by Amy Cherrix
When he addressed the assembled crowd, von Braun’s remarks also contained a warning about the new and challenging obstacles in the future of spaceflight: “My friends, there was dancing in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the Earth. There was dancing again when the first Americans landed on the moon. There is only one moon. I’m afraid we can’t offer any such spectaculars like that for some years to come. But I’d like to ask you, don’t hang up your dancing slippers.” Von Braun did not share his conflicted feelings about going to Washington and leaving his old rocket team behind. Instead, he told them that he had enjoyed some of the best years of his life in Alabama.
NASA administrator Tom Paine had recruited von Braun for the DC job. Paine wanted to garner support for a large-scale mission to Mars and a new space shuttle program. Von Braun would spearhead the effort, promoting the large and expensive projects to the political establishment and the general public, convincing them that they were worthwhile investments. With public support for NASA programs declining after the Apollo missions, it was a tall order. And Paine hoped von Braun could stir up the same type of enthusiasm that he had generated for the moon-landing program.
But von Braun himself was not convinced. He knew better than anyone the costs of a large-scale mission to Mars and a big shuttle program. He thought it was more feasible to focus on a space station and a smaller shuttle program. Unlike the expendable Saturn V rocket and its Apollo capsules, a reusable shuttle could drastically reduce the cost of spaceflight. Within the agency, von Braun lobbied for a more conservative approach that kept costs down in order to make a small shuttle program sustainable. His view was unpopular at NASA, where enthusiasm for a big shuttle program was high. Even as Congress continued to slash NASA’s budget, von Braun’s arguments for a smaller, more sustainable shuttle program were mostly ignored.
For some of his new colleagues at NASA headquarters, von Braun’s status as a former Nazi was a problem. Others resented his celebrity status. These bitter feelings increasingly impacted his work. Although he was fourth in command at NASA, he was regularly left out of decisions and not invited to meetings. “I’ve found out up here I’m just another guy with a funny accent,” he told a former Huntsville colleague.
Back at the Marshall Space Flight Center, von Braun had been king of his own castle and he’d liked it that way, relishing the role of hero. Now all that was changing.
It had only been three years since the Apollo moon landing, but NASA was entering a new orbit, just out of von Braun’s reach. He was unhappy but attempted to hide his growing disappointment. Von Braun’s glory days, it seemed, had come to an abrupt end.
Von Braun next to the Saturn V’s F-1 engines.
In 1972, desperately wanting to put his experience and talents to work in a meaningful way again, von Braun retired from NASA. He accepted a job in the private sector, working for the aerospace company Fairchild Industries.
As vice president of engineering and development, he jetted around the world, meeting with Fairchild clients from Western Europe to South America. His new role was unburdened by the responsibility of overseeing a large engineering project like the Saturn V or the tedium of playing politics in Washington. Von Braun was back in the center of the aerospace industry, working for a company developing next-generation communications satellites. Fairchild clients eagerly awaited their chance to meet with the famed engineer to discuss how they could partner with Fairchild and, hopefully, hear stories of his NASA days.
In June 1973, von Braun took time out of his busy work schedule to visit Houston to see his doctor and longtime friend, Jim Maxfield. A physical was required to renew his pilot’s license, and his new employer had requested a medical exam, strictly as a formality. Von Braun told Maxfield that he was feeling fine, with the exception of some mild discomfort in his back. An X-ray revealed a suspicious shadow on one of his kidneys. The larger-than-life rocketeer seemed unconcerned, but the fact that his mother had died of colon cancer in 1959 was an undeniable risk factor. Maxfield told von Braun to get examined by a kidney specialist. But von Braun dismissed the warning and went back to work, delaying the follow-up appointment until the end of July. When he finally met with the specialist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, he was immediately scheduled for surgery. On August 22, von Braun underwent an operation to remove his left kidney and a large malignant tumor. He had cancer, but it did not slow him down. Less than two weeks after surgery, he was back at home and recovering well. He resumed his life and work with all the activities of a healthy man. He was gifted at compartmentalizing things that would overwhelm most people: large rocket projects, emotional strain, and a cancer diagnosis. With a hectic work schedule, adventurous family vacations, and a calendar filled with speaking engagements, von Braun continued to resist his doctor’s orders and plowed toward the future with single-minded purpose, just as he always had. When he arrived for a follow-up appointment in August 1975, he expected the examination would take less than an hour.
