunar lander and a gigantic rusting Saturn V from the Apollo program.   These five people were among 118 German rocket scientists bundled up and brought to the USA after World War II. Working for the Nazis, the rocket scientists had made Hitler's deadly V-2s. Reconstituted in Huntsville, the group vaulted U.S. rocket technology ahead by a decade and developed the rockets that allowed their adopted country to win the space race.   The group's inspirational leader, Wernher von Braun, helped persuade President Kennedy to make his famous commitment to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.   Today, only 12 of that group are still living, including the five gathered here recently to help raise money to restore the Saturn V outside. Even as the remaining rocketeers fade away, they are suddenly relevant again to a new generation. For almost 30 years after Apollo, the American public seemed indifferent to space. But now, technology entrepreneurs -- members of a generation raised on Star Trek and Star Wars -- are again making space sexy.   Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen funded SpaceShipOne, which this fall won the X Prize for boosting civilian space travel. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has started a private company that will work toward putting people on Mars. Elon Musk, who founded online bill-paying service PayPal, has started a space company. Mogul Richard Branson is aiming to be the first to put hotels in space.   To this new generation, the German rocketeers are an inspiration. For the rocketeers, the techies are reviving their dearest hope: that man will go to Mars.   ''If private industry takes tourists into space, it might uplift the whole program again,'' says Konrad Dannenberg, 92, a propulsion expert on Apollo. ''I'm very hopeful.''   Ernst Stuhlinger, 92, who was von Braun's right-hand man, twinkles when asked about the new generation's dreams of Mars flights. ''We old-timers have been thinking that way for a very long time.''   Forced to make missiles the rocketeers have long been haunted by their earlier lives.   In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of research into the new idea of launching rockets into space. A young von Braun took the lead, launching his first rockets in 1934. As World War II approached, the Nazis created a rocket team under von Braun at a secret base on an island at Peenemünde, Germany. They were ordered to make military missiles, not spaceships.   The team developed the V-2, which killed 2,500 British civilians. The rockets were built by concentration camp labor in tunnels.   The rocketeers have always said they had no choice. They say they wanted to build rockets to go to the moon and Mars, not to carry explosives. ''We couldn't even talk about space flight,'' Dannenberg says. ''Von Braun was at a party and talked about it with some people, and the Nazis found out and put him in jail.'' He was later released, but the message was clear.   As Germany's defeat seemed certain in 1945, the rocketeers made a calculated move. ''It was clear nothing was going to happen in Germany in space after the war,'' Dannenberg says. If the rocketeers wanted to pursue their dream, they would have to go elsewhere. The group decided they'd have their best shot with the Americans. They hid their research papers in a mine shaft, forged travel documents, and as many as 500 people -- scientists and their families -- moved toward the approaching American Army -- avoiding the Gestapo, who might have arrested or shot them. They holed up in an abandoned fortress in the Alps.   Von Braun sent his younger brother, Magnus, off on a bicycle to try to find the Americans. He stumbled across Pvt. Fred Schniekert of Sheboygan, Wis., and tried to explain that a whole team of rocket scientists wanted to surrender. Schniekert said, ''I think you're nuts,'' but relayed the message to his superiors, who recognized the value of the rocketeers.   The Army raced to Peenemünde to get there before the Soviets. The rocketeers' papers and every project and spare V-2 part were loaded on 300 rail cars that were shipped to the USA. And then the U.S. government took its own calculated risk: It transferred the 118 former enemy rocket scientists and their families to Fort Bliss, Texas, and eventually to an abandoned military base in Huntsville.   Beating Russia to the moon over the next decade, the rocketeers didn't have much to do. ''We called ourselves PoPs -- prisoners of peace,'' Stuhlinger quips. John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and soon after fell from grace with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. A few years before, the USSR had beaten the USA to space with its Sputnik satellite.   ''Kennedy wanted to do something to regain America's prestige,'' Stuhlinger recalls. Kennedy asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson to write letters seeking advice. One went to von Braun.   Stuhlinger has copies of memos that bounced between von Braun and the White House. Von Braun laid out everything he knew about the capabilities of U.S. and Soviet rockets. He concluded that the USA would have little chance of beating the Soviets to a manned space lab, but would have a ''sporting chance'' of beating them to an orbit of the moon and ''an excellent chance'' of beating them to a moon landing.   In other words, the USA didn't go to the moon because it was there. We went because we could get there first.   In a speech in May 1961 Kennedy laid out one of history's great mission statements: ''This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.''   ''The irony is that in the 1960s, we went from nothing to landing a person on the moon in eight years,'' says space entrepreneur Musk. ''Today it would take two or three times as long, and that's crazy.''   Astronaut Walter Schirra, 81, who flew three space missions, was one of the seven original Mercury astronauts when he heard about Kennedy's speech. ''I couldn't believe we'd made that commitment,'' he recalls. ''So many things happened so fast. I'd just flown Mach 2 for the first time in 1958.'' To get to the moon would require speeds of Mach 25, which would take engines 60 to 70 times more powerful. ''That's a big leap.''   The von Braun team numbered 400 in 1961. It quickly swelled to 8,000. But the Germans were the leaders, and von Braun was the star. ''That was important,'' Stuhlinger says. ''We had a von Braun. There is no von Braun today.''   ''If the Germans had not been here, the technology would've been delayed by 10 years, 15 years,'' says Mark Smith, who knows the Germans from his years as CEO of Adtran,a Huntsville tech company. ''No group of people is indispensable, but they shrunk the time frame.''   Rules about federal contracts and processes were tossed. ''We could make decisions in almost no time,'' says Walter Haussermann, who led development of guidance controls. He remembers talking with IBM about supplying the mission's computers. He was able to say yes in two days. ''Today, it would take years,'' he says.   Thanks to the Germans' experience, glitches rarely slowed the project. The only disaster: a fire in the Apollo 1 that killed the three-man crew. Manned flights were delayed for nearly two years to make sure it didn't happen again. Ask the Germans how they accomplished so much so quickly, and they struggle for an answer. They note the commitment from Kennedy, the military and the American public -- all pulling toward a single goal. Schirra, who often worked closely with the Germans, says the space race was like a years-long adrenaline rush. ''It was a competition with Russia, and we had to beat them,'' he says.   Mostly, though, the Germans seem nonchalant, as if it were easy to put a man on the moon in eight years. ''We all believed it could be done,'' Dannenberg says with a shrug.   New generation takes over so now comes a new age.   Interest in space dropped after the first moon landings. Travel to Mars seemed unlikely. Discouraged, the Germans dropped out of NASA. Von Braun died in 1977.   But a young generation at NASA has put two robot rovers on Mars and wowed the public. President Bush has talked of Mars missions. Mostly, though, entrepreneurs have picked up where the rocketeers left off.   ''We need to exceed where we were with the Apollo program,'' says Musk, whose company, SpaceX, plans its first orbital launch next year. ''We have to go to Mars with people. A lot of people take for granted that that's the direction we're heading in, but unless there's a dramatic reduction in cost, there won't be anything like that. Somebody has to try to step in and try to save the day.''   Musk made a fortune from PayPal, which he sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. He's pumping much of it into SpaceX. He also helped fund the X Prize.   The public might be ready for Apollo-like excitement again. SpaceShipOne is on the cover of Time as 2004's most amazing invention. The cover of the December issue of Wired proclaims ''The New Age of Exploration.'' Bezos' secretive space start-up, Blue Origins, says on its Web site that it's ''developing vehicles and technologies that, over time, will help enable an enduring human presence in space.''   To do so is the enduring last wish of the rocketeers. Source: USA TODAY Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip.   Of particular interest were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas. An aim of the operation was capturing equipment before the Soviets came in. The US Army destroyed some of the German equipment to prevent it from being captured by the advancing Soviet Army.   The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Fort Bliss, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program.   Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified.   Separate from Paperclip was an even-more-secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos). Another American project (TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography.   The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946. 1500 Nazi doctors and researchers were brought to North America, primarily by the American government following WWII and some of them of course went into the nuclear industry in Los Alamos. But many of them were placed in key positions in hospitals and in medical research facilities, both in the United States and in Canada. There were 200 German medical doctors conducting medical experiments. Most of these doctors were friends of the United States before the war, and despite their inhuman experiments, the U.S. attempted to rebuild a relationship with them after the war. The knowledge the Germans had accumulated at the expense of human life and suffering, was considered a "booty of war", by the Americans and the Russians. The Americans tracked down Dr. Strughold, the aviation doctor who was in charge of the Dachau experiments. With full knowledge that the experiments were conducted on captive humans, the U.S. recruited the doctors to work for them. General Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his personal approval to exploit the work and research of the Nazi's in the death camps. Within weeks of Eisenhower's order, many of these notorious doctors were working for the U.S. Army at Heidelberg. Army teams scoured Europe for scientific experimental apparatus such as pressure chambers, compressors, G-force machines, giant centrifuges, and electron microscopes. These doctors were wined and dined by the U.S. Army while most of Germany's post-war citizens virtually starved. The German doctors were brought to the U.S. and went to work for Project Paperclip. All these doctors had been insulated against war crime charges. The Nuremberg prosecutors were shocked that U.S. authorities were using the German doctors despite their criminal past. In 1969, Americans landed on the moon, and two groups of scientist in the control center shared the credit, the rocket team from Peenemünde, Germany, under the leadership of Wernher von Braun, these men had perfected the V-2s which were built in the Nordhausen caves where 20,000 slave laborers from prison camp Dora had been worked to death. The second group were the space doctors, lead by 71-year-old Dr. Hubertus Strughold, whose work was pioneered in Experimental Block No. 5 of the Dachau concentration camp and the torture and death of hundreds of inmates. The torture chambers that were used to slowly kill the prisoners of the Nazi's were the test beds for the apparatus that protected Neil Armstrong from harm, from lack of oxygen, and pressure, when he walked on the moon. As High Commissioner of occupied Germany, John McCloy was instrumental in the early release and commutation of numerous Nazi war criminals.  In October 1950, he commuted the five-year sentence of Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, who as a Nazi Foreign Office official had been convicted of complicity in the deportation of some six thousand Jews from France to Poland.  