DID U.S. CAST BLIND EYE TO NAZI'S PAST?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120058-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 25, 2011
• Sequence Number: 58
• Publication Date: November 4, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/25: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120058-7
STAT
Saturn 5 Scientist
Did U.S.
Ey~?..t~
Nazi's Past?
By RUDY ABRAMSON,
Times Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES TIMES
4 November 1984
The 'U.S: Justice Department's
chief Nazi hunter said Rudolph,
who had risen to become director of
America's Saturn 5 rocket project
office for NASA, had "literally
worked thousands of slave laborers
to death" in a period of about a year
and a half while he directed pro-
duction of Hitler's V-2 rockets.
Use of Slave Labor
Paso to give them legal, but incon-
' spicuous, points of entry. They
were part of "Project Paperclip," a
top-secret program created at the
outset of the Cold War, when the
United States and the Soviet Union
were furiously competing for Ger-
man scientific and engineering tal-
ent.
And the Rudolph case raises
Justice Department officials ac- qu="ions about whether
U.S. intelligence officials closed
knowledge that there had been no mein eyes to war crimes becaus of
secret about the use of slave labor . ', the pressure to bring top German
at the "Mittelwerk," or the fact scientists to America and prevent
that Rudolph was the V-2 produc-. I them from falling into the hands of
tion manager there. In his memoirs
th
,
e Soviet Union.
WASHINGTON-Last summer, top-ranking-Nazi :official Albert Declassified documents obtained
the word started to get around the I Speer called the conditions "barba- in recent days show that U.S.
German community in Huntsville, rous" and recalled rampant disease, ; intelligence had reason to suspect
Ala., that Arthur and Martha poor sanitation and human degen--. Rudolph as early as 1947, two years
Rudolph after retiring to San Jo- eracy. An official history of the after members of the rocket team
se. Calif., to be near their daughter U.S. Army's Third Armored Divi- were brought to this country.
and grandchildren-had picked up sion described the discovery at the During questioning at that time
and moved back to the Old Coun- end of the war of stark evidence of by an Air Force lawyer at Ft. Bliss,
try. brutality and depravity at the Tex., Rudolph admitted that he had
Ruth von Saurma, who had been Nordhausen concentration camp, seen slave laborers hanged from an
their neighbor on Panorama Drive -- - which overhead crane in the under
-for nearly 20 years, got a birthday furnished laborers for the rocket factor !Found
card and a puzzling note that they Mittelwerk: y, the Mittelwerk,
were back in Germany. A few "Hundreds of corpses," reported where. of had directed the as-
thousands of V-2 rockets
others got brief letters. There was a the unit history, "lay sprawled over from 1y 1943 3 o to o 1945.
from
1945.
Everybody thought it was
:strange. Arthur was 77. Since he
'had retired from the National Aer-
onautics and Space Administration
and moved to San Jose, he had-
suffered at least one heart attack.
He had undergone coronary bypass
surgery. And he was afflicted by a
palsied condition that had started
even before he moved away from
Huntsville.
Left 40 Years Ago
The last thing anybody expected
was that, at their age, Arthur and
hundreds filled the great barracks. Moreover, there was testimony
They, lay in contorted heaps, half in the war crimes trial of Georg
stripped, mouths gaping in the dirt he arms y, the general supervisor of
and straw, or they were piled the arms plant beneath Germany's
naked like cordwood, in the corners Harz Mountains, showing that the
and under the stairways." victims, accused of sabotage, were
During the war crimes trials of hanged slowly and that their bodies
managers and SS were left dangling for as long as 12
guards from both hours so that all the laborers being
:.Nordhausen and the nearby Dora used to excavate the tunnels would
prison camp, former prisoners de- ' see them.
scribed the conditions at the Mit-
.telwerk as inhumane, telling of When there was a flicker of life
sleeping in the tunnels for weeks at in a body taken down from the
a time and working it was ended by a pistol shot
g in dank condi- from an SS guard.
lions with rations harety
Martha would go back to a country 1 for survival.
that they had left nearly 40 years i It was not just another case of the
ago. past catching up with a war crimi-
Then, two weeks`ago, the news nal who had sought refuge in
hit Huntsville like a thunderbolt. professional, middle-class Ameri-
Arthur Rudolph, a senior mem- ca.
ber of Wernher von Braun's rocket
team that had launched America's One of 119 Experts
first satellite and ' designed the Rudolph was one of 119 German
rocket that carried astronaut teams rocket experts who were slipped
to the moon during the 1960s and into this country by government
1970s, had left the country and agents at the close of World War
renounced his American citizen- I1-mn f h
t
nuugn ne admitted witnessing
the hangings and was in overall
charge of V-2 production in the
underground plant, Rudolph main-
tained that he knew nothing of the
deaths of thousands of half-starved
laborers, who lived in the under=
ground tunnels where there were
no sanitation facilities, where they
worked 12-hour shifts with no food
but a cup of thin soup, and where
they died of malnutrition, dysen-
tery and exhaustion.
ship rather than face de ortation y o
em kept in the Air Force Maj. Eugene Smith,'
p country illegally for years, then who conducted the 1947 question-
proceedings a's a Nazi war criminal. . secretly escorted to' Mexico and ing of Rudolph, wrote in a classified
guided back across the border at El ' memorandum: "Mr. Rudolph im-
G~~'ti u JJ~D
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/25: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120058-7