NASA, Nazis, and the Space Race (2025) Movie Script
1
Astronauts Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin
plant the stars and stripes of
America on the surface of the moon.
Back home on Earth,
an audience of 600 million
tune in on their televisions.
The world is united around
America's greatest achievement -
a giant leap for all mankind.
The Apollo 11 astronauts even embark
on a worldwide goodwill tour.
A narrative is constructed that
conceals a more complicated story.
This account is forged in the flames
of World War II,
and in the allies' defeat
of Nazi Germany.
The themes are,
in broadest literary terms,
forgetfulness, money, ambition.
Especially deception and lying,
this is a story that's filled
with lying by prominent people.
Using previously
classified documents,
this film looks at how America turned
a blind eye to Nazi atrocities.
As Europe smouldered,
they embarked on a huge operation
to recruit members of the Nazi Party,
whitewashing their records and
gifting them new lives in America.
These scientists would put man
on the moon,
and one in particular
would become a national hero,
only occasionally
letting the mask slip...
I believe you were forced to join
the Nazi Party, as I understand it?
No, that isn't quite right. Oh.
Um...
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
..leaving us to ask,
was the 1969 moon landing really
a giant leap for mankind
or a last victory for the Nazis?
Apollo 11 is preparing for lift-off.
The team who have worked on
the mission for the last eight years
watch on nervously at
the launch control centre in Florida.
Kennedy, of course, in 1961 had set
this bold, ambitious goal
of the US reaching the moon.
I believe that this nation should
commit itself
to achieving the goal
before this decade is out
of landing a man on the moon and
returning him safely to the earth.
After Kennedy made that speech,
he went to a park in Washington,
sat on a bench and thought,
"We have no way of doing...
"We have no knowledge about
how to do this."
He sat there telling himself,
essentially,
"What on... What the heck
are we going to do?"
And so, the Apollo mission
was dedicated to that
with resources and personnel.
As the rocket carrying Apollo 11
is launched,
the hopes of America are invested
in an unlikely group of rocketeers.
But the 1969 space mission
isn't the first time
these men have found themselves
at the epicentre of global events.
By the time the war ends, it's
quite clear to the western allies
that Nazi Germany was ahead in
a number of important scientific
and technological fields -
not least, rocketry -
and therefore, these are areas
which America, Britain, and others
looked to exploit in order to
improve their own arsenals
and their own industries.
Well, the concept at the time
among policymakers
was intellectual reparations.
When the Soviet Union
moved into Germany,
they started to remove
every piece of infrastructure
that they could ship out -
and for good reason.
The Germans had built this powerful
and in many ways
revolutionary war machine,
and there was really a race on
between the Russians on one side
and then, on the other side, the US.
The geopolitics at the time...
We go from two allies working
together to defeat Nazi Germany
to, actually,
two opposing ideologies
that are rivals in every single way.
In the midst of the race to seize
German assets and firepower,
a partially destroyed list of names
is found by a janitor
working at Bonn University.
The questions for the allies are -
"Is this list real? And if it is,
where are the men on it?"
The Osenberg List was a record
created by the Nazi Military
Research Association
detailing 15,000 German scientists
and technicians
that needed to be recalled from,
kind of, front line service
and brought back to work
on key military scientific projects
for the German army
and the German armed forces.
The biggest name of
the Osenberg List of the scientists
would have been Wernher von Braun,
who was the mastermind of
the V-2 rockets
that hailed down on London
and Antwerp and elsewhere,
and kind of the boy wonder
of their rocket programme.
He was charismatic, handsome,
he was a perfect Aryan specimen,
which meant everything
in that bureaucracy.
The Osenberg List finds itself
in the hands of
the American government,
and they realise that
what they need to do
is investigate this list.
So, they task major Robert B Staver
as the man who's going to do
the intelligence work,
because, of course,
what they need to determine is -
"How legitimate is this list?"
Actually, "Who's still alive
who's on this list?"
Army Major Robert Staver arrives in
the Mittelwerk area
where the V-2 had been mass-produced
in late April of 1945.
So, he goes in to try to scout out
documents and equipment
and personnel.
Staver's one to see the value very
early on in these scientific minds.
He has a Stanford degree
in engineering
and he's very mindful of the kind of
broader geostrategic conversations
that are going on.
He gets permission from
his superiors - his army superiors -
who are in Paris at that point,
to get a truck,
get all these, like,
tonnes and tonnes of documents
out of a cave
where they've been hidden.
And then he says,
"By the way, I think we should
bring over 100 of them, too,
"to work for the US."
He ran into a lot of resistance
from his immediate colleagues
and his immediate boss,
who said, "That's absurd,
we're never going to..."
You know, "We're never going to
bring Nazis over."
Despite this opposition,
Staver's request is granted,
but the man on the Osenberg List
he really wants
has already fled Germany.
As the end of the war approached,
almost every German person
was thinking
which side was it better to
surrender to
or which side did you want to end
up in the occupied territory of.
And, for the vast majority of them,
it would've been the western
allies, particularly the USA.
And the German scientists
were no exception to this.
The thinking for many
in Nazi Germany -
in the high command, so to speak,
is what to do with the
scientific talent in Nazi Germany.
Is it to "liquidate" the scientific
talent of Nazi Germany?
A euphemism for killing.
Von Braun and Walter Dornberger -
the German general who was really
the head of the rocket programme -
they and several
other prominent V-2 figures
ran for their lives,
essentially, to Bavaria,
and holed up in a ski lodge there.
And then, when the American army
got close,
Wernher von Braun sent his brother
Magnus down the hill on a bike.
He encounters this
young American GI who speaks German,
Fred Schneikert from Wisconsin,
and he says to him, "I'm the brother
of the inventor of the V-2."
And Fred supposedly turned to
one of his colleagues and says,
"I've got a nut here."
They realised what they had.
The question of
who was exploiting whom
is one of the wonderful mysteries
of this story.
There was definitely a mutual
benefit for both the Americans
and the German scientists.
The War Department wanted their
scientific and technical expertise
to try and recreate
what they had done in Germany,
and the Nazi scientists wanted to
avoid any involvement
in war atrocity prosecutions,
and also,
in the case of many of them,
be able to continue
their scientific work.
I mean, Von Braun was looking
for his next employer, basically.
An example of how unworried
Von Braun was,
was that a reporter for the army
newspaper came within a day or two
and said that
Von Braun conducted himself
more like a celebrity
than a prisoner.
Von Braun was interrogated,
they all were.
There was
a standard denazification process
that they were subjected to -
very soft questioning -
and the records of
their interrogation
is that the Americans were just...
"Wow, golly, gee! You mean you
could really do that?"
It's almost that bad.
Wernher von Braun, I think,
is very aware
of making sure that he is following
a very particular narrative,
and so it's very much a "I was
following orders" type of narrative.
And so it's really interesting,
because actually,
he gives an interview to the press
quite soon after his surrender.
I myself and everybody you see here
have decided to go west,
and I think our decision was not one
of expediency, but a moral decision.
We knew that we had created
a new means of warfare,
and the question as to what
nation...to what victorious nation
we are willing to entrust
this brainchild of ours
was a moral decision
more than anything else.
We want to spare...see the world
spare another conflict
such as Germany
had just been through...
..and we felt that only by
surrendering such a weapon
to people who are guided
by the Bible
could such an assurance
to the world be best secured.
He's, kind of,
almost acknowledging,
"Look, I know that I made
V-2 rockets that killed civilians,"
but ultimately, what he's saying is,
"That's already happened.
"I have the knowledge,
it's too late,
"but at least, isn't it better that
I'm safely in your hands
"in the west?"
He's playing
a very interesting game,
and he toes that line
quite consistently.
With Wernher von Braun and his
associates in military custody,
a debate rages between
the State Department
and the War Department about what
to do with these Nazi scientists.
There was some fairly intense
debate within the US government.
The State Department,
as they saw this coming, was...
Officials there
were quite opposed to this.
They said, "If this ever gets out,
"just think how this is
going to look.
"The optics of this are horrible,"
basically.
And one of
the War Department advocates
said they needed
the State Department to stop.
"Stop beating a dead Nazi"
was a quote from them.
Once again,
any opposition is dismissed,
and plans for a top-secret project
take shape.
