IMMEDIATEREL//VIA/ATTN/CDR@TACNET//FM//JCL//RLT27//CLASSIFIED
15 July 2020--
"...like so many others, he said, 'I didn’t know about the Holocaust.'..."
(Lab107)--In a landmark 2008 interview by Diane Tedeschi with then Smithsonian Air-Space Division history chairman, Michael Neufeld, the obvious came out of the dark past about the man who literally put the United States on the moon, Wernher von Braun;
"After the war, like so many others, he said, 'I didn’t know about the Holocaust.' He also came to the realization that Hitler was an evil person. So he certainly distanced himself from that. And late in his life, in the 1960s and’70s, he did express some remorse in letters about the concentration camp prisoners. To me, it’s better than nothing, but it’s not very good. There’s no great sense of guilt there. There always seemed to be more than anything else, a kind of distancing."
Certainly the rocket engineer who drew the plans, did the testing and watched the assembly by slave labor from nearby concentration camps must have known something, the chairman argued. Neufeld noted through a war crimes trial testimony that von Braun had been down into the horror chambers of the prisoners but was helpless to criticize the conditions, driven by his solid-rocket fueled obsession with the V-2s that rained down on England. In any other circumstance he would be labelled a war criminal had he not gone to work for the rocket's red glare of the Star Spangled Banner.
Military conscription in Nazi Germany was ordered in 1935 and von Braun was in his mid-twenties. Through some connections that were reported by him in later years, he managed to get out of direct military service and at the time was doing graduate level engineering work at the university level. (BBC, Wikipedia) By any other standard, his rather shady methods of avoiding the Russian front might have labelled him a draft-dodger, a coward. (1)
According to an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald a month after his capture by the Americans, von Braun seemed to boast about his close ties with der Fuhrer and how he convinced Hitler the ultimate weapon for the military was his SCUD;
"He said in an interview with a 'Daily Express' representative that he persuaded army scientists that liquid fuel was preferable. Secret tests of his design were carried out a year after Hitler came into power." (Sydney Morning Herald)
The article goes on to explain that von Braun personally showed films of tests and was ordered to mass produce the weapon. (2) So much for the remorseful scientist who had a guilt complex over the weapon of mass destruction that used Holocaust labor.
Neufeld mentioned in the Tedeschi interview that von Braun was described by a British correspondent as "handsome as a film star" and a ladies man during the Third Reich. Certainly von Braun wasn't about to trade all of that in for a trench on the Russian front if he said one word about organized murder in the camps. For a person of his stellar imagination, it is hard to imagine he didn't know what was going on.
"She is pretty, blonde Baria von Quistrop, an 18-year old miss from the eastern Frisian village of Luetetsburg." (Owensboro Messenger)
Wernher had in the short span of one year following his liberation from the Third Reich, lived up to both his expertise of rocket genius and lady-killer as well with a mail-order bride half his age. (The newspaper misprinted the bride's name, it should have been Maria von Quistrop)
It didn't seem to bother the scientist, safe at an army installation in Texas that his partners were on trial in Nuremberg for war crimes and were sentenced to death by hanging or long stretches in German prisons. That included the Reichsminister for Munitions and War Production, Albert Speer, who facilitated von Braun's release following his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. (Wikipedia) Three months before the scientist announced his engagement, Speer was sentenced at Nuremberg to 20 years imprisonment.
All the while von Braun was mesmerizing the West with visions of space travel, trips to the moon and Mars, with the same hypnotic fascination that put Hitler under his spell, no one questioned von Braun's role in the Holocaust. Through most of the Cold War, von Braun's role in extermination of the Jews and minorities went unchallenged due to that very hypnotic effect the scientist, any scientist, has had over not just the United States government, but the public as well. As the world turned into a new century, many of the skeletons in the closets of "heroes" are being discovered by a socially correct culture out to save itself from its own shame. Von Braun is no exception.
In his Futurism article published for Vocal Media, Matthew Kresal took aim at the scientist in his article "Jurgens, Von Braun and 'I Aim at the Stars' ", a 60's vintage film;
"For one thing, there's the question of how you portray a scientist who once built weapons of war for a former enemy. Much has been said over the years about the whitewashing of not just Von Braun's war record but other Germans brought to the United States as part of Operation: Paperclip. From the point of view of someone interested in that part of the story, the film is interesting." (Vocal)
Vocal notes Kresal's article was published "3 years ago."
