NASA’s Nazi Past
Reading Time: 8 minutesThe Nazis in the Space Program, Wernher von Braun was a member of the Nazi Party, an SS officer, and one of the German scientists and engineers who got the U.S. to the moon., The Nazis in the space program.
The Apollo moon landings are often portrayed as an American achievement, but the United States had help: More than 1,500 German scientists and engineers were brought to the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War II, through a secret program known as Operation Paperclip. Some were members of the Nazi Party; some were also members of the SS—the Schutzstaffel, the party’s black-uniformed political enforcers.
Like Wernher von Braun.
In his time, von Braun was a giant. Not just a rocketry pioneer, but an all-American hero, a man who, perhaps more than any other figure, was seen as enabling the nation’s conquest of space. His Nazi past was rarely mentioned, either in the quarter century between the end of the war and the moon landing, or in the remaining decade until his death in 1977.
It’s what he did before 1945 that’s problematic. Von Braun oversaw the German army’s rocket program, culminating in the development of the world’s first guided long-range ballistic missile: the V-2. Around 3,000 V-2s were launched against London and the Belgian cities of Antwerp and Liège, killing some 9,000 people. The rockets were built at the Mittelwerk factory in central Germany, employing slave labor from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where some 20,000 prisoners died under horrific conditions.
It is too late to prosecute von Braun for possible war crimes; he’s been dead for 46 years. But as the U.S. prepares to head for the moon once again, it’s not too late to take a closer look at the dark side of the space race, and to ask what lessons there may be for the present day.
Seen in the light of postwar geopolitics, the decision by the U.S. military to recruit von Braun and other German scientists and engineers reflects a certain cold logic: With Nazi Germany in ruins, the new threat was the Soviet Union, and it was imperative that the expertise of those German scientists benefit ‘us,’ not ‘them.’
Even so, it’s hard to see von Braun’s transition from Nazi rocketeer to American hero as anything less than astonishing. After helping the U.S. Army develop its ballistic missile program, he took a position in the newly established civilian space agency, NASA, in 1960. He had been a key member of the team that launched the nation’s first satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958, and as director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, he oversaw the development of the Saturn V rockets that took American astronauts to the moon.
Von Braun ‘is the arguably the most prominent ex-Nazi to make a real career in the postwar world,’ says Michael Neufeld, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and author of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. Von Braun, he notes, ‘moved seemingly effortlessly from being the technical director of a rocket project in Germany, to the technical director of a rocket project in the United States, and from there to being the leader of a NASA center, central to landing on the moon.’ Along the way, he and his handlers ‘developed a story … that made him palatable, made him acceptable, to the American public.’
Von Braun was profiled in the New Yorker and in Collier’s magazine; he served as the science adviser for a series of educational Disney films about the promise of space flight. He was portrayed by actor Curd Jürgens in a hagiographic 1960 biopic titled I Aim at the Stars, a U.S.–German co-production. Not everyone fell for the von Braun hero worship, however, including several prominent Jewish comedians. Mort Sahl quipped that I Aim at the Stars should have been subtitled But Sometimes I Hit London. Meanwhile, the musician and satirist Tom Lehrer mocked von Braun in song.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an institution known for combating antisemitism and for hunting Nazi war criminals, is more blunt about the free pass given to von Braun and the other Germans given new lives in the U.S. after the war: ‘I don’t think any of these guys got a parking ticket,’ he says. Those brought over via Paperclip ‘were the luckiest people on Earth, living the dream. They avoided any moral or judicial responsibility for their crimes during World War II, and effectively were heroes.
‘Let’s get one thing out of the way,’ says Cooper. ‘We’re not talking about anyone who was forced to do anything. Period.’ Referring not just to von Braun but to the cohort of German scientists and engineers who helped the Reich, he adds: ‘None of these people were victims. They were perpetrators.’
Von Braun was a member of the Nazi Party and of the SS. Whether he had any ‘choice’ in these affiliations is something for historians and philosophers to ponder. (And debating who was or was not a ‘real Nazi’ seems unsavory, to say the least.) Von Braun’s decision to accept a position in the SS, for example, appears to have been the result of infighting between that organization and the German army for control of the rocket program. He is said to have worn the all-black uniform with the swastika on only a few occasions. (When a colleague expressed shock at seeing him in his SS uniform, von Braun is reported to have said there was ‘no way around it.’) But Von Braun worked on weapons that he knew would be launched against civilian targets, and the weapons were built by enslaved laborers.
For Neufeld, the key issue is von Braun’s exploitation of forced labor. His research suggests that von Braun would have seen the conditions the workers faced not only at Dora but at eight other locations. At least one wartime letter penned by von Braun himself, about a forthcoming transfer of prisoners, ‘implicates him directly in decision-making about the employment of slave labor—a potential ‘crime against humanity’—whether it was his idea or not,’ Neufeld has written.