In January of the following year, McCloy announced that five of the fifteen death sentences from the Nuremburg judgements would be carried out.  He then reduced the sentences of sixty-four of the remaining seventy four war criminals.  One third of these were to be released immediately. He also reduced the sentences of all the remaining convicted doctors who had experimented on concentration camp inmates.  One SS officer who confessed to having personally executed fifteen hundred Jews was reprieved because he had later refused to carry out any further killings.   From Nazis to NASA Jennifer Wilding   Operation Paperclip (originally named Operation Overcast) began shortly after Wernher von Braun's surrender to the American. One of the largest operations of the late days of World War II, it was mounted with intent of securing the world's most advanced rocket, and its designer, for the US. The area in which von Braun and his associates had worked was to be Russian occupied territory, the Americans had to move fast in order to secure the prize for themselves. This Operation was not originally meant to bring von Braun to the US, its purpose was to bring one hundred operational V-2's to American researchers at White Sands, in order to bolster the rather lame army rocket project. However, the fragility of the V-2's meant that none were actually intact when Mittelwerk was captured, the Americans found only piles of parts, and no instruction manuals for assembly. Bringing their designer along seemed like the only viable option. Von Braun, of course, was quite willing.   The American government was not enthusiastic about von Braun and 300 other Germans coming to the States. This was a period of deep suspicion and hostility towards Germany, a natural aftermath of six years of war. A period of rather bitter negotiation ensued. The Germans wanted a three year contract of employment, the US government offered six months, the Germans wanted their families with them, the US offered to hold them in special internment camps. Von Braun wanted 300 hundred scientists to accompany him, the US government did not want any. In September 1945 115 Germans went to America on what proved to be (for most of them) a permanent basis. The majority of their families joined them about two years later.   The US army wanted von Braun very badly, to the point of falsifying security reports that would permit him to enter the United States. He was considered absolutely necessary to their plans to assemble the components of the hundred V-2 rockets which had also been brought to the States and to continue their development. While von Braun had not been deemed a war criminal, his single-minded mania to build rockets had led him to ignore a number of very questionable practices involving the prisoners who constructed and assembled the V-2's. They died by the hundreds.   It is, however, somewhat amusing to note that, while the Army Intelligence Service was perfectly aware of von Braun's activities, the altered version of their report says that certain information was not available because the requisite documents were held in the Russian area of occupation.   Rocket research in America did not proceed as von Braun had hoped. His first task was to sort though the 14 tons of paper and documents that had been shipped from Germany to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. He then spent the remainder of the 1940's testing his old V-2's, with varying degrees of success. It was not until 1949 that he launched the first step rocket. This was primarily due to a conflict in goals. Von Braun wanted to go into space, the army, which employed him, wanted guided missiles. It was not until 1956 that the Jupiter-C, a four stage rocket (the largest ever) was built.   Prior to the successes of the V-2 (von Braun's A-4) as a weapon rocket research had not been a priority of the American military. They had achieved mediocre results with the Private and WAC Corporal rockets, but these were small and inefficient. Significant success was not achieved until the "Bumper" WAC was launched. It was a two stage rocket, with the small WAC atop a V-2, which "bumped" it into space. This was the last series of test carried on at White Sands. IN 1950 the test site was moved to Cape Canaveral.   In October 1957 those who had blocked von Braun's proposals (primarily President Eisenhower, who hated Germans) got a shock, Sputnik 1 was launched. Because of Eisenhower's distrust of von Braun the navy had been awarded the task of launching the first space shot. This was despite the fact that von Braun had almost completed such a vehicle and the Navy had not even got plans on a drawing board. The Navy's project, Vanguard, was speeded up and a launch was attempted in December. The "Flopnik" blew up on the launch pad.   In January, 1958 von Braun's team launched Explorer 1 at Cape Canaveral.   NACA (National Advisory Commission for Aeronautics) was dissolved and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) was formed in the same year.   Russian Yuri Gagarin become the first man in space on April 12, 1961. On May 25 President Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon, von Braun and associates began work on the Apollo series. Apollo 11 achieved circum-Lunar orbit on July 19, 1967.   Even during the war years von Braun had dreamed of larger and larger rockets. The A-10, which was never built, bore a strong resemblance to the Saturn rockets. The A-9 was designed to be a reusable rocket, it was built and flown twice at Peenemünde before the end of the War. It was further developed by von Braun and eventually became the Space Shuttle.   As well as designing rockets, satellites and space stations von Braun published extensively and traveled widely, always sharing his enthusiasm for rocketry and space. He collaborated with Walt Disney on Tommorrowland at Disneyland, and on some Disney documentaries on space. There is even a Disney character, Dr. Ludwig van Drake, based upon von Braun.   In 1970 von Braun was "kicked upstairs". He continued to plan for a Mars mission but gave up and resigned in 1972. None of his proposal received any sort of consideration, it seems his Nazi past had returned to haunt him. He took a private sector job, developing and deploying satellites for the Fairchild Corporation.   Wernher von Braun became seriously in 1975. On June 16, 1977, one of the most influential men of the twentieth century succumbed to cancer at sixty-five years of age. After World War II, German-born rocket engineer Wernher von Braun came to the US, where he developed rockets for the United States military and for NASA. His history of having been a member of the Nazi party and a key figure in the development of Germany's rocket program during the war made him a controversial figure. It was later calculated that thousands of people enslaved by the Nazis had been killed working in von Braun's missile projects, in addition to the thousands killed in London from the notorious V-2 missile, developed by von Braun. The V-2 was also used against Allied troops after D-Day. Dr. Steven M. Greer, M.D., is widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on UFOs and Extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). There are a tremendous amount of articles on the web him and he on these subjects. On his "Disclosure Project" site, he writes: The world is kept in a state or roiling wars, endless poverty for most of Earth's denizens and global environmental ruin, just to prop up this evil world order. As immense as that game is, there is a bigger one: Control through fear. As Wernher Von Braun related to Dr. Carol Rosin, his spokesperson for the last 4 years of his life, a maniacal machine - the military, industrial, intelligence, laboratory complex - would go from Cold War, to Rogue Nations, to Global Terrorism (the stage we find ourselves at today) to the ultimate trump card: A hoaxed threat from space. Greer states that, in regard to the tragedy of September 11, 2001: ...One of the few silver linings to these recent tragedies is that maybe - just maybe - people will take seriously, however far-fetched it may seem at first, the prospect that a shadowy, para-governmental and transnational entity exists that has kept UFOs secret - and is planning a deception and tragedy that will dwarf the events of 9/11. The testimony of hundreds of government, military and corporate insiders has established this: That UFOs are real, that some are built by our secret 'black' shadowy government projects and some are from extraterrestrial civilizations, and that a group has kept this secret so that the technology behind the UFO can be withheld - until the right time. This technology can - and eventually will - replace the need for oil, gas, coal, ionizing nuclear power and other centralized and highly destructive energy systems. Following are portions of quotes taken from Greer's Disclosure Project : Admiral Lord Hill-Norton, Five-Star Admiral, Former Head of the British Ministry of Defense:  ...was kept in the dark about the UFO subject during his official capacities... he states that this subject has great significance and should no longer be denied and kept secret... "...there is a serious possibility that we are being visited - and have been visited for many years - by people from outer space, from other civilizations; that it behoves us to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation, and not the subject of rubbishing by tabloid newspapers." Sgt. Clifford Stone: US Army is another very reputable alien advocate. Greer's prefaces Stone's statement with these comments: During the discussion of UFOs, the question, ultimately, is going to come up, can any government keep secrets, let alone the U.S. Government? And the answer to that is unequivocally yes. But one of the greatest weapons the intelligence community has at their disposal is a predisposition by the American people, the American politicians and the debunkers - people who wish to try to debunk UFO information. They immediately come out and say, oh, we can't keep secrets, we can't keep secrets. Well, the truth is, yes, we can. Stone says: The National Reconnaissance Office remained secret for many, many years. The mere existence of the NSA remained secret. The development of the atomic weapon remained secret until once you exploded one you eventually had to tell some people what was going on. And we are conditioned by our own paradigms not to accept the possibility or probability of a highly advanced intelligent civilization coming here to visit us. You have evidence in the form of highly credible reports of objects being seen, of the entities inside these objects being seen. Yet, we look for a prosaic explanation and we throw out the bits and pieces of the evidence that doesn't meet our paradigm. So it is a self-keeping secret. You can conceal it in plain sight. It is political suicide to go and start hitting up intelligence agencies to get this information released. So, most of your members of Congress, and I know I've worked with a lot of them along that line, will balk and try not to do it. I can name you three members of Congress that were point blank asked to have a congressional inquiry on what happened here at Roswell… We have got to get the documentation as it exists in the Government files. We have got to get it released before it ultimately is destroyed. A good example is the Blue Fly and Moon Dust files. I had classified documents the Air Force acknowledged. When I got members of Congress to help me open up more files, they were immediately destroyed and I can prove this. Somewhere along the line, they may see that material and realize there is some very highly sensitive information that would have a damning effect upon the national security of United States should it become compromised. It needs to be further protected, to insure that there is only a limited access to that information to a small number of people. So small you can put them on a list of paper, on a piece of paper, and list them by name. Thus, you have the special access programs. The controls that were supposed to be put on the special access programs are not there. When Congress did their review of the way we protect documents, and the way we go ahead and implement our secrecy programs, they found that you had special access programs within special access programs - that is was essentially impossible to keep control of them all by Congress. And, I'm telling you right now; it is essentially impossible to keep control of them all. When it comes to UFOs, the same criteria applies. Therefore, only a small nucleus within the intelligence community, numbering less than a hundred - no, I'd suggest less than 50 - control all that information. It is not subject to congressional review or oversight at all. So, Congress needs to go ahead and ask the hard questions and convene a hearing.

