Moon by David Warmflash

Author:David Warmflash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling

1945

OPERATION OVERCAST

In 1945, the US began Operation Overcast to locate German technical specialists in various fields. Authorized by President Harry Truman (1884–1972) and later renamed Operation Paperclip, the project transported 1,600 technical experts to US soil, including Wernher von Braun. Knowing that the Allies and Soviets were approaching, von Braun and his colleagues walked a tight line between orchestrating a surrender to the Americans and responding to SS commanders, who had ordered them to destroy their rocket documents. Risking execution, von Braun and his assistant Dieter Huzel (1912–94) hid rocket blueprints. Meanwhile, President Truman ordered that no war criminals be included among the recruited German specialists.

Offsetting the legacy of Truman’s order is an ugly reality that still haunts the history of lunar exploration. Hoping to out-compete the USSR, US Intelligence avoided scrutinizing the backgrounds of captured Germans with special skills, even as others were being prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials. Back in 1943, the Allies had bombed the Peenemünde rocket facility, and V-2 production had moved southward, to Mittelwerk, a factory consisting of tunnels carved into a mountain.

Mittelwerk had put out rockets that killed some 9,000 people in London and Antwerp, but it is estimated that as many as 20,000 people—slaves from the Dora concentration camp—died in connection with V-2 rocket production at the factory under horrid conditions. The British captured Walter Dornberger and investigated his role in Mittelwerk for possible war crimes; they later released him to work for the US Air Force. Investigation in the 1980s would reveal that the idea to use slaves had come from V-2 engineer Arthur Rudolph (1906–96), who had joined the Nazi Party enthusiastically in 1931. But in 1945 Rudolph was whisked to the US with von Braun and others of the V-2 team. From 1963 to 1968, Rudolph would serve as project director for NASA’s Saturn V program, but in 1984 he would relinquish his US citizenship and flee the US to avoid war- crimes prosecution. Meanwhile, von Braun had affixed his signature to the Mittelwerk slavery plan and later admitted to having witnessed the conditions in the tunnels.

SEE ALSO: Origins of the Saturn V Moon Rocket (1930–44), A New Discovery and a New Agency (1958–59), Planning Lunar Missions (1962)

This tunnel in Mittelwerk led to a storage area that housed components needed to produce V-2 rockets.

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