by J. W Lateer
So now, after looking at all of the above voluminous background on Walter Dornberger, what can we conclude? Dornberger was most likely the engineering supervisor of Michael Paine who worked at Bell Helicopter in Dallas. And Michael Paine, of course, was the man who abandoned his own home and separated from his wife Ruth at the precise time that Lee Harvey Oswald needed a place to live, just weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The day after the assassination, Paine and his wife were reconciled and Michael Paine moved back into his house.
According to the Torbitt Document, discussed earlier, Walter Dornberger was involved in the Kennedy assassination cabal and his job was to get Michael Paine assigned to the position in the Bell Helicopter Company where Paine could be required to participate.
The following appears in an article published by “Lupo Cattivo.” As is obvious by the nature of the claims by Cattivo, this information is not thoroughly vetted, but it is in general consistent with all other known assassination research:
Ruth’s husband, Michael Ralph Paine, from which they live separately, but is in frequent contact, works in the Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, armament and electronics department, performs the maintenance work for the B-52 bomber’s [atomic missile]... Paine’s military intelligence service name is Charles Melvin Coffey. His family has relations with the United Fruit to Rockefeller and Gibraltar Steamship, the CIA offered ships for the Bay of Pigs operation. Paine is a cousin of the United Fruit-director Alexander Cochrane Forbes and the United Fruit President Thomas Dudley Cabot.
Father George Lyman Paine married after his divorce, the Trotskyite Frances Drake, so he gets close contacts with this scene and probably works as a CIA informant. George Paine was the lover of Allen Dulles, [???] Mary Bancroft, friends. Ruth Forbes was previously married to Arthur Young, who is in correspondence with Dulles. Young was one of the founders of the Bell Helicopter, where the Nazi Walter R. Dornberger is Vice- President. Dornberger was responsible for the operations of the V2 rockets into London and [was accused and] should hang for mass murder in Nuremberg. In 1950, he was brought to the United States contrary to the protests and warnings of the British Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency of the [British Government].. Michael Paine also spent seven years working for Bell Aircraft.
Following retirement, Dornberger went to Mexico and later returned to Germany, where he died in 1980 in Baden-Wurttemberg.
Before we conclude this chapter, there is a fascinating and revealing description of Wernher von Braun quoted from James Webb. (a man who knew von Braun) in the book The Man Who Ran The Moon: James Webb, JFK and the Secret History of Project Apollo by Piers Bizony (at p. 48):
Another fascinating aspect of von Braun’s complicated character, and one that still preoccupies historians of the Nazi era, was his essential respect for chains of command. He would obey orders and show absolute public loyalty to whomsoever his masters were at any given time. Nevertheless, he somehow managed to pursue his own course within this outer appearance of compliance. In a sense, this made him a trickier fellow to deal with than if he had merely rebelled outright at any initiative from NASA headquarters that he didn’t like. “He had the instinct and intuition of an animal,” Webb observed of him, “What’s going on here, the wind’s bringing me a new scent?” Wernher had a remarkable sense of what his audience wanted to hear.
According to Bizony, James Webb and two others, formed the entire upper management of NASA. Reporting to these three were four separate segments of NASA .
As described in the book by Bizony, there was a swift re-ordering of some aspects of power in Washington in 1961. Power was moved from the four field centers to Washington, where the Washington Headquarters had four parts, each supervising one of the four field operations. The roles of the four field centers were (1) advanced planning, (2) manned space flight control, (3) space science and (4) communications. Thus, the regional power-brokers were now under the control of Washington, which included former Nazis von Braun at Huntsville, Alabama and Kurt Debus at Cape Canaveral in Florida. James Webb and Hugh L. Dryden would represent NASA in Congress and at the White House. The latter two were, of course, Americans by birth and not affiliated with the recruitment of the German scientists after the War.
And according to Bizony, Webb reported directly to President Kennedy regarding every major thing that happened in the NASA program during Kennedy’s entire term in office.
