20. This Great Rocket Engineer Was Also a Great Monster
Arthur Rudolph (1906 – 1996) was a great rocket engineer, and a great monster. During WWII, he played a prominent role in developing Germany’s V-2 rocket – the world’s first ballistic missile. He was Operations Director of a slave labor facility, Nordhausen-Mittelwerk, in which tens of thousands toiled in inhumane conditions. More than 20,000 of Rudolph’s slaves died from beatings, starvation, executions, or other forms of mistreatment.
After the war, the US Army hired him and sent him to the US as part of Operation Paperclip, which sought to employ German scientists in America’s rocket program. Despite official documents noting that he was “an ardent Nazi”, and despite his being designated a war criminal by Allied officials, Rudolph arrived in America in 1947. He was eventually naturalized as a US citizen, and in 1961 joined his fellow Nazi Wernher Von Braun at NASA as a top manager. There, Rudolph became known as the “Father of the Saturn Rocket” that sent America’s astronauts to the Moon.
