by J. W Lateer
The British however, had one special request. They developed a plan to construct the necessary facility on the Baltic to actually test-fire four V-2 missiles. For this purpose, the Americans agreed to loan their captured German Scientists. After the test launches, however, a problem occurred.
The one person [U.S.] Ordance could not get back from the British was Dornberger (see Neufeld, p. 269). According to a U.K. interrogator, the former rocket General had “extreme views on German domination, and wishes for a Third World War.” Moreover, the British were determined to try Dornberger in Kammler’s place for indiscriminate V-2 attacks on civilians. They kept him in a POW camp until 1947.
Per Neufeld, p. 269:
Because of the narrow focus of war crimes investigations, the rocket general also avoided trial on the one charge that could have stuck: complicity in the exploitation of slave labor. (see also Blowback, by Christopher Simpson at p.27-39).
Continuing Jacobsen p 66 and Neufeld p. 269:
At an internment camp after the war known as “CSDIC Camp 11” the British bugged Dornberger, who in conversation with General major Gerhard Bassenge (COG Air Defences, Tunis & Biserta) said that he and Wernher von Braun had realized in late 1944 that things were going wrong and consequently was in touch with the General Electric Corporation through the German Embassy in Portugal, with a view to coming to some arrangement.
As stated in Jacobsen, p. 84:
Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Hitler were dead. Speer was in custody; also Otto Ambros, Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph were in custody, working toward a U.S. Army contract. George Rickhey had a job in London.
In his book The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists, Tom Bower, (at p. 127) adds even more background about the nature of the relationship between the Nazi missile scientists:
Three Peenemunde scientists, all anti-Nazi’s who had refused American contracts, confided to Osborne [a British interrogator] that the rocket team’s strict hierarchical structure under Dornberger, [Herbert] Axter and Wernher von Braun had remained intact despite the German surrender. Before every interrogation, each German was carefully briefed by Dornberger, Axter and von Braun about what could and could not be disclosed. Osborne also discovered that those scientists who criticized or failed to obey Dornberger’s edicts were punished.
It has to be asked, at this point, about these Nazi’s rigid disciplinary system. They clearly had this system in place just before they were brought to the U.S. They were brought in numbers that reached at least into the high one-hundreds. Further, their team retained a virtual monopoly control in the divisions of NASA in Huntsville under von Braun (production) and Cape Canaveral (launching) under Kurt Debus. When exactly did this rigid militaristic disciplinary system disappear? Sorry I had to even ask!
Still more background on Walter Dornberger is provided by Annie Jacobsen in Operation Paperclip (at p.178):
“Walter Dornberger was definitely the most hated man in the camp,” Sergeant Ron Williams, a prison guard recalled. “Even his own people hated him. He never went out to the local farms to work like other prisoners. Wherever General Dornberger went, he required an escort. The British feared that other prisoners might kill him.
Arriving at Wright Field in the summer of 1947 was General Walter Dornberger, newly released [from Britain]. Before turning him over to the Americans, the British labeled him “a menace of the first order” and warned their Allied partners of his deceitful nature. While holding Dornberger for war crimes, British intelligence had eavesdropped on him and recorded what he said. When Americans listened to the secret audio recordings, they too, concluded that Hitler’s former “chief of all rocket and research development…had an untrustworthy attitude in seeking to turn ally against ally.” Still, Dornberger signed a Paperclip contract, on July 12, 1947, just weeks after his release from prison. Dornberger’s skill at manipulation was put to use by Army Ordnance, which had him write classified intelligence briefs. America needed to develop missiles regardless of what any naysayers might think Dornberger believed.
Of the Paperclip Conspiracy, (at p. 135) Tom Bower provides further perspective from the British point of view quoting from information provided by the British:
Dornberger is a regular soldier of 30 years of service. [He began his career working around the famous “Paris Gun” which shelled Paris from 70 miles away in 1917], is a first rate technician and wields great power over his subordinates including Wernher von Braun…I am convinced that Dornberger is a most dangerous man and should…be…prevented to have contact with his former Peenemunde subordinates.