Peenemünde and Los Alamos: Two Studies

Donald E. Tarter

Abstract

The Second World War produced two great and memorable scientific and technological teams: the German Peenemünde rocket team under the direction of Dr. Wernher von Braun, and the American Los Alamos atomic bomb team under the direction of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Taken together, the contributions of these teams created the post-war capability for intercontinental nuclear warfare. These teams, working in different countries under radically different political systems, encountered severe political difficulties during and after the war. Each, in its own way, has had to live with its deeds, endure public suspicions, and bear the judgment of history. This article, based on 13 hours of interviews recently completed with members of the von Braun Peenemünde team, together with an analysis of several hours of video interviews of members of the Oppenheimer Los Alamos team, seeks to present a meaningful contrast and description of the environments and the pressures under which each worked.

Introduction

Late in 1982, the United States Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) began a series of interrogations of a former von Braun rocket team member, Arthur Rudolph. Rudolph had been one of the central figures in the American Apollo Lunar Program, having been the Saturn 5 project manager. He had left his previous home in Huntsville, Alabama, site of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, and was then residing in San Jose, California.

Throughout 1983, OSI continued its investigations, and late that year informed Dr. Rudolph that it believed there was sufficient evidence to link him to war crimes activity at the World War II German rocket facility, Mittelwerk, a forced-labor installation in the Harz Mountains. OSI threatened prosecution and indictment unless Dr. Rudolph signed an agreement to leave the country and renounce his citizenship. After agonizing over the prospects of a long and expensive trial or doing as the OSI requested, Dr. Rudolph decided in November 1983 to leave the United States. On March 27, 1984, he and his wife boarded a plane in San Francisco en route to Germany.

The disposition of the Rudolph case bitterly incensed many of Rudolph's original German colleagues and many of his associates in the American space program. In early 1989, an effort was launched by several of his friends and colleagues in Huntsville to have the government allow his return to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the lunar landing in July. That effort failed.

A 1989 editorial in the Huntsville Times [1] noted that Rudolph chose to leave the USA because there was a possibility of prosecution, and a chance that if successfully prosecuted he would be deported and lose his government benefits. The editorial added:

The right and justice of the matter have never been established. The aging retiree chose to acquiesce rather than fight. The West German government has said it did not find evidence to prosecute him.

... [This] leaves unanswered the question of the basic justice of the Rudolph case. The OSI's decision is, of course, subject to review. Rudolph has recourse through the federal courts, but to date, he has not taken it. And his dilemma is what it always was: a court order dissolving his voluntary surrender of citizenship would also set aside the OSI's side of the agreement. By starting the case over, Rudolph would be exposed to prosecution with the prospect of deportation and the loss of retirement benefits.

It is a dilemma best left to history.

In late 1983 and early 1984 Mr. Konrad K. Dannenberg and I were beginning a project at the University of Alabama in Huntsville which would add to the recorded recollection of members of Wernher von Braun's Peenemünde rocket team. Dannenberg himself was a former member of that team. He had served as a propulsion engineer on the first successful A-4 (later termed V-2) launch in October 1942. Later, among other duties in the United States, he had served as deputy director of the Saturn Program at George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. Both Dannenberg and I were most interested in seeing that early recollections of German rocketry were preserved. Likewise, we were interested in obtaining comments about the future of space development as anticipated by these pioneers. Hence our project was entitled, "Our Future in Space: Messages from the Beginning."

As a sociologist, I was also interested in obtaining a sense of the human responses to the conditions under which scientific and technical work was conducted in the totalitarian environment of Nazi Germany. Epochal work was being done. It was work that would literally begin the space age. While popular perception dates the beginning of the space age to the famous Soviet Sputnik launch on October 4, 1957, in fact the first human-designed object ever to ascend into the environment of space was launched some 15 years and one day earlier, October 3, 1942. That object was the German A-4 rocket, launched from the Peenemünde test facility, reaching an altitude of over 80 km (50 miles) and a range of 192 km (120 miles).

Thus, at a place now almost forgotten, humanity began its ultimate adventure into the cosmos. As a realist, I know that the drive behind much of human technology has been the military advantage that it might give. As an idealist, I am opposed to the use of science to further human destructiveness. As a behavioral scientist, I wanted to understand how men refined by sophisticated scientific and technological training could be reduced to the service of tyranny and human oppression.

For over two decades I have had the privilege of associating with many of the members of the von Braun team both as a neighbor and as a scholar interested in the social impact of the space age. That association with these gentlemen who stood at the beginning of the space age has, I believe, given me some insight into the questions I have asked. It has always been difficult, at best, to discuss such matters with them. Even in the most relaxed of times, the subject is not an object of easy reflection. I had hoped that our project to videotape the remembrances of key scientific and technical personnel at Peenemünde would be able to probe for answers to difficult and sensitive moral and political questions. The news of the Rudolph case, and the fact that other members of the original rocket team were also under investigation by the Department of Justice, left a heavy pall over any such discussion. Many of the group who had originally agreed to hour-long video sessions decided that they did not wish to grant such an interview under the existing circumstances of rumor and suspicion. Television networks and newspapers were, at the time, contacting me in attempts to obtain materials that would be useful to assist in compiling their own reports on the possible connection of the Peenemünde Team to Nazi atrocities. Some members of the group who decided to go ahead with the interviews stipulated that as a condition for their appearance they would talk about the history and circumstances of technological development, but did not wish to enter into a discussion relating to politically sensitive subjects. Although circumstances made our project most difficult, a grant from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and assistance from the Huntsville affiliate of the Alabama Public Television Network permitted us to obtain 13 hours of videotaped interviews from a dozen members of the original Peenemünde rocket team, but for the reasons stated above I have relied more on information obtained in my 20 years of association with members of the Peenemünde team than on comments made directly in the video interviews. [2]

During the same period that we were recording the recollections of the Peenemünde pioneers, I, along with several of my students, was engaged in an in-depth analysis of the experience of the Los Alamos atomic bomb team, directed by the late Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Through an extensive search of the literature and analysis of several hours of videotaped interviews with key members of that team, we compiled what we thought were some interesting points of comparison between the experiences of the members of the Los Alamos project and those working at Peenemünde. We felt that such a comparison could, perhaps, put the whole question of the moral and political posture of those at Peenemünde into somewhat sharper focus. In addition, I had at least two reasons to seek such a comparison. Firstly, taken together, the contributions of these two great technical teams made the age of intercontinental nuclear warfare possible. Secondly, these were ends not consistent with the motives that drove them in their youth.