This will bring Nazi scientists
to America
for a temporary custodianship,
utilising their superior knowledge
of ballistic missiles.
The operation will be given
the code name "Paperclip."
Operation Paperclip was
a major American programme
to bring German scientists,
technicians
and engineers to the USA,
to put them to work on scientific
and technological projects
principally related to the military,
but not exclusively so.
In September of 1945,
the inventor of Germany's deadly
V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun,
arrives in Texas.
He and his colleagues will stay
for a fixed period
and help the US develop missiles.
In Washington DC,
Operational Paperclip
is officially sanctioned
by President Harry S Truman,
but there are certain directives.
The biggest hurdle for Paperclip
staff, if you will, for recruiters,
is that Truman says that ardent
Nazis and, kind of,
Nazis of
the highest criminal classes
could not be recruited
and taken into the United States
under the terms of Paperclip.
The American intelligence agencies,
I would say they take
that information,
and they see it
as a bit of an issue
because, actually, there are
a lot of these men, like...
Like Wernher von Braun was involved
in the SS, for example.
The American recruitment of
German scientists and technicians
was a morally problematic endeavour.
Some of these men had certainly
been closely affiliated
with the Nazi Party and the SS.
But the climate of
the early Cold War -
where everything was seen
in the light
of how best could America get
an advantage over
or ultimately beat
the Soviet Union -
meant that a lot of those
moral concerns were ignored
or swept under the rug.
Well, the key word there
is "ignored."
Those directives, I don't think,
were ever withdrawn,
they were simply ignored -
by the army, especially.
In some cases, Nazi scientists who
have proved themselves desirable
to the American military
are even given the opportunity
to alter their own records.
They were able to qualify for
Paperclip by erasing their histories.
Any involvement in
war crime atrocities
was essentially purged from
their records
and for purposes of the programme,
they became Nazis in name only.
Maybe they were members of
the Nazi Party,
but, on paper,
they were never loyal Nazis,
they had no relationship
with Hitler,
they weren't involved in
war crimes -
whether it was slave labour
or medical experimentation
on prisoners, or anything like that.
The American press become aware
of the arrival
of hundreds of Nazi scientists
in the Deep South in late 1946.
The War Department
challenges these reports,
as Paperclip has to weather
its first storm of bad publicity.
The War Department, the agency that
administered Paperclip
insisted to the press that
they ruled out Nazis,
and that was just a bald-faced lie.
And columnists would sometimes
discover the Nazis -
you know, the bad Nazis
who had come over -
and then they would often
investigate the columnist.
So that was the level of pushback
that was going on.
The first stories about Paperclip
scientists start to trickle out
in the Washington Post
and some other media outlets,
and it's picked up by
some very notable people -
people like Eleanor Roosevelt.
She strongly opposes it
and brings in other notable thinkers
like Albert Einstein -
Albert Einstein, who can really
speak to the conditions
of the German scientific community,
the choices that had to be made,
the moral dilemmas
presented to them.
There were a small number of cases
where the US was forced to backtrack
because of outside pressure
disclosing what a few of these men
had done.
One case was a Nazi doctor
by the name of Walter Schreiber,
and there was a prominent
newspaper columnist at that time,
Drew Pearson, who wrote a column
disclosing what he had been
involved in in the war,
and horrible Nazi experimentation -
including exposing Polish girls
to gangrene
to see what the response would be
and how they would survive
and whether they would survive.
This was just one of a whole number
of horrible things
that they would do to see
what their own pilots,
German pilots in the Luftwaffe,
could withstand.
The military defended him at first
and tried to, sort of,
say how important he was.
But then the pressure built,
and finally,
they just sent him down
to Argentina,
and there was no attempt to
prosecute him
or hold him accountable.
Operatives working on Paperclip
continued to recruit from Germany
well into the 1950s.
Altogether, the programme relocates
over 1,600 Nazi scientists,
technicians, engineers
and other professionals to the US.
America knows they are now in
an arms race with The Soviet Union,
and losing is not an option.
The President has announced
the dropping
of an atomic explosive
within Russia.
Now we are faced with
a very grave problem
and we must alert the whole world
to the dangers of an unrestricted
atomic armaments race.
There's any kind of number
of incidences
where the Soviets are seen to be
more and more threatening.
The most dramatic is the 1949 test
of the Soviet bomb.
American, kind of, thinkers
and engineers and politicians
had variously estimated that
it would be five to 20 years
before the Soviets got the bomb,
and so that sets the
kind of...not just the recruitment,
but the retention efforts
for Operation Paperclip.
For Wernher von Braun
and his colleagues in the south,
so keen are the Americans to retain
knowledge in this emerging Cold War
that a way is found to legitimise
their presence in the US.
The way they finally get visas
is that,
because you have to have a point of
immigration...
So, they're in Texas,
on the Mexican border,
so they take them over the border
to Juarez,
and the American consul
in Juarez stamps them in,
so that's when they finally have
official entry into the US.
In 1950, they were moved to
Huntsville, Alabama -
so, the heart of
the segregated south.
Just a kind of backwater.
And that's when they started
building the Redstone Rocket,
which was their first dedicated
ballistic missile in the US.
Based on German V-2 technology,
the Redstone is designed
to carry a high explosive warhead.
A bureaucratic fight with the US
Airforce means von Braun and his team
have to limit the range of
their rockets,
but this will change
almost overnight.
REPORT: There are dates that
schoolchildren in the United States
are required to memorise -
like October 12th 1492,
when Columbus discovered America.
Now, there was a new date for
Russian youngsters to remember -
October 4th 1957,
when Sputnik, the first
earth satellite, was launched.
The new moon circled the globe
every 96 minutes.
In the history of the earth,
no other event had captured
the imagination of so many people
as this first step into space.
In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked
America and the world
with two major
technological breakthroughs.
Firstly, they launched Sputnik 1,
the world's first
artificial satellite, into orbit.
And secondly,
they revealed the first
intercontinental ballistic missile
that, in theory at least, meant that
the USA was now in striking distance
of the Soviet Union.
Both of these developments
were met with shock and horror
by the American population,
who felt the idea of a Russian spy
satellite orbiting overhead
and watching them
particularly concerning.
Well, I think that it...
You know, Russia's getting into
space really bothers me,
because it's making the Cold War
between the Russians
and United States more intense.
What do you think this is going to
be...do to our prestige?
I don't think it's going to
enhance it any at this time,
but I imagine we will be able to
catch up
and maybe even surpass them
on the way.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
It's frightening.
We should find out what they are
doing that we're not doing,
and we should do something about it
very quickly.
Sputnik was a profound change.
This archenemy,
this alien ideology
was farther ahead.
In Huntsville, Alabama,
one man has been making the case
for space exploration for years.
Being the inventor of
the Nazi V-2 rocket
and recruited as part of
a top-secret military programme
could be problematic.
But, thankfully for Wernher von Braun
and his team,
a home-grown American icon
has already lent a hand.
PIG SQUEALS
My book about Von Braun,
Dark Side Of The Moon,
was published in 2009.
I worked on that book for 15 years.
Astronomers tell us that the Earth
we live on
and the Moon we see in the sky
are but tiny specks
in a tremendous universe
that contains billions upon
billions of stars and other worlds.
But I'm old enough that,
in the 1950s,
I was one of the children
glued to American TV screens
watching the Disney programme
where Von Braun was really first
presented to a mass audience.
And, you know,
I thought he was wonderful,
and certainly,
his message was inspiring,
so maybe that's the starting point.
Here to reveal a plan
for a trip round the moon,
Dr Wernher von Braun.
When the day arrives
for construction to begin,
the thousands of parts for
the space station
will be transported to the orbit
via our multi-stage rockets.
We merely replace
the winged passenger section
with a simple cargo-carrying nose.
So, Wernher von Braun is there,
he's got his, you know, various
props and things like that,
and he takes the public through how
he's going to do it.
Von Braun was trying his best to
get a satellite into space.
He was specifically overruled by
The Pentagon
that they would not
allow him to do this.
He says, "It will be a disaster
for the US
"if the Soviets get
a satellite up ahead of us."
And the Soviets launched Sputnik
as part of
this international geophysical year.
