19. The Father of the Saturn Rocket Was a War Criminal
German rocket engineer Arthur Rudolph was brought to the US in 1947 as part of Operation Paperclip, which sought to make use of German scientists. He joined Wernher Von Braun at NASA as a top manager, and became known as the “Father of the Saturn Rocket” that sent American astronauts to the Moon. Unfortunately, Rudolph was a Nazi war criminal, who had supervised a slave labor facility in which more than 20,000 workers died of beatings, starvation, executions, and other mistreatment.
He was designated a war criminal by Allied officials, who described him as an “ardent Nazi”, but that did not stop the US Army from bringing him to the US. It was only in 1979 that Rudolph’s past finally caught up with him, when Department of Justice investigators took a look at his Nazi past. He did not help himself when he told a reporter: “I read Mein Kampf and agreed with lots of things in it…Hitler’s first six years, until the war started, were really marvelous“. He eventually cut a deal that spared him prosecution in exchange for surrendering his US citizenship and leaving the country.