The young men who were later to go Peenemünde and begin the space age dreamed of interplanetary space flight. Almost all of them with whom I have talked have specifically mentioned their thrill and excitement about the early German science fiction movie, Frau im Mond ("Girl on the Moon"). This Fritz Lang movie, filmed in consultation with the early Romanian space pioneer Hermann Oberth, stimulated an entire generation of young idealists into seeking careers in space technology. Likewise, as youths, the men who were to go to Los Alamos to begin the atomic age had their own captivating visions that stirred within them. The young Oppenheimer was intrigued by a box of minerals given to him as a gift and was soon exploring the rock formations of Central Park in New York City. At the age of 11 he was accepted into the New York Mineralogical Club. The young Edward Teller was seized by the excitement of science through the works of Jules Verne. The young Leo Szilard showed an almost prescient childhood fascination with the classic Hungarian poem of pessimism, The Tragedy of Man, which, perhaps, accounts in part for his lifelong mission to forestall nuclear tragedy.

The youthful dreams and aspirations of these men did not involve the development of weapons of destruction. Rather, they hoped as adults to understand the laws of nature and to travel into interplanetary space. The world as it was, however, demanded that their noble aspirations be put to the service of much less noble ends. Though they were to move to the very edge of human understanding, they could not escape the political, economic, and social forces of their time. Their dreams were laid aside while their professional talents were channelled into designing means of death and destruction. What types of readjustment are required for such an awesome redirection of one's own purpose for existence? This question led me to investigate the experiences of these two groups for answers.

Their members shared an early experience that an increasing number of scientists and technologists in our current world now face. Out of the processes set in motion at Peenemünde and Los Alamos, the world has now evolved a global militarized culture. A very substantial portion of scientists and technologists trained for participation in our modern world economy find themselves in a situation where their prime opportunity for employment and career development lies in the service of the international arms industry. As nations drain their resources in search of military superiority, many of the more productive and hopeful goals of humankind are cancelled or delayed. The experience of those at Peenemünde and Los Alamos may give us a fuller understanding of the forces that have increasingly put science and scientists in pursuit of destructive goals.

Los Alamos and Peenemünde: A Sense of Perspective

In seeking to gain perspective through comparison of Los Alamos and Peenemünde, it is informative to consider the forces that led each group to come together as a team. Few of their members anticipated careers associated with the military establishments of their respective countries. Yet all of them found that the military was their prime avenue of career development.

In the case of the Peenemünde group, many of its members had been affiliated with small German rocket societies such as the Society for Space Travel (Verein für Raumschiffahrt, or VfR) that had been forming since the late 1920s. [3] While such organizations were not taken seriously in their early days, publicity that played upon the intriguing possibilities of interplanetary space flight made them an object of public curiosity.

Many accounts of German military developments prior to the Second World War suggest that the concept of the high-angle rocket appealed to German officialdom because it might offer a legal way around the restrictions placed on the development of artillery weapons in the Treaty of Versailles. [4] While a case be made for this, it should be remembered that development of potentially illegal artillery had been underway for some while. In the words of Dr. Georg von Tiesenhausen: [5]

When I was drafted in 1936, I found the 8.8 cm anti-aircraft cannon already developed, including its advanced semi-automatic range finders, and velocity and direction indicators. This was a superior masterpiece of engineering development that must have started many years earlier.

Indeed, Dr. Gerhard Reisig points out that [6]

The development of the '88' (as it was commonly called) had begun as early as 1929, in the Weimar Republic. Its use as a replacement for aging weapons was allowed under the treaty. However, the same weapon had great potential for anti-aircraft purposes, making it of questionable legality.

Given the general drift away from the strictest adherence to the standards of the Treaty of Versailles, even in the Weimar Republic, it is unlikely that legal questions overshadowed more practical considerations of feasibility and economics in the earliest days of rocketry.

Early military development of German rocketry fell under the aegis of Walter Dornberger, an artillery captain who, in 1930, had graduated from the Technische Hochschule, Berlin. In the fall of 1932, Dornberger recruited Wernher von Braun as his chief technical assistant, thus making von Braun the ranking civilian in the rocket program. Subsequently von Braun obtained his doctorate in physics in 1934 at army expense. In the meantime, on 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler had been officially appointed Chancellor and the Nazi Party of Germany quickly consolidated its power. Thus, as the Weimar Republic crumbled, the young von Braun was completing his formal education under circumstances that were to obligate him to serve the German army.

It should also be remembered that the Great Depression hit Germany with a vengeance. The severe economic climate motivated individuals to take employment anywhere it could be found, and, with the early rocketeers, it could be found only in the army. Neither German universities nor private industry showed the slightest interest in rocketry. At the best of times, private funding for studying rocket propulsion would have been most difficult to obtain, but, with the depression threatening the very survival of German industry, such a venture into basic research was out of the question. Arthur Rudolph, like so many of his counterparts, found himself without work and without money. Captain Dornberger moved through this cadre of unemployed engineers looking for ideas that might serve the army's interest in rocketry. From his recruitment efforts and from the lack of any available economic alternative, several young rocketeers were brought on to the government military payrolls. For reasons completely beyond their control, and toward ends that were divergent from their dreams, an increasing number of young German space visionaries found themselves in the service of a military establishment that was later to serve Nazi Germany.

As the activities of the early rocket pioneers grew, it became obvious that they would need a larger and more elaborate facility to test their new generation of vehicles. The first test facilities at Kummersdorf, some 25 kilometers south of Berlin, were rapidly becoming inadequate. The vicinity of the small fishing village of Peenemünde on the Baltic Coast seemed to provide the perfect place. First suggested to von Braun by his mother, the site offered isolation and a place to fire the still highly experimental vehicles. As political tensions heightened in Europe, the advanced guard of the Peenemünde team was almost totally preoccupied with the elaborate preparations involved in the opening of the world's first large-scale rocket test facility. The Army Research Center at Peenemünde became fully staffed in August 1939. On September 1, 1939, Hitler ordered his troops to invade Poland, thus formally beginning the Second World War. By 1942, the facility at Peenemünde employed 1,960 scientists and technicians and some 3,852 other workers. Work on rocket development was then proceeding at maximum intensity.

The nearly complete mobilization of German society in the course of the Second World War saw many individuals with scientific and technical skills pressed into the military service. Among the interview group was Dr./Lance Corporal Ernst Stuhlinger, who was serving on the Russian front as an infantryman when he received orders to report to Peenemünde. This was a place and a project of which he had never heard. Likewise, Konrad K. Dannenberg, an infantry lieutenant in France, was called away from the battlefield to join the rocket development center. For individuals such as these, the motivation was clear: build rockets or dodge bullets.

In contrast, the factors that led to the assembly of the Los Alamos atomic bomb team were remarkably different. The scientists who were to comprise the core group at Los Alamos came from the well-established scientific field of physics. Physics, as a discipline, had become increasingly important since the turn of the century, and had acquired respect in major universities. In Germany, however, with the rise of thc Nazi Party, the physics community had suffered a terrible blow. Fully 25 per cent of academic physicists in Germany, almost all Jewish, found themselves forced from their positions shortly after Hitler came to power. By 1934, one of every five institute directorships in Germany was vacant. [7] The number of physicists who left Germany was large, but the quality was truly astounding. Fascism flushed away the cream of European physics: Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Michael Polanyi, Theodor von Karman, George de Hevesy, Felix Bloch, James Franck, Lothar Nordheim, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr and Eugene Rabinowitch. Along with some sympathetic non-Jewish scientists such as Erwin Schrodinger and Martin Stobb, these men were to become the driving force behind atomic research in Britain and the USA.