Von Braun writes to his superiors
and says,
"We could have had a man in space or
a satellite in space two years ago.
"Give me 60 days
and I'll get it done."
There's some pushback.
They say, "Take 90 days."
Von Braun said,
"Fine, but I meant 60 days."
But that is when his remit
really changes.
Operation Paperclip originally,
in terms of what they were
focusing on,
they were focusing on missiles,
on rockets,
but also on different types
of warfare as well -
chemical warfare, nuclear warfare,
for example.
But what then happens is there's
now a space exploration element
that is added, and so we've got
a slight pivot now.
But of course,
there's a huge crossover,
because the technology - which a lot
of people don't realise, I think -
that the technology
within the arms race
overlaps hugely with technology
necessary for the space race.
And I would say in
that kind of Venn diagram,
Wernher von Braun
is at the centre of that.
And so Sputnik was on October 4th,
and Von Braun answers Sputnik with
a satellite of our very own
on January 31st of 1958,
so he got it up in a few months.
REPORT: Before the news conference,
The Big Picture camera
and Sergeant Stuart Queen drew
Dr von Braun aside
for a special interview.
Dr von Braun, I wonder if you
could tell our Big Picture viewers
just what did transpire
during those 84 days?
Well, those were a rather hectic
84 days, I can assure you of that.
A project like firing a satellite
into orbit is only possible
if there's splendid teamwork
all the way through.
Once Von Braun gets Explorer up,
the space race is on.
In 1960,
Wernher von Braun and his team
are transferred to
the newly-formed NASA,
building rockets at the Marshall
Space Flight Centre in Huntsville.
He has become the voice of
space exploration.
Wernher von Braun really became
a very public and revered figure,
not just within
the US military establishment,
but well beyond that.
He wrote books, a comic book about
going to Mars,
he was this very debonair figure
who....
A sort of a renaissance man -
he played classical piano,
he was a scuba diver,
he was sort of
a dashing, well-dressed man,
and he really made himself into
a figure of some renown.
He really is, in a sense,
the first space celebrity.
Even before the astronauts who we
all come to know and love,
before the Neil Armstrongs and the
Buzz Aldrins and the Shepards,
Von Braun is
this first space celebrity.
Wernher von Braun is even
the subject of a biopic
portraying him as a man of peace
and remorse.
Things were certainly simpler
in the old days,
when I used to work here.
I was happy then.
Of course you were.
All you wanted to do then was to
reach the moon.
And all I did was to smash up
other people's greenhouses.
I didn't know then that I would
become an addict.
An addict?
Yes.
This...
..obsession of mine.
Space.
The depiction of Von Braun
as a romantic explorer
is one that he and NASA continued
to cultivate.
Von Braun was really great
at selling the spiritual aspect of
this project,
to really catch people's, sort of,
sense of adventure
and this kind of exalted sense
of achievement.
The USA emerges after the
Second World War as a superpower,
and it starts to conceive of itself
as the leading country
for all humanity.
So, when America's doing something,
it's doing it not just
for Americans,
but for the world at large,
or at least for the free world.
And Wernher von Braun is very
clever at recognising this shift,
recognising the kind of language
that's being used for that.
Humanity's future being beyond
the earth and into space -
he knows he's going to find
an audience for that
among the American people.
He very much wants to emphasise
that part of his story,
which is that he's looking forward
and is going to be one of the people
that's responsible
for pushing the human experience
further and further,
and he tries to do whatever he can
to acknowledge what's happened
in the past,
but he downplays it and wants to
shift the conversation
as quickly as possible to what he
can do FOR us in the future.
With the successful firing of
the Saturn,
a gigantic stride has been taken
in the exploration of space.
Many times, I've been asked why
we are exploring beyond our earth.
I will give you
a few of the many valid reasons.
First of all, of course,
is knowledge of the Earth,
our solar system, and the universe.
Throughout history,
new knowledge has always improved
the lot of the human race.
Achievement of our major goal of
landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to Earth
within this decade
will be of inestimable value.
We have been given the scientific
knowledge, the technical ability,
and the materials to pursue
the exploration of the universe.
To ignore these great resources
would be a corruption of
a God-given ability.
Kennedy was completely pragmatic
about going into space.
He really wasn't interested in it.
Leading up to his famous
May 25th 1961 speech
that we were going to put a man
on the moon
before this decade is out, was...
Two things had happened
that spring -
one was that he had just taken over
the presidency
and inherited a really idiotic
CIA plot from Eisenhower
which was an invasion of Cuba,
and the second one was
the Soviets put up the first man
in space, Yuri Gagarin.
We now know it as a "moonshot,"
right? "Kennedy's moonshot."
But before Kennedy's moonshot,
Kennedy was looking for
the language of a moonshot,
and it's Von Braun who has
this reservoir,
this history of selling space -
selling the optimism of space,
selling the hope of space,
selling the frontier of space.
He has that at the ready,
and he gives that to Kennedy.
Even though I realise that this is,
in some measure,
an act of faith and vision -
for we do not now know
what benefits await us -
but if I were to say,
my fellow citizens,
that we shall send to the moon -
240,000 miles away from
the control station in Houston -
a giant rocket more than
300 feet tall -
the length of this football field -
to an unknown celestial body,
and this will be done in the decade
of the '60s.
One of the few voices to speak out
in opposition to Wernher von Braun
and his growing celebrity is
a daring satirist named Tom Lehrer.
Well, speaking of bombs,
what is it that makes America
the world's greatest nuclear power?
And what is it that will make it
possible for us
to spend 20,000 million dollars of
our taxpayers' money
to put some idiot on the moon?
AUDIENCE CHUCKLE
Well, it was the great,
enormous superiority
of American technology, of course,
as provided by
our great American scientists
such as Dr Wernher von Braun.
AUDIENCE CHUCKLES
There is some criticism of
Wernher von Braun and his team
in the years leading up to
the moon landing.
Very famously, there's a song by
the satirist Tom Lehrer,
where he pokes fun at the fact
that Von Braun seems to have
a very flexible allegiance -
shifting from Germany to the USA -
and even hinting that,
in the future,
he might end up working for China
instead.
# Gather 'round while I sing you of
Wernher von Braun
# A man whose allegiance
is ruled by expedience
# Call him a Nazi,
he won't even frown
# "Nazi, Schmazi"
says Wernher von Braun... #
Paperclip finally was not a secret.
Everybody knew these scientists
were around.
The confection of who they were
and why they were in America
was so perfect, so pervasive,
that anyone who would have
questioned it vigorously,
their patriotism would have
been questioned.
In January 1969,
Wernher von Braun is called to give
evidence at a trial in West Germany.
Three SS guards are accused of
hanging 70 prisoners
while posted at a concentration camp
called Mittelbau-Dora,
connected to the V-2 rocket factory.
Von Braun denies any awareness of -
or involvement in - war crimes.
The US grudgingly allowed Von Braun
to be deposed,
but only in the US, in New Orleans,
right before - or maybe a month or
two before - the moon landing.
So, you have this ironic sequence
of - here he is,
his past being thrown in his face
over his involvement
in Nazi war crimes,
and then, immediately afterwards,
the biggest achievement of his life,
which was the US
landing on the moon.
Well?
I'm so excited I don't know what
to say. It's so beautiful.
Real good, real good.
It's a triumph for the United States
and it will show the Russians
that we got the know-how.
In the years after the moon landing,
Wernher von Braun
really secures his position.
He really is a kind of
unimpeachable American figurehead.
AUDIENCE APPLAUSE
My first guest tonight
is the father of the rocket.
He was in charge of developing
rockets for the Germans during...
..before and during
the Second World War.
This seems so strange when we
remember the Second World War.
And now, through a quirk of history,
he is in charge of developing
our space programme.
One of those ironic things.
Will you welcome please
the legendary Dr Wernher von Braun?
AUDIENCE APPLAUSE
Dick Cavett is known as a really
intelligent, candid interviewer.
And Dick Cavett kind of
takes the bait,
and he gets distracted, almost,
by Wernher von Braun's passion
for this kind of space story.
I believe you were forced to join
the Nazi party,
as I understand it...?
No, that isn't quite right. Oh.
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
The situation was such
that I just figured,
as long as I'm working on rockets
here,
I really can't afford not to use
any help I can get.