Von Braun’s doctor admitted him to Johns Hopkins Hospital the same day. Two days after that, he underwent surgery for a second time to remove a sizable section of his colon with an advanced tumor.
Von Braun’s health steadily declined after his hospitalization as his cancer advanced. Five months later, he was walking with a cane. A year after, he collapsed and would spend some of his remaining time at home, before ultimately being confined to the hospital. Von Braun had to be sedated during the last months of his life to ease his pain. He died at three a.m. on Thursday, June 16, 1977, and was laid to rest the next day in a small private service kept secret from the media and public.
The space race had ended, and both of its iconic champions had been unable to outrun the same disease: cancer. Korolev, whose identity was a state secret until his death, was celebrated in a lavish state funeral, attended by thousands. Von Braun, on the other hand, who had been a recognizable public figure for most of his life, was buried quietly and without fanfare. Like phases of the moon, the two men had cycled in and out of the darkness during their extraordinary and turbulent lifetimes, without their secrets coming to light until after they were gone.
Chapter 42
Out of the Shadows
1980
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
When Harvard Law School student Eli Rosenbaum stepped into a bookstore near the university’s campus, he didn’t expect to find what would become the focus of his life’s work. It was his final year of law school. He had recently concluded an internship at the US Department of Justice, where he worked in the newly formed Office of Special Investigations (OSI). The OSI’s mission was finding and deporting former war criminals residing in the United States.
As Rosenbaum browsed the shelves, his eyes landed on a book written by a World War II French Resistance fighter, Jean Michel. His book, Dora: The Nazi Concentration Camp Where Space Technology Was Born and 30,000 Prisoners Died, was a memoir of his imprisonment at Camp Dora, published the previous year. It was the first widely available account of the lesser-known Dora concentration camp. Despite the horrors there, the tragedies at other camps like Auschwitz had dominated headlines about the Holocaust. American soldiers who had served in Germany heard about Camp Dora or served in its liberation, but their stories never became front-page headlines. The story of the camp and its adjacent Mittelwerk factory slipped into the pages of history unnoticed. It seems incomprehensible, but until Michel’s book was published, the gruesome details about the brutality inside Mittelwerk had never been publicly available.
Rosenbaum later returned to the same bookstore and purchased another recently published title, The Rocket Team, by Frederick I. Ordway III and Mitchell Sharpe. The book chronicled von Braun’s V-2 group from their earliest days at the Peenemünde rocket facility through their more recent work for NASA. Ordway and Sharpe interviewed von Braun’s inner circle, and the candor of those conversations astonished Rosenbaum. The comments of one man named Arthur Rudolph c
aught his attention. He was a longtime member of von Braun’s team and one of the Paperclip engineers. Previously, Rudolph had served as operations director of Mittelwerk. His statements to investigators in the war crimes trial of Georg Rickhey, former general manager of Mittelwerk, helped get Rickhey acquitted.
In Ordway and Sharpe’s book, Rudolph recounted an incident from 1943. He was called away from a New Year’s Eve party to oversee a group of men who were moving a load of heavy rocket equipment. Rudolph noted feeling some frustration at having to leave the celebration and venture out into the frigid night. Because Rosenbaum had read Michel’s book, Dora, he realized something that set his teeth on edge. “The men that he used to move the rocket parts, they would have been slaves,” Rosenbaum later said, “and they were not enjoying some nice party. I just thought that was really, really callous.”