Hence, there was a stark contrast between the unemployed and unknown engineers and technicians who were seeking affiliation with the German army, and the relatively affluent and widely known physicists who were leaving Germany in droves. Of the Peenemünde team, only a few members could be considered to have outstanding credentials in science. Among them were von Braun, with a Ph.D. in physics; Ernst Stuhlinger, also with a Ph.D. in physics; and Carl Wagner, a Ph.D. physical chemist. Engineers did not yet enjoy the status of scientists. As Ernst Stuhlinger stated: [8]

According to my own observations, during the late twenties and the thirties, the general public held natural scientists in higher regard than philosophers. Engineers were considered with less awe than scientists, but their high value to society was well recognized -- more than that of philosophers. Engineer covers a very broad field; engineers were never treated all alike. After all, engineers built the fabulous new airplanes and ocean liners, the worldwide telephone networks, and the television systems that began to appear during the mid 1930s, but engineers were also those simple-minded people who were at fault when the electric light did not work; when the car had a defect; when a train was late; or when the elevator got stuck between floors. The scientist, in the conception of the public, presented a far more homogeneous image than the engineer. There is no doubt that scientists found a far greater degree of respect than engineers in social circles during the 1920s and 1930s.

Even in the USA, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was not unusual to find lingering traces of status comparisons among certain scientists who sometimes referred to the transplanted Peenemünde Team as “von Braun’s plumbers.”

Stuhlinger continues:

During the war, many things were different. From the standpoint of those who felt responsible for the conduct of the war, those scientists and engineers who contributed directly or indirectly to the war effort were, of course, of utmost importance. For Hitler and his immediate entourage, things were again different. Hitler did not like scientists (because they failed to rally around his flag), and he let them feel it. During the first years of the war, he denounced them, or at least neglected them, saying that he did not need them. He wanted production experts who could deliver large quantities of ammunition and other war materiel. He needed and wanted engineers who could help with that production. Only toward the end of the war, when things went badly for Germany, Hitler complained bitterly that his scientists had not provided him with the wonder weapons he would have needed to win the war.

This complaint, Stuhlinger insists was directed primarily at the scientific community, not the engineering and technical community. Hitler felt that his initial mistrust of scientists had been verified. These fuzzy minded dreamers had failed to deliver on their promises, not only in terms of rocket technology, but in terms of a host of land, air and sea weapons.

According to Stuhlinger, considerations of relative status were not a factor within Peenemünde itself. Scientists, engineers and technicians worked together without reference to privilege or prestige. Whatever the general public or the Führer thought of their relative merits, for practical purposes such considerations were unimportant. [9]

Neither the community of Jewish physicists nor the community of non-Jewish scientists and engineers was particularly active politically. The prevailing attitude of both was, insofar as possible, to ignore the political world and get on with their chosen professions. There were exceptions, most notably among the academic physicists such as Szilard, Bohr and Schrodinger, but the activist attitude was not the norm. Alan D. Beyerchen, in his study of thc political posture of the physics community in the Third Reich, refers to this attitude as a form of "inner migration." [10] Edward Teller expressed much the same early rejection of political involvement by noting that the continuing European political difficulties forced him to be "enveloped in the feeling that only science is lasting." [11]

In Germany, this apolitical posture was even more pronounced for the Peenemünde group. At least three reasons can be identified that may account for this. First, their educational backgrounds had certainly not prepared or predisposed them to ask political questions or seek out political activities. Second, as they gravitated toward the closed and restricted environments of Kummersdorf and later Peenemünde, they became progressively more isolated from the intellectual currents at play in the cities and in the universities. Third, and perhaps most important, their lot was improving under the rule of the Third Reich. For the most part, the men of Peenemünde were plain, practical men, mostly members of the volkisch ideal, the German or Nordic middle class. Their training was in practical, not theoretical matters. They were, in the eyes of the Aryan thinkers, the finest example of native German utilitarianism.

Hitler's Aryan ideology even found its way into physics, in a movement led by two Nobel laureates, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. [12] Perhaps the most prominent statement of the philosophy of Aryan physics can be found in Lenard's Deutsche Physik, published in four volumes during 1936 and 1937. [13] Aryan physics proclaimed the applied and experimental over the theoretical. Applied physics was German; theoretical physics was Jewish. Technology was preferred over theory. Non-Jewish German theoretical physicists such as Heisenberg were chastised for bringing a Jewish spirit to German physics, yet statements from the Peenemünde group tend to confirm the failure of Aryan physics to become an influential part of German physics, even in the darkest days of the push toward ideological conformity. Physicist Ernst Stuhlinger observes,

When Lenard's book, Deutsche Physik, was published, it met with head shaking and amazement among colleagues. We young physicists read a few pages out of curiosity, and then put it aside. I remember that Hans Geiger once said to a group of students, "This is all very strange. One cannot do away with the facts of physics just like that. I'm so surprised that Lenard should have digressed so far; he used to be a very fine experimenter." Under the circumstances, it was very courageous for Geiger to say that much. We students got the message. I remember that I was very glad to have this assurance and confirmation of my own thoughts.

Stuhlinger goes on to confirm Alan Beyerchen's observations that Aryan physics was very ill-defined, and fraught with internal contradictions. [14]

The names connected with Aryan physics were Lenard, Stark, Tomaschek and a few hot-headed students, but that was an extremely small minority among the hundreds of physicists who were active at universities at the time. Lenard, Stark and Tomaschek were really ostracized. Physics was taught as usual, with Einstein's relativity, Bohr's atom model, Heisenberg's and Schrodinger's quantum mechanics, Pauli's principle, etc.

Gerhard Reisig, who was in the field of engineering physics, dismissed Lenard and Stark as being thought of as eccentric old men, opportunists seeking to resurrect their declining careers. [15] Georg von Tisenhausen thinks they had virtually no influence in the practical or intellectual activities of engineers. In his words, "Aryan Physics? I never heard of it." [16]

Hence, as the 1930s drew to a close, we see an interesting phenomenon among the community of German scientists and technologists. Large numbers of an old intellectual elite had been dethroned, while a new and emergent elite of physicists and engineers was assuming command. Pressures for ideological conformity were apparent, even to the most politically detached, but an ideological physics was destined to be stillborn.

The historical trap was set. The engineers and technicians bound for Peenemünde were absorbed by new and seemingly unlimited opportunities. The rush of excitement and the promise to be able to pursue the long-held dream of opening thc door to the cosmos dimmed their already feeble propensity to question political policy. The Peenemünde team was lured into a political and moral lethargy that would later be enforced by the powers of a police state.

The Jewish physicists who were destined to become a major component of the yet-to-be Los Alamos team were busily directing their efforts toward the rescue of their families and colleagues. What little time was left was spent urging the British and American governments to prepare to develop the ultimate weapon against Fascism: the atomic bomb. Those who were to be at the core of the Los Alamos team were made callous by the human outrages occurring around them. In the process, their concerns for survival surpassed the moral questions raised by a weapon of mass destruction.

Social scientist have long held that moral questions can only be understood within the context of their times. Perhaps that is why so many members of these two technical teams answer the probes of modern moral investigators with the response, "You just don't understand."

The War Years

The Peenemünde research facility became fully operational in August 1939. It was not until April 1943 that the Los Alamos atomic development facility was opened. Some comparisons of these two major research and development facilities are useful in understanding the behavior of those who worked at each. Both facilities were secret and isolated. Peenemünde had nearly 6,000 operational personnel at its height, the Los Alamos facility had a total workforce of nearly 5,000. Both facilities were heavily dependent upon support facilities in other parts of their respective countries. In Germany, these support facilities were increasingly disabled by Allied attacks as the war progressed. In the United States, the support facilities were secure and increasingly grew more productive. Peenemünde itself came under direct bombing attack in August 1943. Los Alamos never had such concerns. The mission at Peenemünde was open-ended and growing. It was assigned to develop, produce and supply an increasing variety of rocket-propelled vehicles for military use. The mission at Los Alamos was singular and finite: produce an atomic weapon. Both Peenemünde and Los Alamos operated under a military commander: General Walter Dornberger in Germany and General Leslie R. Groves in the United States. Both project directors were civilian scientists -- Dr. Wernher von Braun and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer -- and both were natives of their respective countries. Peenemünde operated in the totalitarian environment of war-ravaged Germany, whereas Los Alamos operated in the more open and democratic environment of a secure United States. Because collaborative scientific and technological enterprises require a great deal of free discussion and exchange of ideas, both facilities seemed to maintain a good deal of internal freedom with regards to discussion of the best strategies to achieve their stated mission. Open discussion of other applications of technologies, most specifically space travel, were forbidden at Peenemünde, and political discussions were most certainly forbidden, while at Los Alamos the political ramifications of the work were an open but infrequently discussed topic.