I needed every bit of help. Mm-hm.
And so, to turn this down
would have been tantamount to say
"I give up working in this field,"
which, as I said a little earlier...
..would have meant pretty close to
defecting the cause in times of war.
Mm-hm. Which I decided was not
the thing to do.
Well, Von Braun was
an American celebrity.
You know, he was on
the Dick Cavett Show.
In Alabama especially, he was,
which is where he had built his base
with many of the Nazi scientists,
he was a revered figure.
CHEERING
It was almost exactly 20 years
that I first came to Huntsville.
Once you received us newcomers
with perhaps some amused tolerance -
we were fully aware of that -
as "those crackpot scientists
who want to go the moon,"
but after you found out that there
was at least some seriousness in us,
you soon became
our most loyal supporters,
and so all this became possible.
He was a frequent guest
at the Pentagon and the White House,
among senior politicians
and presidents.
Despite their fame,
the men who put man on the moon
can't outrun their Nazi pasts.
As documents are declassified
and victims speak out,
the secretive world of
Operation Paperclip begins to emerge.
The links between
Paperclip scientists and engineers
and the crimes of the Third Reich
did not become concretised
until the 1980s,
mostly because archival evidence
was opened up.
In 1982, following work by
investigative reporters,
the Justice Department sets up
a dedicated unit
to locate war criminals
residing in the US.
The so-called Nazi hunters
focused their attention
on a man named Arthur Rudolph.
Arthur Rudolph was a German
rocket scientist who came over
to the USA at around
the same time as Wernher von Braun
and worked quite closely with him,
particularly on missile development
but later on the space programme
as well.
Arthur Rudolph.
APPLAUSE
In the 1980s,
so after Wernher von Braun had died,
some unpleasant truths come to light
around Arthur Rudolph's service
during the Nazi regime.
Now retired and living in
San Jose, California,
Rudolph is questioned by
three Justice Department officials.
Rudolph, it becomes fairly apparent
in 1982 and 1983,
that he was indeed an ardent Nazi,
and that he did oversee
human suffering and death.
Whether or not he directed it
is debated at the time,
but he does oversee human suffering
and death,
so the deal is,
"Rudolph, go back to Germany.
"We're stripping you
of your American citizenship.
"You are no longer our German."
Arthur Rudolph becomes one of
the first Paperclip recruits
to be removed from America
since Walter Schreiber in 1952.
I sometimes wonder whether
Von Braun's sheer charisma
and success would have shielded
Rudolph from them,
from this, if he had been alive,
because I think if they got Rudolph,
they would be forced
to go after Von Braun.
The line of inquiry pursued by
the Nazi Hunters
is a familiar one
to followers of Operation Paperclip.
The underground V-2 rocket factory
and its connected
concentration camp, Mittelbau-Dora.
It consisted of twin tunnels
that had been there
for many years,
which were utterly primitive.
A camp was established by the SS
which bureaucratically was in charge
of utilising slave labourers.
So many of the labourers were dying
that they built crematoria there.
You wouldn't want to be called upon
to rank those human catastrophes
during that era,
but this was...this was
a terrible one.
Between 1943 and 1945,
60,000 prisoners were brought
to Mittelbau by the Nazis.
Even a conservative estimate
puts the number who did not survive
at 20,000.
As the man in charge of production
of the V-2,
Arthur Rudolph was unable to
convince investigators
that he didn't know about
the scale of the suffering -
a claim that had
been made successfully
throughout the life
of Wernher von Braun.
The great lie that he told was that,
yes, he had visited
the production facility,
but he had never been in the camp.
I remember vividly
seeing it for the first time
and thinking, my God,
these are the same place.
You can't say you were in one
and not the other.
He was intimately familiar with the
operation there and the conditions.
80 years on,
where does this leave
the legacy of Operation Paperclip,
and the man most central to the 1969
moon landing, Wernher von Braun?
There have been attempts to get
a better understanding of Von Braun,
and each new detail seems
to further cloud the picture
of what we thought we knew of
Von Braun from say 1933 to 1945.
Part of this is because there
has been a kind of dedicated
corps of memorialists
of Von Braun who are attached
to what you might call
the Huntsville School of Aerospace,
and see Von Braun's legacy
and the advancement of that legacy
as critical to the continued
advancement of space exploration.
But then you have a competing school
who want never to forget the horrors
of Nazi Germany
and want never to forget
the Holocaust,
and understand how that memory
is essential
to the continued healthy functioning
of American society
and American democracy
in the western world.
You know, I looked very deeply
at Von Braun's history for my book,
as have some others, but it still
remains sort of a mystery
to most people,
or a complete unknown.
I was actually just talking to
a retired scientist
who worked in Huntsville for years
and years in America
and then he seemed sort of astounded
to know what Wernher von Braun
had done during the war.
So, his accolades overshadowed
his involvement with the Nazis.
Alongside his considerable
scientific achievements,
perhaps Wernher von Braun's greatest
accomplishment was his ability
to whitewash his own reputation,
transforming himself from
a Nazi military scientist
who played a key role in the German
war effort in the Second World War,
to an American hero who pioneered
space flight
and helped land
an American astronaut on the moon.
I think it's actually really useful
to think about Wernher von Braun
as a salesman.
Not only did he sell his vision,
but he sold himself as well.
I do think that he was very aware
that,
"If I make myself a household name,"
which I would argue that
in lots of ways,
in the '50s and '60s, he was,
I think he was also doing that
to ensure that they couldn't just,
if something came out about him,
they couldn't just hide him away
in South America.
So, why has he sort of avoided
the stain of the Third Reich?
You know, I think that everybody
needs a good Nazi
and it may be because
we want to think that
if we were put in that position,
that we would be able
to transcend the evil,
and so Von Braun was
the good Nazi genius in a way.
There were times
when he let the public see this,
this sort of mercenary side of him.
There is an interview that he did
about six years
after he came to America
with The New Yorker
where he spoke almost wistfully
about the use of slave labour
in Germany,
and how successful they were
in using that to build rockets.
He said that, quote,
"Working in a dictatorship
can have its advantages
"if the regime is behind you.
"I'm convinced that the man
in charge of Stalin's atom bomb
"just has to press a button
and he'll be supplied with
"a whole concentration camp
full of labour."
Von Braun cannot be protected
at this point.
We know all this stuff by now.
He's a condemned man.
If he survives as a hero for
some people, it's out of ignorance.
And celebrating 50 years
of the Von Braun Center,
the entertainment hub
and the heart of Huntsville,
has brought the community together
for decades.
Yes, it does, Rob.
The Von Braun Center's
executive director tells me
that this building here, it has so
much life and legacy behind it.
He's seen the city grow around it
and he expects it to keep boosting
the rocket city's economy.
# Don't say that he's hypocritical
# Say rather that he's apolitical
GERMAN ACCENT: # "Once the rockets
are up,
# "Who cares where they come down?
# "That's not my department,"
says Wernher von Braun. #
I think we have to remember that
the moon landing happened
very specifically
in the context of the Cold War,
but also, there is such a crossover
between the technology
of weaponry, the technology of arms,
and that is the technology that was
harnessed by Wernher von Braun
in order for there to be humans
safely on the moon,
and Operation Paperclip
was central to that,
and it all starts with
a ripped-up list
found in a toilet
in Bonn University.
The US military, in bringing
1,600 of these Nazi scientists,
to America after the war was clearly
making a deal with the devil,
a Faustian bargain,
where they are willing
to overlook and even whitewash
what they had done in Germany,
often being directly involved in
horrible, horrible Nazi atrocities,
because they saw them as
so valuable
in terms of
their scientific brainpower.
"That's one small step for man...
"..one giant leap for mankind."
The image of Neil Armstrong planting
an American flag on the moon
is one of the most enduring
of the modern age.
It is a sign of American triumph
and also of humanity's
technological potential,
but there is a dark side
behind that image,
which links to warfare,
to the development of
intercontinental ballistic missiles,
the shadow of which
we still live under today,
and it's also a story
which can be traced
all the way back to
the Second World War,
to the awful conditions in which
concentration camp inmates worked
in order to produce
these weapons of war.
So, when we think about
the moon landing
as this moment of human greatness,
we should also remember that
there's a much darker side
to be explored behind it.