NASA, in 2023, is very much aware of its troubled past, though it certainly does not dwell on it. The agency’s online biography of von Braun, which runs for seven paragraphs, includes two sentences about his use of slave labor and his membership in the Nazi Party and the SS. Brian Odom, NASA’s chief historian, said in an email: ‘NASA recognizes the difficult duality of both von Braun’s contributions to our space program and his association with the Nazi party. The two are unavoidably and historically intertwined.’
Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, points out that the decision to bring German scientists and engineers to the U.S. was not done indiscriminately; not all were given the green light to start a new life in America. ‘There were those inside the government, especially in the State Department, who did not want to bring them here, who thought that that was a bad idea, that they were indeed Nazis,’ Launius says. In the end, though, the Soviet threat sealed the deal. ‘The military said, ‘We’ve got to have this technology. The Russians are going to get it if we don’t get it.’ ‘ Launius, who is also a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, sums up von Braun’s career succinctly: ‘He spent most of his life building weapons of war, not building rockets to send humans to the moon.’
Not every beneficiary of Paperclip was able to shed their past. Arthur Rudolph, one of von Braun’s closest associates, was investigated for war crimes by the Justice Department in the 1980s—after von Braun’s death—following scrutiny of his involvement with slave labor in the German rocket program. In 1984 he renounced his U.S. citizenship and left the country in return for not being prosecuted, and moved to West Germany.
‘Before Rudolph, people were more willing to say, ‘OK, well, they worked for the Nazis, but now they work for us,’ ‘ says Monique Laney, a historian at Auburn University and the author of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era, which looked at the reaction of local Alabamians to the Germans who descended on Huntsville at the dawn of the Space Age. ‘Rudolph was essentially proof that there was a much darker side.’
Today Huntsville is one of the few places where von Braun’s name is still lauded. The city’s civic center is named for him, as is a planetarium and a University of Alabama in Huntsville research hall. At the Marshall Space Flight Center, however, a bust of von Braun was recently removed from public display.
Von Braun was not the only former Nazi to help get Americans to the moon. Kurt Debus, another German rocket engineer who came to the U.S. via Paperclip, oversaw the design and development of the Apollo launch facility at NASA’s Launch Operations Center in Florida (later renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center). Like von Braun, Debus was also a member of the Nazi Party, and an SS officer. His name lives on in the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Conference Facility at the Kennedy Center. (‘Attendees can draw inspiration from both the setting and the accomplishments it celebrates,’ notes the facility’s website.)
NASA has faced more recent controversies, though drawing any comparisons between them gets into tricky apples-and-oranges territory. A few years ago, concerns were raised over a nickname that the agency had given to an icy body in the Kuiper belt, in the outer solar system; it had been dubbed Ultima Thule, which turned out to have far-right connotations. (The name had been co-opted by German occultists in the early 20th century as the fabled ancestral home of so-called Aryan people, and the term remains popular in alt-right circles.) In 2019 the object was renamed Arrokoth, a Native American name meaning ‘sky’ or ‘cloud.’
A larger controversy concerns the James Webb Space Telescope, named for a former NASA administrator who served in the State Department in the 1940s and ’50s, which at that time enforced policies that discriminated against gay and lesbian government workers during the ‘Lavender Scare.’ A group of astronomers and physicists—Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Sarah Tuttle, Lucianne Walkowicz, and Brian Nord—wrote an op-ed in Scientific American urging NASA to rename the telescope. Regardless of Webb’s own beliefs, as a manager, he bore responsibility ‘for policies enacted under his leadership, including homophobic ones that were in place when he became NASA administrator,’ they wrote. NASA launched an investigation; last year, Odom, the agency’s historian, issued a report that ‘found no evidence that Webb was either a leader or proponent of firing government employees over their sexual orientation,’ as NASA said in a statement released together with the report.
Not everyone was satisfied. Even if Webb wasn’t homophobic, he doesn’t seem to have objected to the government’s harmful policy, says Alice Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Australia. ‘If you see or are aware of oppression, and you do nothing—if you don’t actively perpetrate it, but you don’t oppose it—you’re supporting it. It’s simple as that.’ (Several scientific societies, including Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society, have pledged to refer to the telescope only by its acronym, JWST.)
No human has set foot on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972—over 50 years ago. As part of its Artemis program, NASA plans to send astronauts to the moon again in 2024. As the agency prepares for the next lunar landing, now is a good time to think carefully about whom we honor, and why—and to remember that science, like all human endeavors, is a social, cultural, and political activity. ‘We can’t pretend that science and technology are value-free,’ says Laney. ‘Technology and science happen in a context, and are used in a context. They’re created by humans. And how it’s used and why we use it—these are things you should question. To me, that is the biggest takeaway from this.’
The United States, with its single-minded focus on outmaneuvering the Soviet Union, chose to ignore von Braun’s past. In deliberately overlooking his deeds, it rewarded a possible war criminal, casting a dark shadow over NASA’s greatest achievements. Are there other technological advances that we are pursuing at all costs in the 21st century? We can’t change history, but we can learn from it—and try not to make the same mistakes again.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/nasa-nazi-history-von-braun.html
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