Bower continues regarding the British position in re Dornberger:
…the conviction that all Germans were dangerous was still deep seated among officials whose task for nearly six years had been to preserve the nation’s [Britain’s] internal security. For both the JIC [the British Joint Intelligence Committee] and the Home Office [British office in charge of law, order and immigration], the insuperable obstacle was that a brilliant German scientist would inevitably become “indispensable” and therefore dangerous.
Bower presents the counter-argument:
Like Wev [the American officer in charge of the scientists] most believed that “beating a dead Nazi horse” served little purpose and was, in fact, self-defeating. Former Nazi’s were proving themselves willing and able allies against Communism, which was jeopardizing the entire world. There was, they felt, a sharp distinction between political subversion (because Nazis believed in totalitarianism) and outright espionage.
The reader is invited to make up his or her own mind on this issue. In another interesting sidelight Bower reports the following about a Nazi named Kurt Debus:
“Debus had not deliberately denounced him [i.e. one of his German colleagues] but had been compelled to report their conversation to the Gestapo under his oath as an SS man.”
As mentioned above, Kurt Debus went on to head the launching function of the NASA program at Cape Canaveral and was highly decorated by the U.S. Government for this service.
While Dornberger sat in jail, U.S. Army Ordnance conveyed across the ocean nearly 120 select Peenemunders … von Braun had already departed for the U.S. by airplane with six others in September 1945.
In Simpson, Blowback, Dornberger himself did not experience the immigration difficulties that Wernher von Braun did. He was permitted to enter the U.S. in 1947 without State Department opposition … much to the dismay of the British, who had been, after all, the targets of Dornberger’s rockets … the British held Dornberger for two years as a P.O.W. following the war and tried to bring him up as a war criminal. Dornberger got into the U.S. because he never joined the Nazi party.
The U.S. Air Force, it is now known, secretly brought Dornberger to this country in 1947 and put him to work on a classified rocketry program at Wright Field (now known as Wright-Patterson AFB) near Dayton, Ohio. By 1950, he had gone into private industry with Bell Aircraft and he eventually rose to be a Senior Vice-President of the Bell Aerosystems Division of the massive multi-national Textron Corporation. There he specialized in company liaison with U.S. military agencies..
As detailed by Neufeld in Rocket and the Reich, beginning at page 270 and then on page 271:
They were sent to Fort Bliss [in El Paso, Texas]. Their chief role was Project Hermes, with General Electric … Operation Paperclip replaced Operation Overcast in March 1946.
The Nazis were rationalized … because the German’s technical expertise was seen as indispensable. In 1950 the group was transferred by the U.S. Army to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama where they became the premier rocket development group in the United States. Their arrival in the States had in fact changed the whole balance of Army rocket activities, since the Germans displaced the smaller groups that had begun to flourish in WWII, like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
In her book ,Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Op
eration Paperclip; 1945 to 1990, Linda Hunt (at p. 52) uncovered more information about the Fort Bliss sojourn of the German Scientists.
“Meanwhile, the lax security over Paperclip personnel became so obvious that even visitors to Fort Bliss complained. One War Department intelligence officer, Colonel Frank Reed was shocked that [ Major James] Hamill [responsible for the scientists] …made no serious checks on the German’s loyalty…Reed’s concern about security was heightened because he had just returned from visiting Saint Louis, France, where a comparable group of German rocket engineers worked for the French government. While there, the French commandant told Reed he suspected the Germans under French control were receiving orders from Germany and working toward a re-emergence of the Third Reich.”
