How the ‘NASA Nazis’ helped transform sleepy Alabama farming town into America’s ‘Rocket City’ and win the Space Race – but dark legacy of ‘our Germans’ led by former SS officer remains divisive

Huntsville, Alabama, is fiercely proud of its nickname Rocket City – earned for its crucial role in the success of the US space race.

The city, which transformed from a cotton market town into the world’s leading hub for space research in the 1950s, is home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which led the development of the Saturn rockets that put the first man on the moon .

But there is a dark side to the story of these epic feats: many of the men who led the groundbreaking work were Nazis – recruited through a top-secret operation after World War II.

The fascinating and disturbing reality is often left out of the lessons about America’s victory in the space race against the Soviet Union. It’s also something Huntsville still struggles with today.

There are those who say that the “greater good” was greater than the moral cost of recruiting members of an evil regime, allowing them to avoid justice.

But others say it was an inexcusable decision to bring these men to the US – made worse by the fact that their Nazi backgrounds go largely unmentioned in lessons on American space history.

The Nazi scientists who were key to America’s space ambitions were recruited through a top-secret program called Operation Paperclip.

After the defeat of the Nazis and the end of World War II in 1945, the United States and its allies were aware that Germany was home to some of the greatest scientific minds, including pioneers in rocketry.

America began recruiting these scientists to further its own military research. As tensions with the Soviet Union increased, eventually leading to the Cold War, the plan was also intended to prevent other enemy countries from recruiting the Germans.

About 1,600 scientists were brought to the US through Operation Paperclip, which was authorized by President Harry S. Truman and named for the paperclips attached to the personnel files of Germans seeking recruitment.

The leading scientist was Wernher von Braun, a Nazi and member of the SS, the party’s notorious paramilitary wing.

Von Braun was complicit in war crimes and played a leading role in the development of the V-2 rocket, which was built with slave labor and used by the Nazi regime to kill thousands of civilians. Despite his background, he would later become a hero in the US.

Von Braun and a team of his specialists were transferred to the US in 1945 and initially based at Fort Bliss, Texas, where they worked on missile systems.

Historians have said that about half of von Braun’s team of about 118 men were members of the Nazi Party.

Five years later, he and a team of other German engineers were transferred to Redstone Arsenal, an Army base near Huntsville, to develop the country’s first ballistic missiles.

It was this move that set this former cotton town on the path to becoming the global epicenter of space rocket development.

Before 1950, Huntsville was a poor, segregated city of about 16,000 residents.

In 1960, the year the Marshall Space Flight Center was founded, the city was a center of rocket research.

Von Braun was appointed the first head of the center, which opened at the Redstone Arsenal two years after NASA’s founding in 1958.

He was already one of the most famous scientists in America for his rocket breakthroughs and lofty ambitions for space exploration. But the publicity surrounding him rarely mentioned his Nazi past.

In Huntsville, many people were initially uncomfortable with their new neighbors

Sherman Mullin, who worked in the city in the late 1950s before joining aerospace manufacturer Lockheed, told the LA Times: “There were basically four groups in Huntsville – the local whites, the blacks, the Germans and anyone from outside the town, who were considered Yankees.

“None of the groups mixed. A Yankee couldn’t get a date with a young lady in that town.”

The arrival of the Nazis was also difficult for their Jewish colleagues at NASA. Another central figure in NASA’s early achievements was Kurt Heinrich Debus, another former SS member recruited through Operation Paperclip.

In Nazi Germany, Debus also played a central role in the development of the V rockets. He became the first director of NASA’s Launch Operations Center, which would later become the Kennedy Space Center.

Von Braun worked closely with Abraham Silverstein, a Jewish-American engineer who grew up in Indiana and was a crucial figure at NASA. Silverstein coined the name for the Apollo missions and pioneered the use of liquid hydrogen fuel in rocket engines.

His son, David Silverstein, told the LA Times that he believed his father was “not entirely fond of the situation.” Silverstein’s daughter, Judy Cook, shared a similar opinion.

But ultimately, Silverstein was one of many NASA colleagues motivated to make progress through collaboration. He was quoted as saying that there was “never” animosity with von Braun and that the Nazi recruits were “an important cog in the industry and it would have been foolish to leave them out.”

Former Huntsville Mayor Loretta Spencer told the New York Times in 2007, “People said, ‘If you had just been at war with these people, how can you be so accepting of them?’

“But I think we were just impressed.”

The Germans knew they would face hostility from the local population. But many accounts explain how they went out of their way to be accepted, including von Braun’s insistence that his team never spoke German when Americans were within earshot.

The result was that they were able to integrate into Huntsville despite their background, which some called “our Germans.” Von Braun forged personal ties with several notable figures in Alabama as he rose to national prominence.

Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon on July 21, 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission.

Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and their crewmate Michael Collins were carried into space by a Saturn V rocket built using the expertise of Von Braun, Debus, and many more scientists recruited from Nazi Germany.

To this day, this epic feat of humanity is still considered a truly American achievement.

NASA’s biographies of von Braun and Debus today refer to their Nazi backgrounds. Von Braun was “well aware of the terrible conditions” at the Nazi V-2 rocket factory and was “involved in decision-making regarding the use of slave labor.”

Debus’s biography notes that during his time as a scientist in Germany, he once mentioned a colleague, Richard Crämer, “for criticizing Hitler and the Nazi Party, resulting in Crämer’s conviction under the Treason Act.” .

In Huntsville, where a strong German presence remains, the city carefully considers its achievements in the context of its controversial backstory.

As Mayor Tommy Battle noted during a 2019 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, “For the first time in history, it made Huntsville a place that had done something no one else had done.”