From the date the Peenemünde facility became fully operational to the date of the first successful A-4 test, October 3, 1942, there was a lapse of three years and two months. From the date that Los Alamos opened to the first successful test of the atomic bomb at the Trinity Site, July 1945, there was a lapse of two years and three months. The time from the first successful A-4 test launch in October 1942 to its first successful military use in September 1944 was one year and eleven months. The less complex V-l weapon was ready some two and a half months earlier and was first used on the battlefield on June 13, 1944. The time from the test of the atomic weapon at the Trinity site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, to its first use in warfare at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was a mere three weeks. Credible analysts estimate that the German V-weapon effort cost approximately three billion war-time US dollars. The Manhattan atomic bomb project cost approximately two billion dollars. [17]

While it is impossible to judge with quantitative certainty, the general conditions under which the two research and development facilities existed, and the missions they were assigned to accomplish, suggest that the task faced by the Peenemünde group was more difficult than that faced at Los Alamos. The industrial, university, and governmental support facilities that were necessary for the completion of the Manhattan Project were enormous, and they were located in a country that was not under direct attack. The administrative and production challenges faced by Peenemünde, being open-ended and constantly subject to disruptions through enemy attack, were far greater than those of Los Alamos.

The Peenemünde facility first came under direct attack with the Allied aerial bombardment of August 17, 1943. Although the Royal Air Force specifically intended its mission to kill as many of the expert technical and administrative personnel as possible, in fact only two key figures were killed, Walter Thiel and Erich Walther. Seven hundred and thirty-three other individuals died in the raids, and major damage was done to personnel housing and development works. Following the Peenemünde bombing, systematic raids were launched against supporting assembly plants and hydrogen peroxide production facilities. Peenemünde itself was not bombed again for almost a year, and never with the same intensity. This was because intelligence reports indicated that much of the testing and production had been moved elsewhere. [18] Helmut Zoike, the engineer at the control panel who actually launched the first human object in space, stated in our interviews that "The bombings came too late to hinder the A-4 development, this was already done. The raids were, also, too early to interfere with deployment. It really came at a very opportune time from the German perspective." [19] Thus, the actual raid on Peenemünde was not as crippling to the program as the continuing raids on support facilities.

It was, nevertheless, in an increasing atmosphere of desperation that the decision was made to move rocket production underground into the infamous Mittelwerk facility. This site was the location of an old gypsum mine in the Harz Mountains in north-west Germany. The conversion from mine to missile-production facility was a harsh and dirty task, performed under intense pressure, and using forced labor from a mixture of criminals, homosexuals, prisoners of war and political prisoners. Von Braun described the conditions of the labor force at Mittelwerk as "horrible;" Albert Speer used the term "barbarous;" and Arthur Rudolph calls the treatment of prisoners "primitive" and "awful." Prisoners were literally worked to death or exposed to such unsanitary conditions that they died of disease. Those who resisted faced summary execution. Bodies were disposed of in a local crematory. Only eleven months after General Dornberger had proclaimed the A-4 vehicle to have opened the doorway to the heavens, it was being produced in the dungeons of hell. [20]

The universal question asked by students of the history of technology and ethics comes here. Did the Peenemünde personnel know the composition of the Mittelwerk task force? Clearly, they did. Were they personally terrified, or did they shrug off the barbarities because it was the job that mattered? It has been their position that it was thc former: their welfare and the welfare of their families depended on their compliance with the situation as it was. Given the tyranny and the desperation of the Nazi regime, this seems a distinct possibility. Social science has no power to read the minds and motives of human beings. We can describe events, describe the behavior of individuals in those events, and record their explanations of their behavior. It is up to the student of history to interpret his or her acceptance of those explanations.

Rudolph, and others at Mittelwerk, were frequently reminded that they too could join the forced labor teams if they did not fully cooperate with the SS authorities. Previously, in March 1943, Wernher and Magnus von Braun, Klaus Riedel, Helmut Grottrup and Hannes Luhrsen had been arrested by the (Gestapo at Peenemünde and charged with treason for describing the A-4 as a space vehicle rather than a weapon of war. Obviously, this arrest was not over mere semantics, but was designed as a warning to key members of the team that nobody was immune from the force of SS control.

The madness of war became complete. German atrocities at home and in occupied territories mushroomed. This was followed by the growing insensitivity to human suffering on the part of the Allies. In July 1943, the mostly civilian city of Hamburg was fire-bombed, and in one night 45,000 Germans died -- most of them old people, women and children. [21] Other cities such as Cologne and Dresden were to suffer the same fate. Hostility had escalated into mutual barbarity. With these developments, the world's first generation of space vehicles changed their name from A-weapons, which innocuously meant assembly, to V-weapons, in which the V meant, ominously "vengeance" (Vergeltung).

By comparison, the scene surrounding the isolated mesa that was home to the Los Alamos laboratory appeared almost serene. Here, desperation was nowhere apparent on the landscape, but, rather, was hidden in the emotions and fears of the men who labored frantically against a possibility that proved eventually to be a phantasm. These scientist worked with a fair certainty that Japan would not be able to develop the atomic bomb, but there was much less certainty about what the German potential might be. In their minds, the real enemy was Germany. Japan was a force to be dealt with after the demise of Hitler was assured. Emotional responses to the Third Reich were unusually intense because of the personal associations that many at Los Alamos had with the Third Reich. Several, including Oppenheimer, had relatives who were suffering and dying under Nazi persecution. Whether they shared personal experience or not -- Jewish, non-Jewish, American-born and foreign-born -- all at Los Alamos were melded together into a coordinated and determined force to produce the agent of mass destruction that they knew was possible.

Motivations had been internalized. These men did not work under the threat of midnight arrest. There was no possibility of being assigned to forced-labor parties. They worked voluntarily for a cause they considered essential. This, too, made the task at Los Alamos easier. There were reservations expressed and even some resignations, but the team as a whole had an esprit de corps that was remarkable.

Interestingly, from a behavioral science point of view, the positive esprit de corps at Los Alamos had its counterpart in a sort of "negative" esprit de corps at Peenemünde and Mittelwerk. Dr. Paul Figge, who was a major figure in A-4 production, described it thus: [22]

The bombings hardly affected progress on the A-4 program, because our enthusiasm still remained high to accomplish the goal. So actually, the more difficult the conditions became, the more the enthusiasm grew to finish what we had begun. "Enjoy the war -- the peace will be terrible" was the motto.

Caught up as they were in the enthusiasm for their task, members of the Los Alamos team, as well as their Peenemünde counterparts, were to come to accept and take pleasure in the pernicious products of their science and technology. No member of the Los Alamos team, during the course of his work, ever had to witness a summary execution. No member ever lost one of his immediate family or a close colleague to enemy bombing. No member of the Los Alamos team ever had to look into the wretchedly pitiful face of a slave laborer dying in the process of being forced to serve a cause he detested. Yet the war culture prevailed. Its all-consuming power instilled into the Los Alamos team a growing callousness that effectively precluded deep moral and ethical reflection on the ultimate consequences of their deeds.

Donald A. Strickland, in his study of the atomic scientists' political movement of 1945 and 1946, notes that at Los Alamos there was "no political arousal before the end of the war, save for a few private conversations." He calls this an "arresting" fact, considering that the politically active Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard were frequent visitors to this remote site. [23] The drive to achieve the task was too intense for reflection. It was after the grisly weapon was a fait accompli that the ponderous questions of morality were asked.

Fermi moved to Los Alamos in September 1944. Although he was technically an enemy alien until his American citizenship was granted in 1945, he was allowed to become a lab director. Bohr, on the other hand, had incurred the severe displeasure of Winston Churchill over his insistence that the Soviets be informed as to the existence of the weapon and invited to collaborate in a scheme of international control. Bohr had further made unauthorized disclosures about the project to Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter. It has been reported that, for this, Churchill was on the edge of ordering Bohr's arrest. [24] Roosevelt adopted Churchill's position and became extremely cool toward Bohr. Despite these political difficulties, Bohr was allowed a major consultancy role at Los Alamos. These two cases seem to demonstrate that the practical matter of building the bomb was placed above political questions about those who were building it. It is not likely that the same lenience would have been extended to the key technical personnel on the Peenemünde team.

While most at Los Alamos simply lost themselves in the task at hand, there were more glaring examples of growing insensitivity to humanitarian considerations. From the time Edward Teller arrived, he set his sights not on the mission at hand, but the even greater destructive potential of the hydrogen bomb, or the "super," as he almost affectionately called it. Teller eventually refused to work under Hans Bethe on further calculations concerning mere fission weapons, and was given his own small group at the laboratory for investigation of the, development of a thermonuclear weapon. [25]

In addition to this minority thrust toward overkill, there was a disquieting theoretical possibility that the ignition of the fission weapon might just produce enough heat to cause a reaction between deuterium and nitrogen, and thereby set fire to the world's atmosphere. On hearing this, Oppenheimer immediately set Hans Bethe to work checking Teller's initial calculations. Was this, the ultimate catastrophe, really possible? For the first but not the last time in history, human beings had to make a decision as to whether a task at hand was worth the risk -- albeit infinitesimal -- of ending our collective existence. The logic we used then may give us a hint of the logic we shall have to use again.