In the period after von Braun arrived at Fort Bliss, but before the arrival of Dornberger, Hunt reports another incident at p. 52 regarding the Germans:
“All of a sudden, word came down that Wernher von Braun had been caught sending a map overseas to General Dornberger and concealing information from U.S. officials. It was an incident … similar [to a 1945 plot] when asked about documents, von Braun told the Army he knew nothing about their location. Dornberger later told von Braun’s brother that Army officers didn’t trust Wernher von Braun and that officers had even told him that von Braun had lied to them. Von Braun then sent a map to his family in Europe showing the location of a burial place where sketches stuffed in a cigarette box were hidden. He told them [his family] to deliver the map to Dornberger’s wife, since the General [Dornberger] was still being held in a British POW camp. The way this scheme was supposed to work, the documents then would be located and given to German scientists who would turn them over to Wernher von Braun when they arrived in the U.S. under Paperclip. [The officers said Wernher von Braun would use the documents as a bargaining chip]. The plot was abruptly halted when Army Officers confiscated the map from Dornberger’s wife. Then the officers finagled Dornberger’s release from the British and flew to Germany to look for the missing documents in a forest under Dornberger’s direction. [The sketches turned out to be ruined].”
Post WWII
Once the British had seen the testing of the V-2, Dornberger was taken to London, interrogated and imprisoned. The British acted out of vengeance over Dornberger’s role in the horrific V-2 attacks. But the British had also seen Dornberger in action as the “informal leader” of all the imprisoned Nazi’s at his facility. They feared this leadership role as an ongoing security threat.
But Dornberger was soon to be released to the Americans. He worked in the U.S. for the Air Force. Then he went to work as a Vice President of Bell Aerospace which was headquartered in Buffalo, New York with a facility in Dallas. Dornberger’s projects at Bell Aerospace were mostly esoteric failures, including the never-built Dyna-Soar craft and a nuclear propelled air-to-surface missile. One noteworthy recruit landed for Bell Aerospace by Dornberger was a rocket pioneer named Krafft Arnold Ehricke.
Jacobsen, reports regarding Dornberger(at p. 262): “Russia strives now only time to prepare for war before the United States,” Dornberger wrote in a classified budget pitch financed by the Ordnance Department in 1948. “The United States must decide on a research and development program that will guarantee satisfactory results in the shortest possible time and at the least expense. Such a program must be set up even if its organization appears to violate American economic ideals and American traditions in arms development” Dornberger wrote.
At least it could be said that Dornberger remained true to his totalitarian-leaning principle, that is, his belief that democratic ideals and traditions could be ignored in the quest for military supremacy. That the U.S. Army condoned Dornberger’s idea appears to have never been made public before; his pitch was presented to the Ordnance Department officials at the Pentagon. A copy of the classified document was found in 2012 in Dornberger’s personal papers, kept in a German state archive.
We can continue on to what else is known about the career of Walter Dornberger in the following years in which he worked toward the United States goals in weapons development.
Neufeld reports (at p. 27):
At Huntsville [the U.S. missile facility] one of the keys to the German’s success was the “everything under one roof” approach developed at Kummersdorf and Peenemunde under the direction of Becker and Dornberger. It proved very compatible with the U.S. Army’s “arsenal system” of in-house development. Under von Braun’s leadership the German-dominated group successfully developed the nuclear-tipped Redstone and Jupiter Missiles in the 1950’s. The Redstone-which was really just a much-improved A-4 [V-2] became the vehicle that put the first American satellite and first American man into space. Finally under NASA aegis, after 1960, the Peenemunders crowned their success with the phenomenally reliable Saturn vehicles, which launched Apollo spacecraft into orbit and put humans on the moon.
Of any of the authors quoted about. Jacobsen offers the most details about the role of Dornberger’s career in the U.S. after WWII. She says:
Within two years of his arrival in the United States, Dornberger had transformed from public menace to American celebrity. In 1950, he left military custody at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to work for Bell Aircraft Corporation in Niagara Falls, New York, quickly becoming Vice-President and chief scientist. His vocation was now to serve as America’s mouthpiece for the urgent need to weaponize space. Dornberger was given a Top Secret security clearance and a job consulting with the military on rockets, missiles and the future of space-based weapons. In his desk diary, housed in the Archives of the Deutches Museum in Munich, he kept track of his cross-country business trips with an engineer’s precision. He attended “classified meetings” at U.S. Air Force bases including Wright-Patterson, Elgin, Randolph, Maxwell and Holloman, as well as at Strategic Air Command headquarters, in Omaha, Nebraska and at the Pentagon. He also became a consultant to the Joint Chiefs on Operation Paperclip, visiting the inner circle in the Pentagon to discuss “clearance procedures” and the “hiring of German scientists.” As a Paperclip scout, in 1952 Dornberger traveled with what he called “Pentagon Brass” to Germany to “interview German scientists and engineers [in] Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, Darmstadt and Witzenhausen.”
