The American Space Program – from Nazi Germany?

The Space Age and the Space Race began with a bang on 4th October 1957 as the Russians successfully launched Sputnik. An irritated US Army officer called Sputnik "a piece of old iron". But at that moment the USA was incapable of launching even a piece of old iron.

The USA could have launched a satellite if they had listened to the one man who could have achieved it - Wernher von Braun. But he was not an American. When von Braun was finally given full rein, the US soon had a satellite in orbit.

The V2 rockets that rained down on London in the last stages of World War II were the direct ancestors of today's spacecraft. They were built at Peenemunde in the Baltic, and von Braun was the key man. The RAF bombed Peenemunde in 1943 intending to kill the scientists, only one rocket man died though, Dr Thiel, and there was some disruption to the rocket programme.

At the end of the war, the leading German rocket experts were taken to America in an operation code-named paperclip. Their contribution to the US space program was enormous, and they were made honorary US citizens. But was it justifiable to recruit ex-nazis?

Some of them were undeniably guilty. After 1943, V2 construction moved to the underground Mittelbau-Dora factory. Conditions there were appalling: slave laborers were worked to death, it was comparable to Dachau and Belsen. Arthur Rudolph was personally responsible for torture and murder. Hubertus Strughold was shown to have carried out inhumane medical experiments upon helpless prisoners. Rudolph was stripped of his US citizenship and sent back to Germany. Strughold died. The Americans were not too worried about the guilt of these two men or others - until they had all the technical help the Germans could provide.

Von Braun was a member of the Nazi party, but to be fair he had no choice if he wanted to continue with his rocket work. Significantly, Hitler had von Braun arrested for not paying enough attention to military research. Walter Dornberger, the manager, had a hard job getting him released.
If von Braun had refused to join the Nazi party he would have been disgraced and the rocket program would have continued without him. He was helping the German war effort, but can he be blamed any more than the scientists who worked on the American atom bomb program?

However, was he aware of the atrocities being committed at the Mittelbau-Dora slave camp?

Some books on the subject have cast von Braun in a bad light. He may not have worn his Nazi uniform unless made to, but he could not have ignored information coming from Mittelbau-Dora. Those who knew him have all said he was a pure scientist, who regretted the link between rockets and warfare. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between these two accounts?