Huntsville, Alabama, is fiercely proud of its Rocket City nickname—deserved for its pivotal role in America’s space race success.
The city, which in the 1950s transformed from a cotton trading town to the world’s leading hub for space travel research, 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 achievements: Many of the men who led the ground-breaking work were Nazis – recruited through a top-secret operation after World War II.
That fascinating and troubling 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 continues to struggle with today.
There are those who say that the ‘greater good’ outweighed the moral costs of recruiting members of an evil regime, allowing them to avoid justice in the process.
But others say it was an inexcusable decision to bring these men to the U.S.—reinforced by the fact that their Nazi background is largely unmentioned in lessons on America’s space history.
Huntsville, Alabama is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center, which played a critical role in America’s victory in the space race. Many of the scientists who designed the rockets that put the first man on the moon were Nazis recruited secretly after World War II
Wernher von Braun, a Nazi who directed the Marshall Space Flight Center, pictured with President John F. Kennedy
Part of a Saturn rocket at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The Saturn rockets, which carried the first man to the moon, were designed with the help of Nazi scientists recruited by the United States after World War II
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 realized that Germany was home to some of the greatest scientific minds, including pioneers in rocketry.
America set about recruiting these scientists to advance its own military research. As tensions with the Soviet Union rose, eventually leading to the Cold War, the scheme was also intended to prevent other enemy nations from recruiting the Germans.
About 1,600 scientists were brought to the United States through Operation Paperclip, which was authorized by President Harry S. Truman and named after the paperclips attached to the personnel files of Germans eager to recruit.
Foremost among the scientists was Wernher von Braun, a Nazi and member of the SS, the notorious paramilitary wing of the party.
Von Braun was complicit in war crimes and played a leading role in the development of the V-2 rocket, which was built using slave labor and used by the Nazi regime to kill thousands of civilians. Despite his background, he would later become a hero in the United States.
Von Braun and a team of his specialists were brought to the United States 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 was transferred to Redstone Arsenal, an Army base near Huntsville, with a team of other German engineers to develop the nation’s first ballistic missiles.
It was this move that started this former cotton town on its journey to becoming the global epicenter of space rocket development.
Saturn V instrument cluster and flight control computers in the Saturn V Hall at the Davidson Center, US Rocket and Space Center, Huntsville, AL
The historic Redstone Rocket Test Site and its bomb bunker at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama
Huntsville, Alabama is nicknamed Rocket City after the rockets that took the first man to the moon were developed there at the Marshall Space Flight Center
Before 1950, Huntsville was a poor, segregated town with a population of about 16,000 people.
In 1960, the year the Marshall Space Flight Center was established, the city was a hub for rocket research.
Von Braun was named the first director of the center, which opened at Redstone Arsenal two years after NASA was formed 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 that surrounded him rarely included mention of his Nazi past.
In Huntsville, at first, many people were uneasy about their new neighbors
Sherman Mullin, who worked in the city in the late 1950s before joining the aerospace manufacturer Lockheed, told the LA Times: “There were basically four groups in Huntsville — the local whites, the blacks, the Germans and all the out-of-towners who were considered Yankees.
‘Neither group interfered. 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 missiles. He went on to become 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 key 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 thought his father ‘wasn’t totally into the situation.’ Silverstein’s daughter, Judy Cook, shared a similar view.
But ultimately, Silverstein was one of many NASA colleagues motivated to make progress through collaboration. He would say that there was ‘never’ any animosity with von Braun and that the Nazi recruits ‘were an important cog in the business and to have left them out would have been foolish’.
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 accept them?’
“But I think we were just in awe.”
The Germans knew they would face hostility from the local population. But many accounts explain how they made an effort to be accepted, including Von Braun’s insistence that his team never speak German when the Americans were within earshot.
The result was that in Huntsville they were able to integrate despite their background, referred to by some as ‘our Germans’. Von Braun made personal connections with several notable people in Alabama as he rose to national prominence.
Wernher von Braun meets Nazi Wehrmacht officers during a demonstration for the launch of the V-2 rocket, scheduled for June 20, 1944. He went on to become a key figure in America’s victory in the space race
Wernher von Braun is credited with inventing the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany and the Saturn V for the United States
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 missile 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 true American achievement.
NASA biographies of von Braun and Debus today refer to their Nazi background. Von Braun was “well aware of the appalling conditions” at the Nazi V-2 missile factory and was “involved in the decision-making about the use of slave labor”.
Debus’s biography notes that during his time as a scientist in Germany he once reported a colleague, Richard Crämer, ‘for criticizing Hitler and the Nazi Party, resulting in Crämer’s conviction under the Treason Act’.
In Huntsville, where there is still a strong German presence, the city is careful to consider its achievements in the context of its controversial backstory.
As Mayor Tommy Battle noted during a 50th anniversary celebration of the Apollo 11 mission in 2019, ‘For the first time in history, it made Huntsville a place that had done something no one else had done.’