Astronauts Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin
plant the stars and stripes of
America on the surface of the moon.
Back home on Earth,
an audience of 600 million
tune in on their televisions.
The world is united around
America's greatest achievement -
a giant leap for all mankind.
The Apollo 11 astronauts even embark
on a worldwide goodwill tour.
A narrative is constructed that
conceals a more complicated story.
This account is forged in the flames
of World War II,
and in the allies' defeat
of Nazi Germany.
The themes are,
in broadest literary terms,
forgetfulness, money, ambition.
Especially deception and lying,
this is a story that's filled
with lying by prominent people.
Using previously
classified documents,
this film looks at how America turned
a blind eye to Nazi atrocities.
As Europe smouldered,
they embarked on a huge operation
to recruit members of the Nazi Party,
whitewashing their records and
gifting them new lives in America.
These scientists would put man
on the moon,
and one in particular
would become a national hero,
only occasionally
letting the mask slip...
I believe you were forced to join
the Nazi Party, as I understand it?
No, that isn't quite right. Oh.
Um...
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
..leaving us to ask,
was the 1969 moon landing really
a giant leap for mankind
or a last victory for the Nazis?
Apollo 11 is preparing for lift-off.
The team who have worked on
the mission for the last eight years
watch on nervously at
the launch control centre in Florida.
Kennedy, of course, in 1961 had set
this bold, ambitious goal
of the US reaching the moon.
I believe that this nation should
commit itself
to achieving the goal
before this decade is out
of landing a man on the moon and
returning him safely to the earth.
After Kennedy made that speech,
he went to a park in Washington,
sat on a bench and thought,
"We have no way of doing...
"We have no knowledge about
how to do this."
He sat there telling himself,
essentially,
"What on... What the heck
are we going to do?"
And so, the Apollo mission
was dedicated to that
with resources and personnel.
As the rocket carrying Apollo 11
is launched,
the hopes of America are invested
in an unlikely group of rocketeers.
But the 1969 space mission
isn't the first time
these men have found themselves
at the epicentre of global events.
By the time the war ends, it's
quite clear to the western allies
that Nazi Germany was ahead in
a number of important scientific
and technological fields -
not least, rocketry -
and therefore, these are areas
which America, Britain, and others
looked to exploit in order to
improve their own arsenals
and their own industries.
Well, the concept at the time
among policymakers
was intellectual reparations.
When the Soviet Union
moved into Germany,
they started to remove
every piece of infrastructure
that they could ship out -
and for good reason.
The Germans had built this powerful
and in many ways
revolutionary war machine,
and there was really a race on
between the Russians on one side
and then, on the other side, the US.
The geopolitics at the time...
We go from two allies working
together to defeat Nazi Germany
to, actually,
two opposing ideologies
that are rivals in every single way.
In the midst of the race to seize
German assets and firepower,
a partially destroyed list of names
is found by a janitor
working at Bonn University.
The questions for the allies are -
"Is this list real? And if it is,
where are the men on it?"
The Osenberg List was a record
created by the Nazi Military
Research Association
detailing 15,000 German scientists
and technicians
that needed to be recalled from,
kind of, front line service
and brought back to work
on key military scientific projects
for the German army
and the German armed forces.
The biggest name of
the Osenberg List of the scientists
would have been Wernher von Braun,
who was the mastermind of
the V-2 rockets
that hailed down on London
and Antwerp and elsewhere,
and kind of the boy wonder
of their rocket programme.
He was charismatic, handsome,
he was a perfect Aryan specimen,
which meant everything
in that bureaucracy.
The Osenberg List finds itself
in the hands of
the American government,
and they realise that
what they need to do
is investigate this list.
So, they task major Robert B Staver
as the man who's going to do
the intelligence work,
because, of course,
what they need to determine is -
"How legitimate is this list?"
Actually, "Who's still alive
who's on this list?"
Army Major Robert Staver arrives in
the Mittelwerk area
where the V-2 had been mass-produced
in late April of 1945.
So, he goes in to try to scout out
documents and equipment
and personnel.
Staver's one to see the value very
early on in these scientific minds.
He has a Stanford degree
in engineering
and he's very mindful of the kind of
broader geostrategic conversations
that are going on.
He gets permission from
his superiors - his army superiors -
who are in Paris at that point,
to get a truck,
get all these, like,
tonnes and tonnes of documents
out of a cave
where they've been hidden.
And then he says,
"By the way, I think we should
bring over 100 of them, too,
"to work for the US."
He ran into a lot of resistance
from his immediate colleagues
and his immediate boss,
who said, "That's absurd,
we're never going to..."
You know, "We're never going to
bring Nazis over."
Despite this opposition,
Staver's request is granted,
but the man on the Osenberg List
he really wants
has already fled Germany.
As the end of the war approached,
almost every German person
was thinking
which side was it better to
surrender to
or which side did you want to end
up in the occupied territory of.
And, for the vast majority of them,
it would've been the western
allies, particularly the USA.
And the German scientists
were no exception to this.
The thinking for many
in Nazi Germany -
in the high command, so to speak,
is what to do with the
scientific talent in Nazi Germany.
Is it to "liquidate" the scientific
talent of Nazi Germany?
A euphemism for killing.
Von Braun and Walter Dornberger -
the German general who was really
the head of the rocket programme -
they and several
other prominent V-2 figures
ran for their lives,
essentially, to Bavaria,
and holed up in a ski lodge there.
And then, when the American army
got close,
Wernher von Braun sent his brother
Magnus down the hill on a bike.
He encounters this
young American GI who speaks German,
Fred Schneikert from Wisconsin,
and he says to him, "I'm the brother
of the inventor of the V-2."
And Fred supposedly turned to
one of his colleagues and says,
"I've got a nut here."
They realised what they had.
The question of
who was exploiting whom
is one of the wonderful mysteries
of this story.
There was definitely a mutual
benefit for both the Americans
and the German scientists.
The War Department wanted their
scientific and technical expertise
to try and recreate
what they had done in Germany,
and the Nazi scientists wanted to
avoid any involvement
in war atrocity prosecutions,
and also,
in the case of many of them,
be able to continue
their scientific work.
I mean, Von Braun was looking
for his next employer, basically.
An example of how unworried
Von Braun was,
was that a reporter for the army
newspaper came within a day or two
and said that
Von Braun conducted himself
more like a celebrity
than a prisoner.
Von Braun was interrogated,
they all were.
There was
a standard denazification process
that they were subjected to -
very soft questioning -
and the records of
their interrogation
is that the Americans were just...
"Wow, golly, gee! You mean you
could really do that?"
It's almost that bad.
Wernher von Braun, I think,
is very aware
of making sure that he is following
a very particular narrative,
and so it's very much a "I was
following orders" type of narrative.
And so it's really interesting,
because actually,
he gives an interview to the press
quite soon after his surrender.
I myself and everybody you see here
have decided to go west,
and I think our decision was not one
of expediency, but a moral decision.
We knew that we had created
a new means of warfare,
and the question as to what
nation...to what victorious nation
we are willing to entrust
this brainchild of ours
was a moral decision
more than anything else.
We want to spare...see the world
spare another conflict
such as Germany
had just been through...
..and we felt that only by
surrendering such a weapon
to people who are guided
by the Bible
could such an assurance
to the world be best secured.
He's, kind of,
almost acknowledging,
"Look, I know that I made
V-2 rockets that killed civilians,"
but ultimately, what he's saying is,
"That's already happened.
"I have the knowledge,
it's too late,
"but at least, isn't it better that
I'm safely in your hands
"in the west?"
He's playing
a very interesting game,
and he toes that line
quite consistently.
With Wernher von Braun and his
associates in military custody,
a debate rages between
the State Department
and the War Department about what
to do with these Nazi scientists.
There was some fairly intense
debate within the US government.
The State Department,
as they saw this coming, was...
Officials there
were quite opposed to this.
They said, "If this ever gets out,
"just think how this is
going to look.
"The optics of this are horrible,"
basically.
And one of
the War Department advocates
said they needed
the State Department to stop.
"Stop beating a dead Nazi"
was a quote from them.
Once again,
any opposition is dismissed,
and plans for a top-secret project
take shape.