According to the La Crosse (WI) Tribune, the film was given an official Pentagon endorsement. (La Crosse Tribune, 1960) When the film premiered in London at the Leicester Square Theater on 24 November 1960, it was met with a "anti-Nazi pamphlets" rained from the balcony on the assemblage of "Embassy officials. screen stars, film executives and scientists." (SF Examiner, 1960) The divide between the status quo and those who carried a 12-foot banner reading "Nazi Braun's V2 rocket killed and maimed 9,000 Londoners" was becoming painfully apparent. Across the board, the elite was whitewashing the Nazi scientific community.
"I have very deep and sincere regrets for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides." (The York, PA Gazette and Daily)
There were actually three sides, he failed to acknowledge the thousands of Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp prisoners who either died in the camps or caught in the 1944 bombing raids or were slaughtered on the death marches. The film was banned in Antwerp where thousands were victims of the V2 rockets in 1944-45. (Greenville News, 1960)
When teenaged girls protested the showing of the film in Akron the following January, they were labelled as "beatniks." (Akron Beacon-Journal, 1961)
Besides this rather shallow question mark on the role of von Braun in the Holocaust and Neufeld's book, there doesn't appear to be genuine evidence one way or another of his participation, by direction or proxy, in its perpetuation. The Wikipedia article on the scientist notes there were "14 tons of V-2" documents recovered in Operation Paperclip. Just how much of that vast stockpile of documents the slave labor from nearby concentration camps has yet to be uncovered. At least one estimate is one ton of paper equals 200,000 sheets, or, 28 million sheets of paper regarding the Peenemunde project were recovered.
"Production of the V-2 was too small at the time to have delayed the Allied invasion of Normandy. It later was stepped up to 400 a month." (Windsor Star)
He was careful, in his permitted disclosure not to reveal just who was responsible for the manual labor of that increased production. (3)
Again, not only the government, but the news media as well, in the face of the growing Cold War as the world moved into the Nuclear Age, all were in denial of where to place the responsibility for the labor that went into the production of the "Buzz Bomb" and "Retribution Weapon 2."
Today, we still don't really know.
Footnote: As for defense of the scientist that he "didn't know," it is suspect that he saw hordes of prisoners in the camps but didn't bother to question why they were there. Were they military prisoners of war, political prisoners, or just arbitrary arrests made by the SS? Where was a military tribunal, a court of law, what about habeas corpus, the right of an accused, a detained person, to appear before a judge to hear the charges brought against him? No, von Braun must have known the truth all along but refused to accept it in his obsession with rocketry. It was a convenient cop out. Many top scientists bailed out of Germany when the Third Reich came to power, von Braun had that same opportunity. Instead, the prospect of using SS concentration camp slave labor was just too appealing and too available considering he might otherwise have been just another soldier in a trench. He went on to manipulate the Western governments just as he had done the Germans to achieve his end. Can we accept in good conscience that the man most responsible for putting the United States on the moon was also a self-centered zealot who would use, at any expense countless human lives to eventually accomplish that goal?
References
Tedeschi, D., How Much Did Wernher von Braun Know?, https://www.airspacemag.com/space/a-amp-s-interview-michael-j-neufeld-23236520/
Nazi conscription, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zsdfr82/revision/3
V-2 Inventor Tells Story, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 1945, Page 1.
Mail-order bride, Owensboro (KY) Messenger, 26 Dec 1946, Page 6.
Ms. von Quistrop's photo, The Binghampton (NY) Press-Sun Bulletin, 11 Dec 1946, Page 16.
Albert Speer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
Kresal, M., Jurgens, Von Brain & "I Aim at the Stars," https://vocal.media/futurism/jurgens-von-braun-and-i-aim-at-the-stars (also : Jurgens photo)
Pentagon emdorsement, La Crosse Tribune, 24 Sept 1960, Page 16)
London Protests, SF Examiner, 25 Nov 1960, Page 21.
Munich Premiere, The York Gazette and Daily, 20 Aug, 1960, Page 31.
Banned in Antwerp, Greenville News, 19 Nov 1960, Page 4
Beatniks, Akron Beacon-Journal, 18 Jan 1961, Page 6.