Contrast this to a statement in an article by Alan Wasser.57 There, Wasser states “Once President, Kennedy put Vice-President Johnson in personal charge of the space program.”
This information reported about Johnson and his role in the Space Program seems to be directly contradicted by Piers Bizony in his book covering, in depth, the administration of NASA.
This question becomes important because some writers accuse Lyndon Johnson of being the mastermind of the Kennedy Assassination. If this were the case, Johnson would have no significant staff to use in carrying out any plot, because if, as Vice-President (because his every movement is thoroughly documented) he would not have an opportunity to meet to plot an assassination with anyone but his own staff in the normal course of business.
So if Johnson were actually in charge of NASA (which was, after all, the space program), then he could have conceivably conspired with von Braun, or Debus or other NASA employees or scientists. (It should be mentioned that Jim Garrison, in his book On The Trail Of The Assassins, clearly states that he felt that NASA, through their New Orleans facilities, was complicit in the assassination).
Based on the information presented by Bizony, Johnson’s involvement in this manner would clearly be unlikely, if not impossible. But what about some other role involving Werhner von Braun or Walter Dornberger? As discussed in prior chapters, the Torbitt Document implicates both of them in the Kennedy assassination.
In the case of Wernher von Braun, anything could be possible. He is one of the most mercurial figures in the whole history of the period. He seemed to willingly join the SS, join the Nazi party and had no particular problems with the issues of slave labor, genocide or any of the other that were going on around him. Further, his role in the missile program was always one of a public relations man, rather than that of a scientific purist or introverted technician. So if we ask, could von Braun have entered into a plot to assassinate the elected President, the answer is probably yes, without much problem.
Of all the putative suspects in the Kennedy assassination case, the role of Dornberger comes closest to defying analysis by merely examining his character and his circumstances. One problem in this analysis is the case of Arthur Rudolph. This case is pathetically recounted in the book Gestapo USA: When Justice Was Blindfolded, by Sr. Lt. Colonel William E. Winterstein.
Col. Winterstein was the commander of the German scientists at Fort Bliss for a period of time. One of the most prominent scientists, Arthur Rudolph, after serving NASA for many years and being highly decorated, was deported back to Germany in 1983, 35 years after he came to the U.S, on grounds that he had employed slave labor during WWII.59
Reading between the lines of the Winterstein book, one does not get the impression that the German scientists were a group of arrogant, unprincipled believers in fascism who were just using the United States as a place to live (and escape from their notorious past), while indulging their special interest in rockets and space.
The facts seem to be more like this: the Germans had a stranglehold on the U.S. missile program and the Moon program through their role at Huntsville(von Braun) and Cape Canaveral (Debus) through NASA. They also had a close relationship over the years with the powerful Lyndon Johnson, even if he were not their actual superior at the time.
However, the utility of their stranglehold seems to have been more defensive than offensive. In fact, some said that once the Moon had been reached, the German scientists lost their “protection” by circumstances and hence became prey to the Nazi hunters and Arthur Rudolph was actually overtaken by the Nazi hunters a
nd he lost both his citizenship and his new homeland.
Of course this situation is a two sided coin. On one side, the scientists were indispensable to the most important (by far) of the nation’s weapons programs. Thus, they were in a position to plot and act in an aggressive and conspiratorial manner, especially if they had maintained that rigid military hierarchical discipline which they brought with them to this country.
But the other side of the coin is that they were living in fear of deportation at the hands of the equally powerful Nazi-hunters, backed by Israel. So they were also vulnerable to the grossest type of blackmail.
The question becomes particularly interesting when one examines the character of Dornberger. During his career in Nazi Germany, he never joined the Nazi Party, much less the SS. This was probably due both to religious scruples or affiliations and to his loyalty to his Regular Army compatriots of 30 years. (The historical record does not disclose the religion of Dornberger, though he acted decisively to protect his Catholic friend who was in trouble with the Nazis).