After graduation from law school, Rosenbaum accepted a job at OSI and shared his concerns with Deputy Director Neal Sher, who warned his new colleague about the difficulties in pursuing someone like Rudolph. Von Braun and company were heroes to millions of people in America and around the world. The fact that the US had hired Hitler’s best engineers to help build missiles had been disclosed while the von Braun team was still at Fort Bliss in the late 1940s. It was decades-old news, glossed over by the incredible achievements of the Apollo moon missions.
But Rosenbaum couldn’t forget what he had read in those two books. Something wasn’t right. And despite the fact that investigating such a powerful and well-respected person could prove pointless, no one was above the law. The Office of Special Investigations approved Rosenbaum’s request to launch an inquiry into Arthur Rudolph.
At that time, Rudolph was in his mid-seventies, living with his wife, Martha, in San Jose, California. He had legally entered the United States in 1949 using the same method as von Braun and the others in Fort Bliss—by first entering Mexico to receive a visa, and then crossing back into the United States. Rudolph had become a naturalized citizen in 1954. Since his top secret arrival in the United States under Operation Paperclip, the mechanical engineer had enjoyed a storied career that reached its zenith when he was named Saturn V project director. After his retirement from the agency in 1969, NASA awarded Rudolph the Distinguished Service Medal, the agency’s highest honor.
During multiple interrogations in 1982 and 1983, Rosenbaum and Neal Sher questioned Rudolph. He admitted that he had requested prison labor to increase production efficiency at Mittelwerk. Additional evidence, which included classified army documents and the Nordhausen trial transcripts from 1947, revealed Rudolph’s direct involvement in the profound human suffering at Mittelwerk. Rosenbaum, Sher, and the OSI concluded that Rudolph had “mercilessly utilized the slave labor pool to meet production quotas . . . and that he had the rank and authority which he used to participate in the persecution of the prisoners.”
He had also witnessed a mass murder. Rudolph was present at the hanging of a group of Dora inmates who were suspected of sabotage. According to one report, Rudolph ordered the other prisoners to watch. OSI argued that the unspeakable act of forcing prisoners to observe the murder of their fellow inmates was “a form of terror.” Understandably, Rudolph had withheld these grisly details when he was first selected for Operation Paperclip.
The evidence gathered by Rosenbaum and Sher was overwhelming. There was no proof that Rudolph had personally ordered or committed murders, but the OSI concluded that he was not without responsibility, either.
To avoid an American trial, Rudolph accepted a deal. In 1984 he renounced his US citizenship and returned to Germany. A German investigation into whether Rudolph should stand trial for war crimes ultimately concluded that there was not enough evidence. In Germany, the statute of limitations for a number of Nazi crimes had expired. However, under the terms of Rudolph’s deal with OSI, he was allowed to retain his US government retirement income, in addition to health care and social security benefits. Rudolph’s NASA commendation for distinguished service still stands.
In mid-October 1984, American newspaper readers were stunned to learn of Rudolph’s involvement in concentration camp atrocities, especially because he had risen to an esteemed position at NASA. The Mittelwerk story had never been widely publicized in the US, so most people were learning about it for the first time. Of course, Rudolph had not been the only Paperclip alumnus with ties to Mittelwerk. His exposure had inadvertently rekindled questions about Wernher von Braun. The Apollo program mastermind had been dead nearly eight years, but the secret of his personal connection to Mittelwerk was about to be uncovered.
In 1985, journalist Linda Hunt began investigating Operation Paperclip, as well as the records of the scientists, engineers, and technicians who had been involved. She filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the US government that led to the release of previously classified documents. Von Braun’s rank as a decorated major in Hitler’s SS was finally exposed, as was the fact that the US government knew about his SS membership but had classified it.
