Operation Paperclip Arrives

In the spring of nineteen fifty, more than one hundred thirty German scientists and engineers arrived at Redstone Arsenal on the southern edge of Huntsville. They had been living and working at Fort Bliss in Texas for several years, brought to the United States under a program called Operation Paperclip. The Army had recruited over sixteen hundred German specialists from the ruins of the Third Reich. The most prominent of them was Wernher von Braun.

Von Braun had been the technical director at Peenemünde, the Baltic coast facility where Nazi Germany developed the V-two ballistic missile. He had joined the Nazi Party in nineteen thirty-seven and received a commission as an officer in the SS in nineteen forty. His postwar account held that both memberships were coerced, that refusing them would have meant the end of his rocket work. American intelligence assessed in nineteen sixty-one that he had joined the party "solely to advance his academic career."

The V-two program he directed produced roughly fifty-five hundred missiles. They killed an estimated nine thousand civilians across Europe. More people died building the rockets than died from them. At the Mittelwerk underground factory in the Harz mountains, approximately twelve thousand prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp died during V-two production. Von Braun visited the Mittelwerk on roughly twelve to fifteen occasions. He described conditions there as "repulsive" and said he was "aware of the treatment of prisoners, but felt helpless to change the situation." The Office of Special Investigations would later find a different set of accounts from former prisoners, though von Braun was never charged.

Arthur Rudolph, who served as operations director for V-two production at Mittelwerk and was compelled to attend a public execution of prisoners in January nineteen forty-five, also came to Huntsville. He managed the Pershing missile project and then served as program director for the Saturn Five. In nineteen eighty-four, under pressure from the Office of Special Investigations, he renounced his United States citizenship and departed for West Germany.

None of this was public knowledge when these men arrived in Huntsville. The Army needed rocket engineers. The engineers needed a place to work.