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The Dark Side of Great Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan December 11, 2020 33 min

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony - Elizabeth Cady Stanton — Susan B. Anthony, left, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. NJTV

19. Arthur Rudolph Was a Huge Hitler Fan

Arthur Rudolph with a model of the Saturn V rocket. Wikimedia

Arthur Rudolph’s past eventually caught up with him in 1979. That year, investigators for the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), tasked with investigating crimes against humanity, started looking at Rudolph’s Nazi past. His wartime activities began attracting attention, and 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 with the OSI that spared him prosecution in exchange for surrendering his American citizenship and leaving the US. In 1984, Rudolph departed for West Germany, which conducted a halfhearted investigation before declining to prosecute him on grounds that the statute of limitations had run out on most of his crimes. He died of a heart attack in Hamburg, on January 1^st, 1996.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.