In his desk diary Dornberger also detailed an ambitious schedule of public appearances, carefully noting the places he traveled and the people he met with. They were the kinds of engagements usually reserved for Congressmen. Throughout the 1950’s, he jetted from one event to the next, lecturing at dinners and luncheons and sometimes week-long events. His speeches were always about conquest with titles like “Rockets-Guided Missiles: Key to the Conquest of Space,” “Intercontinental Weapons Systems” and “A Realistic Approach to the Conquest of Space.” He orated to anyone who would listen: the Men’s Club of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, the Boy Scouts of America, the Society of Automotive Engineers. When the Rochester Junior Chamber of Commerce hosted General Dornberger for a women’s luncheon in the spring of 1953, the local press covered the event with the headline “Buzz Bomb Mastermind to Address Jaycees Today.”
Dornberger became so popular that his memoir about the V-2, originally published in West Germany in 1952, was published in America in 1954. In these pages, Dornberger was able to re-engineer his professional history from that of warmongering Nazi General to beneficent science pioneer. According to Dornberger, the research and development that had gone into the V-2 at Peenemunde was a romantic, science laboratory-by-the-sea affair. There was no mention made of the slave labor facility at Nordhausen or the slaves at Peenemunde. The book was originally titled V-2: The Shot into Space (V-2 Der Schuss in All)…
In 1957, Dornberger seemed to have found his true post-Nazi calling, attempting to sell Bell Aircraft’s BoMi (bomber-missile) to the Pentagon. BoMi was a rocket-powered manned spacecraft designed for nuclear combat in space. Occasionally, and behind closed doors, usually at the Pentagon, Dornberger faced challenges. He was once p
itching the benefits of BoMi to an audience of air force officials when “abusive and insulting remarks” were shouted at him, according to Air Force historian Roy F. Houchin II. In that instance, Dornberger is said to have turned on his audience and insisted that the BoMi would receive a lot more respect if Dornberger had had a chance to fly it against the United States during a war. There was “deafening silence” in the room, Houchin noted.
In 1958, the FBI opened an investigation into General Dornberger based on an insider’s tip that he might be engaged in secret discussions with Communist spies. The special agent who interviewed Dornberger did not believe he was spying for the Soviets but honed in on Dornberger’s duplicitous nature. “It is believed that subject [Dornberger] could carry on satisfactorily in the role of a double-agent.” Dornberger was a cunning man, and this quality, coupled with his scientist’s acumen, served him. No matter what the circumstances, Dornberger always seemed to come out on top.
Jacobsen P.409 “In October 1958…the Aero-Medical Association convened…General Dornberger delivered a speech.” At page 538 of Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip in an end- note] it reads as follows: “In Dornberger papers housed at the Deutches Museum… In one [manuscript] on the use of slave labor, Dornberger cites Himmler as having said to him ‘[the] power of Germany [meant] a return to the era of slavery.’ To this Dornberger says he wondered aloud if other nations might object, to which Himmler said, “after our victory they will not dare.”
In Blowback by Christopher Simpson, another Dornberger contribution is described at p. 64:
Walter Dornberger added fuel to this fire (of the perception of the USSR) in 1955 by publishing alarming speculation that the Soviets might attack from the sea, using shorter-range missiles deployed in floating canisters off the coast of the U.S. He was deeply involved in the U.S.’s own ICBM program at this point and his opinions were given considerable weight in public discussion.