A ton of paper,
https://www.cattlv.wnyric.org/cms/lib/NY19000422/Centricity/Domain/13/GREEN%20FACTS.pdf
Red Tape, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 13 Sept 1946, Page 1.
Paperclip, Dayton Daily News, 15 Sept 1946, Page 9.
Research savings, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 04 Dec 1956, Page 2.
V-2 production, Windsor Star,
Notes:
(1) "The Luftwaffe gave important assistance to the rocket work, and von Braun himself did his compulsory military service in the late 1930s in the Luftwaffe's reserves."
“Von Braun, Dornberger, and World War II.” To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers, by CHRIS GAINOR and ALFRED WORDEN, University of Nebraska Press, LINCOLN; LONDON, 2008, pp. 70–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dfnvfh.11. Accessed 17 July 2020.
(2) "Most of the A-4 test launches that followed weren't as successful but the film of the October launch (03 Oct 1942) impressed everyone who saw it, including Hitler, who got a special showing the following July narrated by von Braun and Dornberger." (Gainor, Worden, JSTOR)
(3) "Peenemunde was bombed again in 1944...As food became scarce in Germany, the already starving prisoners were the first to feel the shortage... Although the first prisoners at Dora didn't include the Jews, thousands arrived late in the war as the SS emptied concentration camps in the east before the advancing Red Army." (Gainor, Worden, JSTOR)
Neufeld, Michael J. “Wernher Von Braun, the SS, and Concentration Camp Labor: Questions of Moral, Political, and Criminal Responsibility.” German Studies Review, vol. 25, no. 1, 2002, pp. 57–78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1433245. Accessed 17 July 2020.
Regarding the "French Professor,"
Stuhlinger, Ernst, and Michael J. Neufeld. “Wernher Von Braun and Concentration Camp Labor: An Exchange.” German Studies Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2003, pp. 121–126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1432905. Accessed 17 July 2020.
Mary Kathryn Barbier on Projects Backfire, Overcast and Operation Paperclip:
“Operation Paperclip—Antecedents and Dubious Draftees.” Spies, Lies, and Citizenship: The Hunt for Nazi Criminals, by MARY KATHRYN BARBIER and DENNIS SHOWALTER, University of Nebraska Press, 2017, pp. 211–232. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tqx72k.16. Accessed 17 July 2020.
New Orleans testimony, Johnson City (TN) Press, 06 Feb 1969, Page 19.
Dora & the "black air corps medic, John Nichols (Nicholas)-- "
Fort Lauderdale News, 18 Oct 1984, Page 14
Dora Trial record,
https://www.wikizero.com/en/Dora_Trial
Margrit von Braun,
https://www.deccanherald.com/international/world-trending/von-braun-apollo-hero-rocket-builder-for-hitler-748080.html
File on von Braun in the FBI "Vault"-- (heavily redacted, 7 documents +/- 50 pages each) on what appears application for Atomic Energy Commission background check.
https://vault.fbi.gov/Wernher%20VonBraun/Wernher%20VonBraun%20Part%201%20of%207/view
Julius Mader/The Springer File
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230361362_6
Arthur Rudolph file:
https://vault.fbi.gov/Arthur%20Rudolph%20/Arthur%20Rudolph%20Part%201%20of%201/view
Note here that Rudolph used the same rationalization as von Braun for belonging to the SS, that it was vital to stay employed and get food rations. He, as well, had the choice in 1933 to leave the country. Most of the affidavits in the vault on Rudolph's character appeared nearly verbatim as those for von Braun, even though the names were redacted. They all could only swear to his character in the United States and not his prior life in Nazi Germany.
JSTOR links:
“The Camp Mittelbau-Dora.” Commemorating Hell: The Public Memory of Mittelbau-Dora, by GRETCHEN SCHAFFT and GERHARD ZEIDLER, University of Illinois Press, 2011, pp. 19–38. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt2ttcp7.5. Accessed 18 July 2020.
“The Logic of the Camp.” Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom, by Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, University of Georgia Press, 2013, pp. 128–150. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17575f8.15. Accessed 18 July 2020.
IMMEDIATEREL//VIA/ATTN/CDR@TACNET//FM//JCL//RLT27//CLASSIFIED