According to Teller, the matter was firmly laid to rest in 1942, when some of his initial calculations were found to be in error. As Peter Goodchild notes in his classic study of Oppenheimer, several scientists were, over the next three years, to make the same calculations as Teller; and because Teller's initial calculations had been kept secret, they too came to Oppenheimer with great alarm. [26] Calculations were checked and rechecked right up to 1945, shortly before the first test detonation at the Trinity site. Rumors of the potential total human catastrophe had become so widespread among all levels of personnel at Los Alamos that the authorities drew up contingency plans for psychiatrists at the Oak Ridge facility to be flown to Los Alamos should panic ensue. Arthur H. Compton has said that his group calculated a three-in-a-million chance of destroying the world, and that was an acceptable risk. Edward Teller, on the other hand, insists that they were able to dismiss the possibility entirely. At that time such statements of high confidence seemed most reassuring. [27] Looking back from the perspective of a generation that has heard similar confident risk assessments before events such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the space shuttle Challenger, those expressions of high confidence sound more hollow.

A final observation on the darker face of Los Alamos is now in order. The prevailing pathos of the general culture had affected all who labored there, but perhaps the extent to which it had changed basic human values is best illustrated by J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. Based on information recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Joseph Rotblat, a physicist who assisted in bomb design, and one of the few who left prior to project completion, relates the following story. In a letter dated May 25, 1943, from Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, the issue of using radioactive materials to poison German food supplies was raised. Oppenheimer was asking Fermi whether he could produce enough strontium without letting too many in on the secret. Oppenheimer continued, "I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men." Rotblat offers the following observation, "I am sure that in peacetime these same scientists would have viewed such a plan as barbaric; they would not have contemplated it even for a moment. Yet, during the war, it was considered quite seriously, and I presume, abandoned only because it was technically unfeasible." [28]

Richard Rhodes comments on the same incident as follows, "There is no better evidence anywhere in the record of the increasing bloody-mindedness of the Second World War than that Robert Oppenheimer, a man who professed at various times in his life to be dedicated to Ahisma (the Sanskrit word that means doing no harm or hurt ...) could write with enthusiasm of preparations for the mass poisoning of as many as five hundred thousand human beings." [29]

After The War

Their accomplishment in the Second World War made the members of the Los Alamos and Peenemünde teams into legends. Their actions and statements after the war shaped and moulded the public perceptions of these legends, yet the environments that the two groups faced after the war were radically different. It is those differences that have done much to shape our postwar evaluations of them. Members of the teams at Peenemünde and Mittelwerk fled their posts as the Allied forces closed their grip around Germany in early 1945. They arranged a rendezvous at a small Austrian village named Reutte. There they surrendered to the American forces, and their journey to the United States began. The code name Project Paperclip was given to this movement. Some 118 individuals comprised the first group of Peenemünde personnel coming to the USA. Later, several hundred additional individuals, including family and colleagues, joined them. One member of the core group, Helmut Grottrup, decided to remain in what was to become East Germany and work with the Soviet missile program. A small cadre of other German rocket personnel joined him and were later transferred to the Soviet Union.

From the time von Braun and his group surrendered until some years after their arrival at Fort Bliss, Texas, they remained, as Ordway and Sharpe put it, "prisoners of peace." [30] They were allowed substantial freedom of movement and association, but they were subject to governmental restrictions and objects of continued surveillance by the FBI and other government agencies. Although acceptance by the American public was generally polite, some degree of suspicion and hostility was occasionally apparent. In contrast, the key figures at Los Alamos, their mission completed for the most part, sought to leave weapons work and return to academic environments. They did so with an enhanced prestige that made them instant scientific celebrities wherever they went. They existed in an atmosphere of honor and respect, and they were encouraged to express their views freely on what they had done and what it might mean for our future.

There was pressure on the atomic scientists to help us think about the new issues we faced in the nuclear age. Their academic settings made this possible. Their organization into politically active groups and their launch of the influential Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists were reflections of this type of environment. But for those who had come from Peenemünde, conditions were very different. Between 1945 and 1950, there was little public discussion of their role or their activities. They worked for thc US army on the remote missile test ranges of Texas and New Mexico and their actions were shrouded in secrecy. Occasional announcements of V-2 launching were made, but very little was said about the German team that assisted. The United States government was still too uncertain about the possible public reaction to play up the presence of these men from Peenemünde.

It was not until the early 1950s that the public began to learn of the activities of these men. Shifting as they did from the sparsely populated regions of Texas and New Mexico to the more populated regions surrounding Huntsville, Alabama, they came increasingly to public attention. The focus of publicity was on Dr. Wernher von Braun. His charismatic manner and his ability to capture public attention were immediately apparent. He began to publish books such as Across the Space Frontier, Man on the Moon, and Mars Project in the early 1950s. As these works came to public attention, the Cold War intensified. With the advent of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, in October 1957, attention focused on the Germans at Huntsville. The USA increasingly began to look to them to save its international prestige by answering the Soviet challenge with its own successful orbital vehicle. After dismal failures by the Navy in its Vanguard program, von Braun's team at Huntsville was given the task and, on JJnuary 31, 1958, the Redstone rocket lifted the USA's first satellite, Explorer I, into orbit. The space age for the United States had now really begun, and Dr. Wernher von Braun was its leader.

The passions of the late 1950s and 1960s were assertive and not reflective. This was mirrored in von Braun's writings, which became commonplace in the scientific and popular press. These. dealt almost entirely with the prospects of new hardware in space and new missions for space vehicles. The more sensitive subject of science and its relation to political and foreign policy issues was almost never discussed. By contrast, the atomic scientists made such issues their central focus.

Suspicions concerning the historical role of the Peenemünde team were occasionally expressed in public dialogue in the late 1960s and 1970s, but they were seldom answered by the team itself. Their continued affiliation with the Army, and later NASA, dampened any thoughts of embroiling themselves in controversial questions. After the successful Apollo Lunar Program there was a feeling among several of von Braun's close associates that he was a victim of lingering prejudice against Germans by not being considered for the top job at NASA. His resignation from NASA in 1972 was rumored to be a result of such prejudices but, in traditional low-key style, he and his colleagues shied away from discussion of such allegations. When we sought clarification on this point for our project, Stuhlinger, Reisig and von Tiesenhausen all confirmed that they felt prejudice was a factor. But all agreed that it was more than just prejudice. As Stublinger pointed out, [31]

At the time when the first American satellite was planned, 1955-57, there were people who thought that an American satellite should be built by native Americans, not naturalized immigrants -- who even had been enemies less than ten years earlier. That attitude was probably the real reason why the Navy-supported Vanguard, and not the Army-supported Explorer, was America's satellite project for the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year. However, in my talks with large numbers of people who knew von Braun, it is clear that the true reason was neither von Braun's background as a builder of rockets for the German Army, nor a lingering prejudice against Germans in general, but "very simple human jealousy." Von Braun's popularity was extraordinary, not only with the public and the news media, but also, with Congress. For some within the high ranks of NASA, this was just too much to bear.

Reisig noted that "We found out that Americans like success but not too much success." [32]

In a strange historical irony, the leaders of these two great scientific and technical teams met their final demise in much the same way. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer's career with government came to an end with a denial of his security clearance because of past political associations. However, professional jealousy was also a key part of this decision. In the Oppenheimer case, the principal source of opposition has been identified as Edward Teller, who, in the words of Peter Goodchild, saw Oppenheimer as "a man of rival power and opposite persuasion." [33] Likewise, von Braun's fate was sealed by the same combination of past political associations and professional rivalry. Oppenheimer received strong expressions of support from his colleagues and stirred much public debate. With von Braun, there was a minimum of public discussion. Right up until 1984, when the US Department of Justice completed its investigation of Dr. Arthur Rudolph and he chose to leave the country rather than face trial, the Peenemünde team avoided public controversy.

The news of the Rudolph affair shook the German group. Virtually all had now retired and were free to express themselves on events in Germany. Some did, but most felt that their best interest could be served by remaining silent. Indeed, many long decades of silence about the political winds that had constantly buffeted them throughout their careers had crippled their capacity for public expression about these issues. It was as if by spending a lifetime in difficult circumstances where silence was the seeming solution, when public expression was demanded they had no capacity for it. At this point, they as a group, their ranks now thinned by death and debility, stood wounded and demoralized. Their great goal of leading the moon race, though accomplished, had been followed not by respect but by what they perceived as a sense of public rejection.

