On Tv: Recruitment of Nazi Scientists for U.S. Space Program Documented

The U.S. government overlooked and in some cases covered up the Nazi past of German rocket scientists recruited after World War II to boost the U.S. space program, according to a new television documentary.

“The Nazi Connection,” will be aired February 24 on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) “Frontline” program. It is an hour-long documentary, based on years of research by British journalist Tom Bower, that traces the careers and crimes of several scientists who directed Hitler’s advanced V-2 rocket program.

U.S. government documents show that leading rocket scientists Werner von Braun and Arthur Rudolph oversaw the construction of an underground Nazi rocket factory at Nordhausen, Germany, using inmates of the nearby concentration camp, Dora, as slave labor. Some 20,000 of the slaves were either murdered or died of starvation or disease.

Bower discovered that other scientists conducted high-pressure experiments that killed the camp inmate subjects. In other experiments, the scientists fed prisoners only salt-water until they died. Several of the scientists were even tried in Nuremberg and acquitted before the U.S. coopted them.

FOUND IN HIDING

According to “The Nazi Connection,” the rocket scientists had gone into hiding by the end of the war. The U.S. Army ordered Robert Staver, an American scientist, to locate them before the Soviets did. They were discovered, and von Braun and about 100 of his team members were secretly brought to the U.S. Also recruited were the aviation medicine experts who had experimented on the camp inmates.

The Pentagon directors of the recruitment effort, called Project Paperclip, arranged visas and U.S. citizenship for the German scientists despite then-President Truman’s prohibition against bringing in Nazis for the program.

Newly-released documents and interviews with Germans and Americans indicated that the Pentagon also “cleaned up” the war records of the German scientists to erase or tone down evidence of their atrocities and cooperation with the Nazis.

Von Braun, Rudolph and the other German scientists eventually received U.S. citizenship and were decorated for their work in the space program.

But years later, after the Justice Department created the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to locate and prosecute Nazi war criminals living in the U.S., some scientists lost their heroic status. In 1984, Rudolph, who directed production of the U.S. Saturn 5 rocket, returned to Germany and gave up his U.S. citizenship rather than face prosecution for war crimes committed at Nordhausen.

In an interview for the “The Nazi Connection” after he returned to Germany, the elderly Rudolph said, “The U.S. government is thankless to me.” Rudolph said that without him and the other German scientists, the U.S. probably still would not have landed a man on the moon.