This will bring Nazi scientists
to America
for a temporary custodianship,
utilising their superior knowledge
of ballistic missiles.
The operation will be given
the code name "Paperclip."
Operation Paperclip was
a major American programme
to bring German scientists,
technicians
and engineers to the USA,
to put them to work on scientific
and technological projects
principally related to the military,
but not exclusively so.
In September of 1945,
the inventor of Germany's deadly
V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun,
arrives in Texas.
He and his colleagues will stay
for a fixed period
and help the US develop missiles.
In Washington DC,
Operational Paperclip
is officially sanctioned
by President Harry S Truman,
but there are certain directives.
The biggest hurdle for Paperclip
staff, if you will, for recruiters,
is that Truman says that ardent
Nazis and, kind of,
Nazis of
the highest criminal classes
could not be recruited
and taken into the United States
under the terms of Paperclip.
The American intelligence agencies,
I would say they take
that information,
and they see it
as a bit of an issue
because, actually, there are
a lot of these men, like...
Like Wernher von Braun was involved
in the SS, for example.
The American recruitment of
German scientists and technicians
was a morally problematic endeavour.
Some of these men had certainly
been closely affiliated
with the Nazi Party and the SS.
But the climate of
the early Cold War -
where everything was seen
in the light
of how best could America get
an advantage over
or ultimately beat
the Soviet Union -
meant that a lot of those
moral concerns were ignored
or swept under the rug.
Well, the key word there
is "ignored."
Those directives, I don't think,
were ever withdrawn,
they were simply ignored -
by the army, especially.
In some cases, Nazi scientists who
have proved themselves desirable
to the American military
are even given the opportunity
to alter their own records.
They were able to qualify for
Paperclip by erasing their histories.
Any involvement in
war crime atrocities
was essentially purged from
their records
and for purposes of the programme,
they became Nazis in name only.
Maybe they were members of
the Nazi Party,
but, on paper,
they were never loyal Nazis,
they had no relationship
with Hitler,
they weren't involved in
war crimes -
whether it was slave labour
or medical experimentation
on prisoners, or anything like that.
The American press become aware
of the arrival
of hundreds of Nazi scientists
in the Deep South in late 1946.
The War Department
challenges these reports,
as Paperclip has to weather
its first storm of bad publicity.
The War Department, the agency that
administered Paperclip
insisted to the press that
they ruled out Nazis,
and that was just a bald-faced lie.
And columnists would sometimes
discover the Nazis -
you know, the bad Nazis
who had come over -
and then they would often
investigate the columnist.
So that was the level of pushback
that was going on.
The first stories about Paperclip
scientists start to trickle out
in the Washington Post
and some other media outlets,
and it's picked up by
some very notable people -
people like Eleanor Roosevelt.
She strongly opposes it
and brings in other notable thinkers
like Albert Einstein -
Albert Einstein, who can really
speak to the conditions
of the German scientific community,
the choices that had to be made,
the moral dilemmas
presented to them.
There were a small number of cases
where the US was forced to backtrack
because of outside pressure
disclosing what a few of these men
had done.
One case was a Nazi doctor
by the name of Walter Schreiber,
and there was a prominent
newspaper columnist at that time,
Drew Pearson, who wrote a column
disclosing what he had been
involved in in the war,
and horrible Nazi experimentation -
including exposing Polish girls
to gangrene
to see what the response would be
and how they would survive
and whether they would survive.
This was just one of a whole number
of horrible things
that they would do to see
what their own pilots,
German pilots in the Luftwaffe,
could withstand.
The military defended him at first
and tried to, sort of,
say how important he was.
But then the pressure built,
and finally,
they just sent him down
to Argentina,
and there was no attempt to
prosecute him
or hold him accountable.
Operatives working on Paperclip
continued to recruit from Germany
well into the 1950s.
Altogether, the programme relocates
over 1,600 Nazi scientists,
technicians, engineers
and other professionals to the US.
America knows they are now in
an arms race with The Soviet Union,
and losing is not an option.
The President has announced
the dropping
of an atomic explosive
within Russia.
Now we are faced with
a very grave problem
and we must alert the whole world
to the dangers of an unrestricted
atomic armaments race.
There's any kind of number
of incidences
where the Soviets are seen to be
more and more threatening.
The most dramatic is the 1949 test
of the Soviet bomb.
American, kind of, thinkers
and engineers and politicians
had variously estimated that
it would be five to 20 years
before the Soviets got the bomb,
and so that sets the
kind of...not just the recruitment,
but the retention efforts
for Operation Paperclip.
For Wernher von Braun
and his colleagues in the south,
so keen are the Americans to retain
knowledge in this emerging Cold War
that a way is found to legitimise
their presence in the US.
The way they finally get visas
is that,
because you have to have a point of
immigration...
So, they're in Texas,
on the Mexican border,
so they take them over the border
to Juarez,
and the American consul
in Juarez stamps them in,
so that's when they finally have
official entry into the US.
In 1950, they were moved to
Huntsville, Alabama -
so, the heart of
the segregated south.
Just a kind of backwater.
And that's when they started
building the Redstone Rocket,
which was their first dedicated
ballistic missile in the US.
Based on German V-2 technology,
the Redstone is designed
to carry a high explosive warhead.
A bureaucratic fight with the US
Airforce means von Braun and his team
have to limit the range of
their rockets,
but this will change
almost overnight.
REPORT: There are dates that
schoolchildren in the United States
are required to memorise -
like October 12th 1492,
when Columbus discovered America.
Now, there was a new date for
Russian youngsters to remember -
October 4th 1957,
when Sputnik, the first
earth satellite, was launched.
The new moon circled the globe
every 96 minutes.
In the history of the earth,
no other event had captured
the imagination of so many people
as this first step into space.
In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked
America and the world
with two major
technological breakthroughs.
Firstly, they launched Sputnik 1,
the world's first
artificial satellite, into orbit.
And secondly,
they revealed the first
intercontinental ballistic missile
that, in theory at least, meant that
the USA was now in striking distance
of the Soviet Union.
Both of these developments
were met with shock and horror
by the American population,
who felt the idea of a Russian spy
satellite orbiting overhead
and watching them
particularly concerning.
Well, I think that it...
You know, Russia's getting into
space really bothers me,
because it's making the Cold War
between the Russians
and United States more intense.
What do you think this is going to
be...do to our prestige?
I don't think it's going to
enhance it any at this time,
but I imagine we will be able to
catch up
and maybe even surpass them
on the way.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
It's frightening.
We should find out what they are
doing that we're not doing,
and we should do something about it
very quickly.
Sputnik was a profound change.
This archenemy,
this alien ideology
was farther ahead.
In Huntsville, Alabama,
one man has been making the case
for space exploration for years.
Being the inventor of
the Nazi V-2 rocket
and recruited as part of
a top-secret military programme
could be problematic.
But, thankfully for Wernher von Braun
and his team,
a home-grown American icon
has already lent a hand.
PIG SQUEALS
My book about Von Braun,
Dark Side Of The Moon,
was published in 2009.
I worked on that book for 15 years.
Astronomers tell us that the Earth
we live on
and the Moon we see in the sky
are but tiny specks
in a tremendous universe
that contains billions upon
billions of stars and other worlds.
But I'm old enough that,
in the 1950s,
I was one of the children
glued to American TV screens
watching the Disney programme
where Von Braun was really first
presented to a mass audience.
And, you know,
I thought he was wonderful,
and certainly,
his message was inspiring,
so maybe that's the starting point.
Here to reveal a plan
for a trip round the moon,
Dr Wernher von Braun.
When the day arrives
for construction to begin,
the thousands of parts for
the space station
will be transported to the orbit
via our multi-stage rockets.
We merely replace
the winged passenger section
with a simple cargo-carrying nose.
So, Wernher von Braun is there,
he's got his, you know, various
props and things like that,
and he takes the public through how
he's going to do it.
Von Braun was trying his best to
get a satellite into space.
He was specifically overruled by
The Pentagon
that they would not
allow him to do this.
He says, "It will be a disaster
for the US
"if the Soviets get
a satellite up ahead of us."
And the Soviets launched Sputnik
as part of
this international geophysical year.
Von Braun writes to his superiors
and says,
"We could have had a man in space or
a satellite in space two years ago.