Once he was established in the U.S., his practice of speaking before the Jaycees and the Boy Scouts seems to belie any association with radical right-wing extremists. Dornberger was, however, a true realist about weapons and geopolitics. If Dornberger perceived that either Eisenhower, Kennedy or Johnson were jeopardizing the integrity of the missile or any other crucial defense program, he probably would have been in favor of the assassination as a matter of necessity. (The murder of a President would not cause these Hitler associates to lose any sleep out of guilt. We know that for sure). And that could have (conceivably) been a perfectly good call, a matter of which we will never know the answer for sure.
The other aspect of his career that comes into play is the fact that the demented Nazi SS fanatics like Himmler or Kammler were always more of a hindrance rather than a help to weapons development. Even Hitler was constantly jeopardizing the German technological weapons programs with his nightmares, depression, paranoia and all the rest. For this reason, it is hard to imagine Dornberger in league with the assortment of Czarist Cavalry, European Monarchist pretenders, Ukrainian Nazi collaberators and the others who were central to the plot in Dallas. Dornberger could likely have been the agent who made arrangements with Michael Paine for housing Lee Harvey Oswald. This could have been because of his long, close friendship with von Braun, or because of blackmail over a possible deportation, either of himself or his friends.
Dornberger likely felt a lifelong distaste for the U.S. Government because it had, after all, pretty much temporarily destroyed his beloved Germany. This was a feeling shared by virtually every top Hitler associate.
It also deserves mention that at least three very major figures in the assassination history, namely Thomas J. Dodd, Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy all had hands-on experience dealing with the Nazi problem in Europe. This raises further suspicion around the major former Nazi’s in the U.S., especially the scientists.
Unfortunately, unlike other parts of the “conspiracy theory” universe, like blaming the French Mafia or OAS, or J.Edgar Hoover, or the American mafia, it is not really possible to exclude Dornberger through in-depth study of the person or the circumstances. We will have to await the possible further release of classified documents to resolve the enigma of Walter Dornberger and his lifelong friend, Baron Wernher von Braun.
Notes:
The following are the reference works cited in the above chapter:
In the Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, by James Neufeld.
Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Disastrous Effect on The cold war, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, by Christopher Simpson.
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Schientists to America, by Annie Jacobsen.
The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists, by Tom Bower.
Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Operation Paperclip; 1945 to 1990, by Linda Hunt.
The following appears at:[http://www.US-politik.ch/teil7.htm] Published by “Lupo Cattivo” which is a European-based blog claiming to be similar to Wikileaks [search for “Walter Dornberger” “James O. Eastland” OR “James Eastland”] and select Translate:
The Man Who Ran The Moon: James Webb, JFK and the Secret History of Project Apollo by Piers Bizony See also the article cited in the text by Alan Wasser dated 6-20-05, read on 3-8-15 on the website [www.thespacereview.com/article/396/1].
Gestapo USA: When Justice Was Blindfolded, by Sr. Lt. Colonel William E. Winterstein.
Chapter 27
James O. Eastland and the JFK Assassination
This chapter deals with information on the life and motivations of James O. Eastland. There has never been a definitive biography written about Eastland although he was a dominant figure in the 1950’s and 1960’s. There is, however, a good basic beginning to be found on his Wikipedia page [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Eastland] which will serve as our beginning basis for facts about Senator Eastland.
The Early Life and Career of James O.
Eastland
James Oliver Eastland was born November 28, 1904 in Doddsville, Mississipppi which is located in the delta region. He was a dominant force in the U.S. Senate, as a powerful Democrat who served in 1941 and again from 1943 until his resignation December 27, 1978. For 31 years, from 1947 to 1978, he served alongside John Stennis, also a Democrat. These two, for a time, became the longest serving two-person state delegation in the Senate in U.S. history. Their record was subsequently surpassed, however, by the duo of Strom Thurmond and Ernest Hollings of South Carolina who served together for thirty-six years. At the time of his retirement, Eastland was the most senior member of the Senate. He compiled a record in support of the Conservative coalition.
