This lack of knowledge among my students alerts me to the contrast between our backgrounds. I went to school in Germany during the seventies and eighties. My schoolmates and I learned early on that Germany could not ignore its past under National Socialism and that if the country wanted to be recognized in the international community, its people had to make amends by acknowledging what had happened on German soil on our grandparents’ watch. Germans call this Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The term describes the coping, grappling, negotiating, struggling with, and relating to the Nazi past and the Holocaust. We regularly saw politicians reference the shameful past, and our teachers taught us about its different aspects in literature, history, and social science classes. If memory serves me right, the topic was even discussed in our music classes as we learned about various German composers and German musical culture.
Predictably, many of us were inspired to ask our families about our grandparents’ involvement in Hitler’s regime. And unsurprisingly, we were often either told not to ask question about that time period or provided with answers that would allow us to continue to revere our grandparents. Accordingly, many of us were told that they had been innocent bystanders who knew nothing or very little about the regime’s persecution of Jews and others who were in the social minority. Our parents had received similar responses that did little to explain how the Holocaust could have occurred if, as so many people later claimed, they were innocent. Therefore, our teachers strived to educate us as much as possible about Germany’s history from 1933 to 1945. The related slogan I remember best from those school days was “Nie Wieder!” (“Never Again!”)
I went to school in Germany because I grew up mostly with my mother, who is German. Since my father is an American from Alabama, we spent the first years of my life in Tuscaloosa, where my parents both pursued graduate degrees at the University of Alabama. My mother and I moved to Germany when I turned seven. Trained to think critically about the history of my mother’s native country at a young age, I was later naturally inclined to do the same when dealing with the place my father calls home. To me, the German rocket team in Huntsville offers a great opportunity to combine the two and to reflect critically on the history of both Germany and the United States.
Much of the history of the German rocket team, including its transition to the United States and its successes for the army and later NASA, is well documented in earlier issues of this magazine, so the following is just a brief synopsis.
This intriguing story leaves many open questions that scholars and investigative reporters have tried to answer over the past decades. Most of the questions were prompted by accusations raised against the Saturn V project manager, Arthur Rudolph, who oversaw the work of engineers and slave laborers as the production manager for the German V-2 rocket. In 1984 the US Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) announced that Rudolph had returned to Germany after signing an affidavit, according to which he “participated…in the persecution of unarmed civilians because of their race, religion, national origin, or political opinion.” Once in Germany, Rudolph renounced his US citizenship, as he had agreed to do, but also promptly denied any wrongdoing under the Nazi regime. Surprised by the events, admirers of the team, along with many of his Huntsville neighbors, friends, and former colleagues, joined him in protesting the allegations. Investigative reporters began to submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to access government records concerning the German rocketeers. They were mostly interested in learning how well the team had been vetted before its members were offered US citizenship and long-term employment with the military. Several journalists believed they had found evidence of dubious decisions, which provoked questions about the roles of the rest of the rocket team under the Nazi regime.
In the meantime, Rudolph’s supporters stressed the importance of the German team’s contributions to American rocketry. Many in Huntsville were also grateful for the Germans’ influence on the town’s prosperity and culture and believed that Rudolph, like his colleagues from Germany, deserved to be celebrated, not driven out of the country. They encouraged him to fight the accusations, collected money for a potential trial, appealed to politicians, including President Reagan, and even tried to bring Rudolph back into the country via Canada. Some saw Rudolph as the victim of overzealous bureaucrats, while others descended to using anti-Semitic language or even invoked outright Holocaust denial to dismiss Rudolph’s accusers. To many who had raised their families alongside the Germans, the accusations against Rudolph seemed simply incompatible with their experiences.
These reactions from close friends and acquaintances are understandable, but those with a little distance from the team, either by geography, lack of family connections, or age, have a chance to pursue their own investigations. Interlocutors in Alabama have an enormous opportunity to learn from this complicated past with so many individuals in their midst who recall this history. In Huntsville alone, there are family members, friends, and former colleagues of the rocket team, as well as descendants of Holocaust survivors, African Americans who experienced the Jim Crow era, and people from all over the world with various histories and inherited memories of World War II. Talking to the children of these individuals can be very enlightening as well. Most likely, those who follow this path will find different answers than I did, but at a minimum they will learn more about the society in which the atrocities committed under Hitler’s regime occurred. And hopefully, they will therefore be better equipped to recognize the signs and symptoms in their own society when they appear. That would be the best way to spread the crucial goals of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.