"Give me 60 days
and I'll get it done."
There's some pushback.
They say, "Take 90 days."
Von Braun said,
"Fine, but I meant 60 days."
But that is when his remit
really changes.
Operation Paperclip originally,
in terms of what they were
focusing on,
they were focusing on missiles,
on rockets,
but also on different types
of warfare as well -
chemical warfare, nuclear warfare,
for example.
But what then happens is there's
now a space exploration element
that is added, and so we've got
a slight pivot now.
But of course,
there's a huge crossover,
because the technology - which a lot
of people don't realise, I think -
that the technology
within the arms race
overlaps hugely with technology
necessary for the space race.
And I would say in
that kind of Venn diagram,
Wernher von Braun
is at the centre of that.
And so Sputnik was on October 4th,
and Von Braun answers Sputnik with
a satellite of our very own
on January 31st of 1958,
so he got it up in a few months.
REPORT: Before the news conference,
The Big Picture camera
and Sergeant Stuart Queen drew
Dr von Braun aside
for a special interview.
Dr von Braun, I wonder if you
could tell our Big Picture viewers
just what did transpire
during those 84 days?
Well, those were a rather hectic
84 days, I can assure you of that.
A project like firing a satellite
into orbit is only possible
if there's splendid teamwork
all the way through.
Once Von Braun gets Explorer up,
the space race is on.
In 1960,
Wernher von Braun and his team
are transferred to
the newly-formed NASA,
building rockets at the Marshall
Space Flight Centre in Huntsville.
He has become the voice of
space exploration.
Wernher von Braun really became
a very public and revered figure,
not just within
the US military establishment,
but well beyond that.
He wrote books, a comic book about
going to Mars,
he was this very debonair figure
who....
A sort of a renaissance man -
he played classical piano,
he was a scuba diver,
he was sort of
a dashing, well-dressed man,
and he really made himself into
a figure of some renown.
He really is, in a sense,
the first space celebrity.
Even before the astronauts who we
all come to know and love,
before the Neil Armstrongs and the
Buzz Aldrins and the Shepards,
Von Braun is
this first space celebrity.
Wernher von Braun is even
the subject of a biopic
portraying him as a man of peace
and remorse.
Things were certainly simpler
in the old days,
when I used to work here.
I was happy then.
Of course you were.
All you wanted to do then was to
reach the moon.
And all I did was to smash up
other people's greenhouses.
I didn't know then that I would
become an addict.
An addict?
Yes.
This...
..obsession of mine.
Space.
The depiction of Von Braun
as a romantic explorer
is one that he and NASA continued
to cultivate.
Von Braun was really great
at selling the spiritual aspect of
this project,
to really catch people's, sort of,
sense of adventure
and this kind of exalted sense
of achievement.
The USA emerges after the
Second World War as a superpower,
and it starts to conceive of itself
as the leading country
for all humanity.
So, when America's doing something,
it's doing it not just
for Americans,
but for the world at large,
or at least for the free world.
And Wernher von Braun is very
clever at recognising this shift,
recognising the kind of language
that's being used for that.
Humanity's future being beyond
the earth and into space -
he knows he's going to find
an audience for that
among the American people.
He very much wants to emphasise
that part of his story,
which is that he's looking forward
and is going to be one of the people
that's responsible
for pushing the human experience
further and further,
and he tries to do whatever he can
to acknowledge what's happened
in the past,
but he downplays it and wants to
shift the conversation
as quickly as possible to what he
can do FOR us in the future.
With the successful firing of
the Saturn,
a gigantic stride has been taken
in the exploration of space.
Many times, I've been asked why
we are exploring beyond our earth.
I will give you
a few of the many valid reasons.
First of all, of course,
is knowledge of the Earth,
our solar system, and the universe.
Throughout history,
new knowledge has always improved
the lot of the human race.
Achievement of our major goal of
landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to Earth
within this decade
will be of inestimable value.
We have been given the scientific
knowledge, the technical ability,
and the materials to pursue
the exploration of the universe.
To ignore these great resources
would be a corruption of
a God-given ability.
Kennedy was completely pragmatic
about going into space.
He really wasn't interested in it.
Leading up to his famous
May 25th 1961 speech
that we were going to put a man
on the moon
before this decade is out, was...
Two things had happened
that spring -
one was that he had just taken over
the presidency
and inherited a really idiotic
CIA plot from Eisenhower
which was an invasion of Cuba,
and the second one was
the Soviets put up the first man
in space, Yuri Gagarin.
We now know it as a "moonshot,"
right? "Kennedy's moonshot."
But before Kennedy's moonshot,
Kennedy was looking for
the language of a moonshot,
and it's Von Braun who has
this reservoir,
this history of selling space -
selling the optimism of space,
selling the hope of space,
selling the frontier of space.
He has that at the ready,
and he gives that to Kennedy.
Even though I realise that this is,
in some measure,
an act of faith and vision -
for we do not now know
what benefits await us -
but if I were to say,
my fellow citizens,
that we shall send to the moon -
240,000 miles away from
the control station in Houston -
a giant rocket more than
300 feet tall -
the length of this football field -
to an unknown celestial body,
and this will be done in the decade
of the '60s.
One of the few voices to speak out
in opposition to Wernher von Braun
and his growing celebrity is
a daring satirist named Tom Lehrer.
Well, speaking of bombs,
what is it that makes America
the world's greatest nuclear power?
And what is it that will make it
possible for us
to spend 20,000 million dollars of
our taxpayers' money
to put some idiot on the moon?
AUDIENCE CHUCKLE
Well, it was the great,
enormous superiority
of American technology, of course,
as provided by
our great American scientists
such as Dr Wernher von Braun.
AUDIENCE CHUCKLES
There is some criticism of
Wernher von Braun and his team
in the years leading up to
the moon landing.
Very famously, there's a song by
the satirist Tom Lehrer,
where he pokes fun at the fact
that Von Braun seems to have
a very flexible allegiance -
shifting from Germany to the USA -
and even hinting that,
in the future,
he might end up working for China
instead.
# Gather 'round while I sing you of
Wernher von Braun
# A man whose allegiance
is ruled by expedience
# Call him a Nazi,
he won't even frown
# "Nazi, Schmazi"
says Wernher von Braun... #
Paperclip finally was not a secret.
Everybody knew these scientists
were around.
The confection of who they were
and why they were in America
was so perfect, so pervasive,
that anyone who would have
questioned it vigorously,
their patriotism would have
been questioned.
In January 1969,
Wernher von Braun is called to give
evidence at a trial in West Germany.
Three SS guards are accused of
hanging 70 prisoners
while posted at a concentration camp
called Mittelbau-Dora,
connected to the V-2 rocket factory.
Von Braun denies any awareness of -
or involvement in - war crimes.
The US grudgingly allowed Von Braun
to be deposed,
but only in the US, in New Orleans,
right before - or maybe a month or
two before - the moon landing.
So, you have this ironic sequence
of - here he is,
his past being thrown in his face
over his involvement
in Nazi war crimes,
and then, immediately afterwards,
the biggest achievement of his life,
which was the US
landing on the moon.
Well?
I'm so excited I don't know what
to say. It's so beautiful.
Real good, real good.
It's a triumph for the United States
and it will show the Russians
that we got the know-how.
In the years after the moon landing,
Wernher von Braun
really secures his position.
He really is a kind of
unimpeachable American figurehead.
AUDIENCE APPLAUSE
My first guest tonight
is the father of the rocket.
He was in charge of developing
rockets for the Germans during...
..before and during
the Second World War.
This seems so strange when we
remember the Second World War.
And now, through a quirk of history,
he is in charge of developing
our space programme.
One of those ironic things.
Will you welcome please
the legendary Dr Wernher von Braun?
AUDIENCE APPLAUSE
Dick Cavett is known as a really
intelligent, candid interviewer.
And Dick Cavett kind of
takes the bait,
and he gets distracted, almost,
by Wernher von Braun's passion
for this kind of space story.
I believe you were forced to join
the Nazi party,
as I understand it...?
No, that isn't quite right. Oh.
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
The situation was such
that I just figured,
as long as I'm working on rockets
here,
I really can't afford not to use
any help I can get.