The grandfather of James O. Eastland had ridden with Confederate guerrilla General Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil War.
The family of James O. Eastland were wealthy plantation owners in Sunflower County Mississippi. Eastland was the son of Woods Caperton Eastland, a lawyer and cotton planter, and Alma Teresa (Austin) Eastland. In the Senate, Eastland was an ardent segregationist. He came by this attitude due, no doubt, to the abysmal social conditions in which he was reared. Lynchings of blacks was a frequent occurrence in Sunflower County. Eastland was born just nine months after the lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife on the Eastland plantation in 1904, an event which was led by Eastland’s father, a pharmacist as well as a planter. Holbert was not hanged, but rather burned at the stake because he was accused of murdering James Eastland, the uncle and namesake of Senator Eastland. Some Sunflower County observers say that there were lynchings most Sundays on the Eastland plantation, carried out by Eastland’s father.
The NAACP compiled statistics showing that in the first three decades of the 1900’s, in the 17 counties lying in whole or in part in the Mississippi Delta region of Mississippi, there were 66 lynchings. This was out of a total of 188 confirmed lynchings in the entire state.
In 1905, young James Eastland moved with his parents to Forest, Mississippi where he attended the segregated public schools. Woods Eastland was active in politics and served as a district attorney.
Growing up in an atmosphere of racial violence left Eastland with a doctrinaire racist attitude typical of the South at the time. According to a statement attributed to Eastland, he claimed “that only the purest of white blood flowed through the Eastland family veins. I know that the white race is a superior race. It has ruled the world. It has given us civilization. It is responsible for all the progress on earth.”
Eastland attended the University of Mississippi (1922-1924), Vanderbilt University (1925-1926), and the University of Alabama (1926-1927) before studying law with his father and attaining admission to the bar. While a lawyer in rural Mississippi, he served one term in the state House of Representatives from 1928 to 1932
In the 1930
’s, Eastland took over his family’s Sunflower County plantation, and eventually expanded it to nearly 6,000 acres (9.3 square miles). Even after entering politics, he considered himself first and foremost a cotton planter. While agriculture was becoming mechanized, he still had many African-American laborers on the plantation, many working as sharecroppers.
Eastland was first appointed to the Senate in 1941 by Democratic Governor Paul B. Johnson, Sr., following the death of Senator Pat Harrison. Johnson first offered the appointment to Eastland’s father, who declined and suggested his son. Johnson appointed James Eastland on the condition that he not run in the special election for the seat later in the year. Eastland kept his word and the election was won by 2nd District Congressman Wall Doxey.
In 1942, however, Eastland ran for the Senate on his own initiative and was one of three candidates who challenged Doxey for a full term. Doxey had the support of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mississippi’s senior U.S. Senator, Theodore G. Bilbo, but Eastland defeated Doxey in the Democratic primary. In those days, winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election in Mississippi. It was a one-party state dominated by white Democrats since disenfranchisement of African-Americans with the passage of the 1890 state constitution, which used poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses to exclude them from the political system. Eastland returned to the Senate on January 3, 1943.
The racism of the Mississippi Delta in that era was not just limited to that locale. Senior Senator Theodore Bilbo was said to have ties to an outside organization with direct Nazi ties. On the other side of the ledger, there was civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, who was also a singer, storyteller and organizer of anti-segregationist efforts.
Once Eastland went to Washington, FDR and Eastland developed a working relationship that enabled Eastland to oppose New Deal programs unpopular in Mississippi while he supported FDR’s agenda on many other issues. Eastland was effective in developing this type of arrangement with presidents of both parties during his long tenure in the Senate. As a result he gained major federal investment in the state, such as infrastructure construction including the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, and federal relief after disasters such as Hurricane Camille.