Los Alamos and Peenemünde: A Reflection

Now, nearly 50 [sic] years after the last great war, emotions have not yet cooled enough to look dispassionately upon events of that epoch. The exile of Dr. Rudolph and some lingering pressures to investigate other members of the Peenemünde group attest to this fact. It is not the purpose of this article to attempt to assess guilt or innocence of any individual, or to try to place a moral judgment on either team. It is to place them side by side and note the points of similarity and thc points of contrast. In so doing, I have sought to show that both were the product of the peculiar and seemingly pathological forces of their time. Nearly 13,000 individuals died as a result of the machines built by the men of Peenemünde. This death toll was dwarfed by the 340,000 individuals who ultimately died as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the context of those times, such numbers became mere abstractions in a cultural ambience that had come to accept the atrocity of mass annihilation. Today, perhaps, we can look at these figures with some sense of perspective. [34]

We may conclude from this contrasting viewpoint of these two great technological teams that human evaluations are not based on absolute deeds, but upon the relationship of those deeds to a larger cultural and historical context. The Los Alamos team stands as an honored and esteemed group to which individuals still proudly claim affiliation. The Peenemünde team, to this day, prefers a low profile and elicits a curious public response. As the remaining members of both teams now live out their final days, they must examine their own consciences, ponder their own products and judge their own role in history. Their experience has taught those of us who would pass judgment that technology in service to war and its weapons brings, to those who prepare such weapons, honor or disgrace based not upon the lethal impact of their work but upon the moral judgments that are defined by the victors and endured by the vanquished.

Notes and References

1. Editorial, The Huntsville (Ala.) Times, January 27, 1989.

2. The videotaped interviews are available through the library of the University of Alabama in Huntsville or the library of the United States Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville. The author would like to thank the following individuals for their willingness to participate in this project: Konrad K. Dannenberg, Jim Fagan, Rudolph Hermann, Otto Hirschler, Dieter K. Huzel, Fritz K Müller, Willibald Prasthofer, Eberhard Rees, Wernher K. Rosinski, Gerhard Reisig, Ernst Stuhlinger, Georg von Tiesenhausen and Helmut Zoike. This is a revised and expanded edition of a paper presented at the 38th Annual Congress of the International Astronautical Federation, Brighton, United Kingdom, October 1987.

3. The nature and history of the early German rocket societies has been detailed in Frank H. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age: Thc Rocket Societies, 1924-1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983).

4. For a more detailed account of this historical matter, see Frederick Ordway, and Mitchell R. Sharpe, The Rocket Team (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979), pp. 16-20.

5. As stated by Dr. Georg von Tiesenhausen in personal correspondence to the author, February 1989.

6. As stated by Dr. Gerhard Reisig in interview, February 1989.

7. These figure are reported. Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler: Polities and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 200.

8. As stated by Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger in personal correspondence to the author clarifying points in the video interview, February 1989.

9. Ernst Stuhlinger, source cited above (note 8).

10. A. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler, cited above (note 7), p. 201.

11. Richard Rhodes, Thc Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 113.

12. A. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler, cited above, chaps. 5 and 6.

13. Philipp Lenard, Deutsche Physik, 4 vols. (Munich; J.F. Lehmanns, 1936).

14. E. Stuhlinger, source cited above (note 8).

15. G. Reisig, source cited above (note 6).

16. G. von Tisenhausen, source cited above (note 5).

17. F. Ordway and M. Sharpe, The Rocket Team, cited above (note 4), p. 242.

18. F. Ordway and M. Sharpe, The Rocket Team, cited above, pp. 121-124.

19. As stated by Helmut Zoike in the video interviews: "Our Future in Space: Messages from the Beginning" (Library, University of Alabama in Huntsville and the archives of the United States Space and Rocket Center).

20. This refers to General Dornberger's talk on the evening of October 3, 1942, the date of the first successful A-4 launch, in which he stated that "We have invaded space with our rocket for the first time." See F. Ordway and M. Sharpe, The Rocket Team, cited above, p. 42.

21. R. Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, cited above (note 11), p. 474.

22. F. Ordway and M. Sharpe, The Rocket Team, cited above, p. 69.

23. Donald A. Strickland, Scientists in Politics: The Atomic Scientists Movement, 1945-46 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 34-35.

24. Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science & Technology (New York: Equinox Books, 1972), p. 902.

25. Peter Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds (New York: Fromm International, 1985), p. 105.

26. P. Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer, cited above (note 25), pp. 63-4.

27. P. Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer, cited above, p. 63.

28. Joseph Rotblat, "Learning the Bomb Project," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 47, N. 7, 1985, p. 18.

29. R. Rhodes, Thee Making of the Atomic Bomb, cited above, p. 57.

30. F. Ordway and M. Sharpe, The Rocket Team, cited above, p. 362.

31. E. Stuhlinger, source cited above (note 8).

32. G. Reisig, source cited above (note 6).

33. P. Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer, cited above, p. 252, indicates the rivalry between Oppenheimer and Teller.

34. These figures were obtained from F. Ordway and M. Sharpe, The Rocket Team, cited above, pp. 734, 740. Various studies produce different numbers, but these seem to be approaching the norm of estimates.

About the author

Donald E. Tarter holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Tennessee, and is the author of numerous articles published in scholarly periodicals. Now retired, for years he taught at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, specializing on the social impact of technology. This essay is reprinted, with permission, from the anthology History of Technology (London: Mansell, 1992), vol. 14, edited by Graham Hollister-Short and Frank A.J.L. James. Publication of this essay was suggested by Dr. Robert H. Countess, who knew Donald Tarter when they both taught at the University of Alabama in Huntsville during the 1980s.

Hitler salutes SS troops on parade in Nuremberg while SS leader Heinrich Himmler watches. Himmler was in charge of finding "archeological evidence" for the Aryan "race." Vengeance in the air   In the 1930s, German rocket scientists used to shoot off their wares near Berlin. But the rockets made a racket, and had this habit of falling onto local villages. After Adolf Hitler's Nazi party won the 1933 election, his desire to use rockets as weapons necessitated a more secluded test site. In 1936, operations were moved to the remote village of Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.   There, the Germans built an extensive network of factories, labs, test sites and a giant plant to generate electricity and liquid oxygen for fuel. Nazis being Nazis, they later built concentration camps for the slave laborers who would assemble the fearsome new weapons. Peenemünde developed two unmanned weapons, both used to attack Britain as punishment. ("V" stands for "Vergeltungswaffe," or "vengeance weapon," and their use started long after Germany had any chance of winning the war.) The V1 was a sub-sonic, jet-powered missile dubbed the "buzz bomb." The V2 was the first ballistic missile, first launched on October 3, 1942. By war's end, Germany produced 662 V2 rockets; most were fired at Britain and Belgium.   In 1990, 54 years after it was founded, Peenemünde has become a "military theme park." That's the description of journalist Shareen Brysac, who described the site in Archaeology magazine ("Reliving the Nightmare...").   With more than nine square miles of ruins - including craters from the August, 1943, raid by Britain's Royal Air Force - the site has fuel tanks, wrecked launch stands, and ominous warnings about live munitions. Peenemünde draws 2,000 visitors a day.   Although the Soviets wrecked the place after taking control in 1945, little has been restored. Most excavation occurred during the Soviet occupation of East Germany. The Soviets and their communist lackeys, Brysac says, "wanted to prove that people in the West German government were war criminals." There certainly were links: One director of the operation, Heinrich Lübke, was later president of the Federal Republic of Germany, as West Germany was known before reunification. Wernher von Braun holding a model of the V-2 rocket in the early 1950's. After helping the Nazis blast London, von Braun moved to the U.S. space project. Divided mission The museum itself lives a hybrid life - part memorial to the science of rocketry - part memorial to the horrible tasks of Peenemünde. "Peenemünde is a political site," says Brysac. When it opened just after German reunification, it was designed to be a space museum, and was called "Peenemünde, the birthplace of space travel." The place was, she says, "a paean to Wernher von Braun and the start of the space age. It was a total whitewash." Von Braun was the German rocketeer who, after serving Nazi aggression, became a luminary of the U.S. rocket and space programs. Although movies shown at the museum in the mid-1990s described a quest to reach the moon, Brysac says, "They were launching rockets and bombs at England, they were going to launch them at New York. Hitler was not interested in going to the moon."   Slave-built rockets   There was also the little embarrassment of slave labor. German records show that 32,475 slave laborers worked at the two concentration camps whose remains remain visible at Peenemünde.   The outcry over the bogus portrayal sparked major revisions of the displays, she says, which now show what happened when a V2 struck London. And while the original museum ignored slave labor, Brysac says a movie now being screened upstairs includes interviews with former slaves.