I needed every bit of help. Mm-hm.
And so, to turn this down
would have been tantamount to say
"I give up working in this field,"
which, as I said a little earlier...
..would have meant pretty close to
defecting the cause in times of war.
Mm-hm. Which I decided was not
the thing to do.
Well, Von Braun was
an American celebrity.
You know, he was on
the Dick Cavett Show.
In Alabama especially, he was,
which is where he had built his base
with many of the Nazi scientists,
he was a revered figure.
CHEERING
It was almost exactly 20 years
that I first came to Huntsville.
Once you received us newcomers
with perhaps some amused tolerance -
we were fully aware of that -
as "those crackpot scientists
who want to go the moon,"
but after you found out that there
was at least some seriousness in us,
you soon became
our most loyal supporters,
and so all this became possible.
He was a frequent guest
at the Pentagon and the White House,
among senior politicians
and presidents.
Despite their fame,
the men who put man on the moon
can't outrun their Nazi pasts.
As documents are declassified
and victims speak out,
the secretive world of
Operation Paperclip begins to emerge.
The links between
Paperclip scientists and engineers
and the crimes of the Third Reich
did not become concretised
until the 1980s,
mostly because archival evidence
was opened up.
In 1982, following work by
investigative reporters,
the Justice Department sets up
a dedicated unit
to locate war criminals
residing in the US.
The so-called Nazi hunters
focused their attention
on a man named Arthur Rudolph.
Arthur Rudolph was a German
rocket scientist who came over
to the USA at around
the same time as Wernher von Braun
and worked quite closely with him,
particularly on missile development
but later on the space programme
as well.
Arthur Rudolph.
APPLAUSE
In the 1980s,
so after Wernher von Braun had died,
some unpleasant truths come to light
around Arthur Rudolph's service
during the Nazi regime.
Now retired and living in
San Jose, California,
Rudolph is questioned by
three Justice Department officials.
Rudolph, it becomes fairly apparent
in 1982 and 1983,
that he was indeed an ardent Nazi,
and that he did oversee
human suffering and death.
Whether or not he directed it
is debated at the time,
but he does oversee human suffering
and death,
so the deal is,
"Rudolph, go back to Germany.
"We're stripping you
of your American citizenship.
"You are no longer our German."
Arthur Rudolph becomes one of
the first Paperclip recruits
to be removed from America
since Walter Schreiber in 1952.
I sometimes wonder whether
Von Braun's sheer charisma
and success would have shielded
Rudolph from them,
from this, if he had been alive,
because I think if they got Rudolph,
they would be forced
to go after Von Braun.
The line of inquiry pursued by
the Nazi Hunters
is a familiar one
to followers of Operation Paperclip.
The underground V-2 rocket factory
and its connected
concentration camp, Mittelbau-Dora.
It consisted of twin tunnels
that had been there
for many years,
which were utterly primitive.
A camp was established by the SS
which bureaucratically was in charge
of utilising slave labourers.
So many of the labourers were dying
that they built crematoria there.
You wouldn't want to be called upon
to rank those human catastrophes
during that era,
but this was...this was
a terrible one.
Between 1943 and 1945,
60,000 prisoners were brought
to Mittelbau by the Nazis.
Even a conservative estimate
puts the number who did not survive
at 20,000.
As the man in charge of production
of the V-2,
Arthur Rudolph was unable to
convince investigators
that he didn't know about
the scale of the suffering -
a claim that had
been made successfully
throughout the life
of Wernher von Braun.
The great lie that he told was that,
yes, he had visited
the production facility,
but he had never been in the camp.
I remember vividly
seeing it for the first time
and thinking, my God,
these are the same place.
You can't say you were in one
and not the other.
He was intimately familiar with the
operation there and the conditions.
80 years on,
where does this leave
the legacy of Operation Paperclip,
and the man most central to the 1969
moon landing, Wernher von Braun?
There have been attempts to get
a better understanding of Von Braun,
and each new detail seems
to further cloud the picture
of what we thought we knew of
Von Braun from say 1933 to 1945.
Part of this is because there
has been a kind of dedicated
corps of memorialists
of Von Braun who are attached
to what you might call
the Huntsville School of Aerospace,
and see Von Braun's legacy
and the advancement of that legacy
as critical to the continued
advancement of space exploration.
But then you have a competing school
who want never to forget the horrors
of Nazi Germany
and want never to forget
the Holocaust,
and understand how that memory
is essential
to the continued healthy functioning
of American society
and American democracy
in the western world.
You know, I looked very deeply
at Von Braun's history for my book,
as have some others, but it still
remains sort of a mystery
to most people,
or a complete unknown.
I was actually just talking to
a retired scientist
who worked in Huntsville for years
and years in America
and then he seemed sort of astounded
to know what Wernher von Braun
had done during the war.
So, his accolades overshadowed
his involvement with the Nazis.
Alongside his considerable
scientific achievements,
perhaps Wernher von Braun's greatest
accomplishment was his ability
to whitewash his own reputation,
transforming himself from
a Nazi military scientist
who played a key role in the German
war effort in the Second World War,
to an American hero who pioneered
space flight
and helped land
an American astronaut on the moon.
I think it's actually really useful
to think about Wernher von Braun
as a salesman.
Not only did he sell his vision,
but he sold himself as well.
I do think that he was very aware
that,
"If I make myself a household name,"
which I would argue that
in lots of ways,
in the '50s and '60s, he was,
I think he was also doing that
to ensure that they couldn't just,
if something came out about him,
they couldn't just hide him away
in South America.
So, why has he sort of avoided
the stain of the Third Reich?
You know, I think that everybody
needs a good Nazi
and it may be because
we want to think that
if we were put in that position,
that we would be able
to transcend the evil,
and so Von Braun was
the good Nazi genius in a way.
There were times
when he let the public see this,
this sort of mercenary side of him.
There is an interview that he did
about six years
after he came to America
with The New Yorker
where he spoke almost wistfully
about the use of slave labour
in Germany,
and how successful they were
in using that to build rockets.
He said that, quote,
"Working in a dictatorship
can have its advantages
"if the regime is behind you.
"I'm convinced that the man
in charge of Stalin's atom bomb
"just has to press a button
and he'll be supplied with
"a whole concentration camp
full of labour."
Von Braun cannot be protected
at this point.
We know all this stuff by now.
He's a condemned man.
If he survives as a hero for
some people, it's out of ignorance.
And celebrating 50 years
of the Von Braun Center,
the entertainment hub
and the heart of Huntsville,
has brought the community together
for decades.
Yes, it does, Rob.
The Von Braun Center's
executive director tells me
that this building here, it has so
much life and legacy behind it.
He's seen the city grow around it
and he expects it to keep boosting
the rocket city's economy.
# Don't say that he's hypocritical
# Say rather that he's apolitical
GERMAN ACCENT: # "Once the rockets
are up,
# "Who cares where they come down?
# "That's not my department,"
says Wernher von Braun. #
I think we have to remember that
the moon landing happened
very specifically
in the context of the Cold War,
but also, there is such a crossover
between the technology
of weaponry, the technology of arms,
and that is the technology that was
harnessed by Wernher von Braun
in order for there to be humans
safely on the moon,
and Operation Paperclip
was central to that,
and it all starts with
a ripped-up list
found in a toilet
in Bonn University.
The US military, in bringing
1,600 of these Nazi scientists,
to America after the war was clearly
making a deal with the devil,
a Faustian bargain,
where they are willing
to overlook and even whitewash
what they had done in Germany,
often being directly involved in
horrible, horrible Nazi atrocities,
because they saw them as
so valuable
in terms of
their scientific brainpower.
"That's one small step for man...
"..one giant leap for mankind."
The image of Neil Armstrong planting
an American flag on the moon
is one of the most enduring
of the modern age.
It is a sign of American triumph
and also of humanity's
technological potential,
but there is a dark side
behind that image,
which links to warfare,
to the development of
intercontinental ballistic missiles,
the shadow of which
we still live under today,
and it's also a story
which can be traced
all the way back to
the Second World War,
to the awful conditions in which
concentration camp inmates worked
in order to produce
these weapons of war.
So, when we think about
the moon landing
as this moment of human greatness,
we should also remember that
there's a much darker side
to be explored behind it.