As time passed, historians and academics dug deeper into the story, painstakingly evaluating historical records and combing through archives in the US and Germany. Documents signed by von Braun at Mittelwerk showed that he had known about forced labor in the secret V-2 factory. He calculated the most efficient ratio between skilled workers and concentration camp prisoners. Although he was ordered to make such calculations as part of his job, he was still complicit in the atrocities. He had known about the use of forced labor but had chosen, out of fear or self-preservation, like so many bystanders during World War II, to keep silent.
Chapter 43
All That Remains
It’s worth considering what might have happened if von Braun had still been alive when Eli Rosenbaum investigated Arthur Rudolph. Would he have been implicated and deported as well? Von Braun had always been a somewhat controversial figure because of his well-known status as the V-2 architect. But his massive and enduring public appeal, high-level political connections, and undeniable contributions to rocket engineering would have been challenging obstacles for OSI investigators to overcome.
As evidence, consider that in the twenty-first century, despite all that has been disclosed about his past, von Braun remains an icon in spaceflight history as the mastermind of the Apollo moon landing, whose Saturn V rocket never failed. His name continues to grace buildings and awards. Following his death, the International Astronomical Union considered renaming a moon crater after von Braun, but the decision was delayed because of his Nazi background. It wasn’t until 1994 that the proposal was finally accepted and the lunar crater formerly known as “Lavoisier D” became known as “Von Braun.” A conference room at the headquarters of Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturing company, SpaceX, is also named “Von Braun.”
Korolev has been similarly memorialized. Two astronomical craters bear his name, one on the moon and another on the surface of Mars. In Russia, a city is called “Korolev.” Yet the famous Russian rocket engineer’s groundbreaking contributions to spaceflight remain largely omitted from popular narratives of the space race outside of the spaceflight history community. His quest for the moon, while less controversial than von Braun’s, is more obscured. He was responsible for igniting the space race with the launch of Sputnik and dominated the competition during its early years, but few people apart from aerospace professionals, historians, and space-race buffs know his name. This seems ironic, given that Korolev also invented a world-changing weapon, the ICBM—technology that jeopardizes millions of innocent lives on Earth with its capacity to carry nuclear warheads over thousands of miles.
Sergei Korolev, mastermind of the Soviet space program.
Korolev’s other lasting achievements, the Soyuz rocket and space capsule, are still in use today. The Soyuz program may have begun with the tragic death of Cosmonaut Komarov, but the system was later perfected by the Russians, becoming an indispensable tool in modern spaceflight, especially for Americans. In 2011, the
US ended its space shuttle program when Space Shuttle Atlantis landed for the last time. Thereafter, the only way for American astronauts to reach the International Space Station (ISS) was by paying for a ride aboard Russia’s Soyuz. It would be nine years before the US began to reclaim independence from the Soyuz by replacing its space shuttle with a new vehicle. A historic partnership between NASA and the private aerospace company SpaceX resulted in the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and its Crew Dragon space capsule. In May 2020, aboard this newly designed spacecraft, American astronauts once again successfully launched to the ISS from Cape Canaveral. If all goes according to plan, NASA’s latest space transportation vehicle, the Space Launch System (SLS), will carry American astronauts back to the moon, and possibly on to Mars by the 2030s.
These next-generation space vehicles are designed to be reusable, drastically lowering equipment costs, removing a major barrier to future space exploration.
How remarkable to consider that all this incredible technology was first imagined by two engineers who dared to dream of voyages to the moon and Mars as early as the 1930s. Equally remarkable is the vast number of secrets, lies, and hidden scandals at the heart of their quests. Yet rarely, if ever, are these stories discussed in classroom history books, because so much of the story was buried for years to protect governments from being held accountable for their actions. Identities were concealed. The contributions of women and people of color who dared to defy race and gender stereotypes went unacknowledged. Files were classified and secret operations undertaken. Documents were buried by the ton in a secret mountain cave. And thousands of concentration camp prisoners, whose lives were forfeited in the advancement of rocket technology, were forgotten.
