Anyone who has visited Huntsville knows how important Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team are to the town’s residents. Even a casual observer will notice that von Braun’s iconic name and image are featured on or in multiple public institutions, such as the airport, the civic center, multiple buildings at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and on Redstone Arsenal, and least surprisingly, the United States Space & Rocket Center.
In addition to the physical reminders of von Braun and his team’s work around town, locals are showered with a steady stream of related articles and editorials in regional news outlets and occasional airings of documentaries. The team’s role in Huntsville’s identity is most evident when I mention the topic of my recent book in courses I teach for the history department at Auburn University. Students from Huntsville immediately understand references to the team and are familiar with its role in the town’s development. What is curious to me, however, is that even those who major in history usually know very little about the team members’ work and lives in Nazi Germany before they moved first to the United States and then to Alabama.
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 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.
Wernher von Braun became a household name as a visionary for space exploration in the 1950s and 1960s. His ideas seemed credible to many because of his expertise and experience. Raised and educated in Germany, he led the team that developed the V-2 rocket for the Nazi regime. With the V-2, von Braun’s team had advanced rocketry significantly—an expertise that the Allied nations wanted to take advantage of. After the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, a relatively small portion of this team was therefore brought to the United States as part of a secret military project. Von Braun and a group of about 125 engineers and technicians helped the US Army at Fort Bliss, Texas, and White Sands, New Mexico, assemble and test V-2s captured at the end of the war. They also worked on underfunded missile projects. In 1950 the army decided to consolidate its rocket development programs and moved operations to Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. There, the German and Austrian rocketeers, along with thousands of Americans who had also moved their families to the small cotton mill town, helped develop guided missiles. Under von Braun’s leadership, the arsenal developed the rocket that put the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit—a feat that restored Americans’ faith in the nation’s capabilities after the Soviet success in launching two Sputniks. In 1960 NASA built the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) on Redstone Arsenal, to which the German team was transferred with thousands of other Americans. More specialists from Germany joined the team over the years, raising the number to approximately two hundred. Soon, Pres. John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would put a human on the Moon and safely return him to Earth within the decade. Led by von Braun and members of his German team, the MSFC responded by developing the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to Earth’s natural satellite. When the astronauts returned safely from their voyage in 1969, Huntsville’s citizens joined the worldwide festivities with a celebration of their local rocket team.
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.
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.
![Picture](/uploads/2/3/9/9/23999508/ah123-vonbraun3_orig.jpg)
Remains of a V-2 rocket engine at the Mittelwerk factory. When the Peenemünde facility was targeted by Allied bombers, assembly of the V-1 and V-2 rockets was transferred to the Mittelwerk, a vast underground facility near Nordhausen that used slave labor from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Part of it has been restored and is now open as a museum. [NASA]
Regardless of whether or not the US government made the right decisions after World War II, Rudolph’s investigation by the OSI and its aftermath provide an opportunity to reflect on the intersecting histories of Germany and the United States. For me, the most interesting question was why many in Huntsville continued to vehemently support a first-generation immigrant accused of war crimes while the rest of the nation seemed more willing to accept his culpability. Outside of Huntsville, the image of the German team underwent a dramatic transformation after the accusations against Rudolph became public. New publications in the 1990s and 2000s about von Braun and his team reflect a debate over the meaning of the team’s work for the Nazi regime and the use of concentration camp labor to build the V-2s. American TV stations were fairly quiet on the subject after a damning 1987 PBS Frontline piece, but around 1995 they began airing more explicit documentaries again, which now always includes references to the use of concentration camp labor to build the rockets for Hitler’s regime. In 1990 the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC replaced its exhibit of a V-2 rocket, which had focused only on its role as a technological forerunner of space boosters. Images in the new exhibit showed Wernher von Braun briefing uniformed German officers, corpses of victims of the V-2 bombings in Antwerp, and the “slave factories in which the missile was produced.” That placed the rocket, its history, and thereby its designers in a much broader social and moral context. The Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas, went a step further in 1997 by creating an exhibit for the V-2 with an explicit focus on the Nazi regime and the use of concentration camp labor.
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.
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.
About the Author
Monique Laney is an assistant professor in the history department at Auburn University, where she teaches courses in the history of technology. Her recent book, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era (Yale University Press, 2015), received best book awards from the American Astronautical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as honorable mention for the Deep South Book Prize of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. Her current research focuses on the history of immigrants with “special skills.”