Year 2002

"Jesus and Hitler Told the Truth about the Jews."

Dear kindred and fellow Aryans

To day’s story is written by:

Dave Bryan of Associated Press Writer

I think we should read it and see how the Jewnited States of America repays loyalty and faithful service...

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) - They were brought to this northern Alabama city a half-century ago for their minds, and their rocket technology would eventually launch man into space and to the moon.

 Now in their 80s and 90s, white-haired and frail, the few who remain from an elite team of 119 German scientists still marvel at their legacy and how they transformed a patch of cotton fields into a landmark of space exploration.

"I don't know how to describe it, it's a tremendous achievement," said 84-year-old Walter Jacobi. "We always knew we could do it."

Their number now down to about a dozen, the accomplishments of the team led by physicist Wernher von Braun are indisputable: Manned space flight, lunar landings, the space shuttle and the international space station - all the result of their work developing rockets in the United States following World War II.

But to some that legacy is marred by the group's initial work creating V-2 rockets for the German military used against the allies and built with the help of thousands of concentration camp laborers under the Nazi boot.

Michael Neufeld, a space history curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, said it's important to remember that von Braun and many members of his team were to some degree complicit in Hitler's Nazi regime.

Von Braun, who died in 1977, (11 years after I heard a lecture by him in Munic. RjH) would eventually become a hero to many for enabling the United States to beat Russia to put a man on the moon. But his background includes production of the V-2 - the first long-range ballistic missile - with the help of Russian, French and Polish prisoners of war working under deplorable conditions, Neufeld said. About 10,000 of the prisoners died of malnutrition and disease.

"I think he blinded himself to the kind of government he was working for," said Neufeld, author of a 1995 book about the scientists, "The Rocket and the Reich."

The first group of six of von Braun's German team came over in 1945 after surrendering to American soldiers advancing toward Berlin. They set up shop under strict oversight of the Army at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas.

The number of rocket team members, primarily electrical engineers with varying degrees of academic training, increased in the ensuing months as von Braun assembled his team.

They labored at Fort Bliss until moving to Huntsville as part of the newly christened Redstone Arsenal Ordnance Rocket Center in 1949.

Despite von Braun's lifelong ambition of sending rockets into orbit and landing men on the moon - he devoted his life to rocketry at the age of 13 - Army brass were mostly interested in ballistic missile development as a countermeasure to communist Russia under Stalin.

The V-2 had been created and produced by von Braun's team during 1940-45 at an isolated outpost on the Baltic sea near a town called Peenemuende. V-2 work later was also done at Mittelwerk at the foot of the Harz mountains in central Germany.

The V-2, shrieking across the sky and exploding into homes and buildings, was used on England in the closing months of World War II.

"They wanted to know everything about the V-2s," Jacobi said of the U.S. Army officials who first worked with von Braun and his team. "Quite a few people thought that going into space was a crazy idea."

Aerodynamics expert Werner Dahm, the only one of the original team who still works at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, said one part of the group's legacy is their contribution to America's efforts during the Cold War arms race after World War II.

Russia was aggressively building intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons even as the German team's work led to the creation of the Redstone missile in 1954.

Dahm said it was essential to build rockets for military purposes: "If we had not done this, we would be Reds nowadays because Stalin would not have stopped."

Dannenberg and others who knew him say space flight was always the driving force behind von Braun's work. That was the case even while he was working on the V-2 in Germany and during the years of missile development in the United States.

Indeed, a story in The Huntsville Times on Sunday, May 14, 1950, had the headline: "Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon."

In Germany before the rise of Hitler, von Braun knew that the only way to get the kind of funding and resources necessary to develop his rocket science would be through the military.

Once in the United States, he again saw his chance to realize his dreams of space flight. By 1959 the Army began to turn its attention to the stars, in no small part because of von Braun's efforts to sell the idea to his military superiors and the American public. His pitch to the masses included collaboration with Walt Disney on three highly popular space-related television films in the 1950s.

None of his American accomplishments, including creation of the Saturn V rocket that propelled Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon in 1969, were seriously clouded by the team's work in Germany. For years, few knew details of that work.

It is now well-known that von Braun was an honorary officer in the SS, Hitler's feared security police, and that V-2 production was made possible by slave labor at both Peenemuende and Mittelwerk - facts that were hidden or glossed over by the U.S. government and von Braun himself.

Von Braun's complicity in Nazi atrocities is less clear, Neufeld said. But there is at least one document - a letter - in which von Braun discusses a trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he apparently spoke to the commandant about obtaining more skilled laborers to use at Mittelwerk.