German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie by Monique Laney

Author:Monique Laney
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300213454
Publisher: Yale University Press

MEANWHILE, IN GERMANY

If any specialists who are brought to this country are subsequently found to be listed as alleged war criminals, they should be returned to Europe for trial.

—U.S. War Department General Staff Directive, July 194571

After a preliminary investigation, Rudolph’s German citizenship was restored, and he did not stand trial in Germany for the war crimes the OSI had accused him of. This is not too surprising, since the German and American attorneys evaluating Rudolph and his activities in Nazi Germany had different goals. The OSI investigators were charged with investigating and, if it came to a denaturalization hearing, proving that Rudolph should be stripped of his American citizenship. Once Rudolph signed an agreement admitting to the agency’s accusations and promising to renounce his American citizenship and move to Germany, the OSI’s job was basically done. The U.S. investigators did not expect the German authorities to prosecute Rudolph, despite the “enormous record of facts.”72 They were aware of the challenge of prosecuting Rudolph under German law, where the statute of limitations for many Nazi crimes had expired.73 From this point on, their focus for the case was to make sure that the German government had access to all the material used in the OSI investigation and to ensure that Rudolph would not be able to enter the United States again.

The German prosecutor, on the other hand, presumably would have had to prove “base motive” murder or accessory to such murder in order to convict Rudolph of any crime related to his work at Mittelwerk. According to the chief historian of the OSI at the time, these were “the only crimes of the Nazi period as to which the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany, commonly known as West Germany] statute of limitations has not been permitted to run.”74 After Rudolph renounced his citizenship at an American embassy in Germany and the OSI transferred the files it had collected for the case against Rudolph to the German Justice Department via the German embassy in Washington, D.C., in April 1985, the Hamburg prosecutor, Harald Duhn, began a preliminary investigation to determine whether Rudolph should be the subject of a criminal investigation. The goal was to determine whether there was any conclusive evidence to determine if Rudolph had been “a completely uninvolved observer” or, to the contrary, if he had forwarded sabotage reports to the SS—which would have prompted the SS to hold a public hanging of the accused prisoners, thereby presumably making Rudolph an accessory to murder.75

According to Duhn’s report, “The prisoners were guarded by SS Totenkopf units (‘Death’s Head’ units) but worked under the direction of German engineers and foremen. The allocation of labour was the duty of the work commander from the camp commander’s office but had to be approved by the ‘Labour Allocation’ department of Mittelwerk GmbH.”76 Accusations of sabotage were presumably commonplace; these, as well as the charge of a plot to stage an armed uprising and attempted breakouts, led to at least two mass hangings in front of prisoners, military personnel, and civilians.

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