Watch a 5-minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBDpPyX480E
• Wernher Von Braun
From 1937 to 1945, von Braun was the technical director of the Peenemünde rocket research center, where the V-2 rocket —which devastated England—was developed. His dossier was rewritten so he didn’t appear tohave been an enthusiastic Nazi.
Von Braun worked on guided missiles for the U.S. Army and was later director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He became a celebrity in the 1950s and early 1960s, as one of Walt Disney’s experts on the “World of Tomorrow.” In 1970, he became NASA’s associate administrator.
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• Arthur Rudolph
During the war, Rudolph was operations director of the Mittelwerk factory at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camps, where 20,000 workers died from beatings, hangings, and starvation. Rudolph had been a member of the Nazi party since 1931; a 1945 military file on him said simply: “100% Nazi, dangerous type, security threat..!! Suggest internment.”
But the JIOA’s final dossier on him said there was “nothing in his records indicating that he was a war criminal or and ardent Nazi or otherwise objectionable.” Rudolph became a US citizen and later designed the Saturn 5 rocket used in the Apollo moon landings. In 1984, when his war record was finally investigated, he fled to West Germany.
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• Hermann Oberth
He is known as a father of rocketry. Oberth worked on Nazi German rocketry projects, including the V-2 rocket weapon, and in about September 1943, he was awarded the War Merit Cross 1st Class, with Swords for his “outstanding, courageous behavior … during the attack”. Oberth eventually came to work for his former student, Wernher von Braun, who was developing space rockets for NASA.
The Nazis have often been linked with teachings of the occult and accused of performing rituals to summon ancient spirits (see Heinrich Himmler & the SS) One of Oberth’s most famous quotes may give some insight into these accusations:
“We cannot take the credit for our record advancement in certain scientific fields alone; we have been helped.”
When asked by whom, he replied:
“The people of other worlds.”
- Hermann Oberth
