When I was in Junior High School, like many of us in the late fifties and early sixties, I was fascinated by the thought of space travel. Along with several class mates we built large scale models of the rockets we were reading about in the papers and magazines. On May 5, 1961 we all filed in to the school auditorium to watch Alan Shepard's sub-orbital first step into space. We were uncertain if he would emerge a space pioneer or if he would be the first fatality in the quest to conquer the new frontier.
As much as we admired the guys who strapped themselves into these rockets where they risked their lives to venture into the unknown vacuum of space, the man who got the press and was credited as being the brain behind our efforts to outdo the Soviet Union exploration of the unknowns of space. This man was Wernher von Braun.
The achievements he guided the NASA team to spoke volumes about his ability to design and motivate America's best and brightest rocket scientists. When he spoke, it was with a German accent that enhanced his European intellectual image.
It wasn't even a generation after the end of World War II. We were aware of the war. Many of our parents had unspoken memories of the brutality of the conflict. There were some in our town with wounds testifying to their part in the war. There were communities of Europeans displaced by the fighting. Yet, in our innocence we did not understand what had really taken place.
Today, if you take the longer tour of the Kennedy Space Center – the part that ventures into the military base that is part of the center – you visit launch pads used for the early flights into space. As you visit the block house where Shepard's launch was controlled, you can even press the button that von Braun himself pressed to send our first American into space.
Who was this man led the US in the cold war space race? As we look into the days following the allied victory in Europe there were highly educated technologists who developed weapons, some of which were superior to those the Allies used. It was open season on German intellect and talent. Looking into the history of the time, Operation Paperclip was an official government program designed to bring the cream of captured talent to the US as we were squaring up for an increasingly hostile Soviet Union.
But what did we get – and was it worth the price?
We got a brilliant German aristocrat who was the driving force behind their V1 and V2 rocket programs that rained death and destruction on the enemies of the “master race”. He was recognized multiple times by der Führer for his fine work. Von Braun was a loyal member of the Nazi party as were all who wished to be able to practice their craft in the the Third Reich.
Perhaps this could be overlooked along with his SS membership, but the supervision of underground production facilities where capable concentration camp prisoners were brought to produce the technology for the Germans was a little harder to take. Most prisoners were did not have to work very long as the average life span in the facility was around three months.
Such was the paranoia about the intent of the Soviet Union that the US brought in hundreds of war criminals in an effort to maintain superiority. Von Braun was one of the more benign Nazi scientists as was his superior, General Walter Dornberger, who found his way into the Bell Helicopter operation.
What could be worse? The intelligence people sought out Nazi scientists with particular interrogation skills. The weapons people brought in experts in biological warfare. Medical researchers were anxious to find out what limits of human endurance were discovered in concentration camp experiments such as putting naked prisoners out in sub-freezing temperatures to study how body temperatures would drop and at what point death would take over.
The Allies beat the bad guys, then invited some of the worst into our land to learn what they learned without actually taking part in the barbaric practices.
General Patton and General LeMay warned us of the danger posed by our former ally, but publicly they were ignored. Internally it was a different story. You can find out more about some of the things our fear of the Soviet Union drove the US to do in Annie Jacobsen's book, Operation Paperclip.
In case you are curious about the name, the operation was named after the practice of putting a paperclip on the profiles of the scientists the intelligence community thought might be helpful to bring into our operation. The reality is that some were spared that hangman's noose if their knowledge was of sufficient interest. Some even wanted Göring to be spared, but that was just too much to pull off.
Perhaps I was expecting too much of my heroes... or perhaps our country was expecting too little.