America’s Cold War biological and chemical weapons programs existed in the shadows, and the majority of the Nazi scientists who worked on them maintained anonymity for decades. Their JIOA case files and OMGUS security reports were classified, as were the programs they worked on. But some of the Operation Paperclip scientists enjoyed the limelight for their work, notably in instances where their work crossed over from weapons projects into space-related endeavors. In this manner, Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun, and Hubertus Strughold attained varying degrees of prominence and prestige in the 1950s and 1960s and onward.
Within two years of his arrival in the United States, Dornberger had transformed from public menace to American celebrity. In 1950 he left military custody at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to work for Bell Aircraft Corporation in Niagara Falls, New York, quickly becoming vice president and chief scientist. His vocation was now to serve as America’s mouthpiece for the urgent need to weaponize space. Dornberger was given a Top Secret security clearance and a job consulting with the military on rockets, missiles, and the future of space-based weapons. In his desk diary, housed in the archives at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, he kept track of his cross-country business trips with an engineer’s precision. He attended “classified meetings” at U.S. Air Force bases including Wright-Patterson, Elgin, Randolph, Maxwell, and Holloman, as well as at Strategic Air Command headquarters, in Omaha, Nebraska, and the Pentagon. He also became a consultant to the Joint Chiefs on Operation Paperclip, visiting the inner circle in the Pentagon to discuss “clearance procedures” and the “hiring of German Scientists.” As a Paperclip scout, in 1952 Dornberger traveled with what he called “Pentagon Brass” to Germany to “interview German scientists and engineers [in] Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Witzenhausen.”
In his desk diary Dornberger also detailed an ambitious schedule of public appearances, carefully noting the places he traveled and the people he met with. They were the kinds of engagements usually reserved for congressmen. Throughout the 1950s, he jetted from one event to the next, lecturing at dinners and luncheons and sometimes weeklong events. His speeches were always about conquest, with titles like “Rockets—Guided Missiles: Key to the Conquest of Space,” “Intercontinental Weapons Systems,” and “A Realistic Approach to the Conquest of Space.” He orated to anyone who would listen: the Men’s Club of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, the Boy Scouts of America, the Society of Automotive Engineers. When the Rochester Junior Chamber of Commerce hosted General Dornberger for a women’s luncheon in the spring of 1953, the local press covered the event with the headline, “Buzz Bomb Mastermind to Address Jaycees Today.”
Dornberger became so popular that his memoir about the V-2, originally published in West Germany in 1952, was published in America in 1954. In these pages, Dornberger was able to reengineer his professional history from that of warmongering Nazi general to beneficent science pioneer. According to Dornberger, the research and development that had gone into the V-2 at Peenemünde was a romantic, science-laboratory-by-the-sea affair. There was no mention made of the slave labor facility at Nordhausen or the slaves at Peenemünde. The book was originally titled V-2: The Shot into Space (V-2: Der Schuss ins All). “It would be nice to know who invented the subtitle,” says Michael J. Neufeld, “which so neatly captures the reinvention of a Nazi terror weapon as the space rocket it most certainly was not.”
In 1957, Dornberger seemed to have found his true post-Nazi calling, attempting to sell Bell Aircraft’s BoMi (bomber-missile) to the Pentagon. BoMi was a rocket-powered manned spacecraft designed for nuclear combat in space. Occasionally, and behind closed doors, usually at the Pentagon, Dornberger faced challenges. He was once pitching the benefits of BoMi to an audience of air force officials when “abusive and insulting remarks” were shouted at him, according to air force historian Roy F. Houchin II. In that instance, Dornberger is said to have turned on his audience and insisted that BoMi would receive a lot more respect if Dornberger had had a chance to fly it against the United States during a war. There was “deafening silence,” in the room, Houchin noted.
In 1958 the FBI opened an investigation into General Dornberger based on an insider’s tip that he might be engaged in secret discussions with Communist spies. The special agent who interviewed Dornberger did not believe he was spying for the Soviets but honed in on Dornberger’s duplicitous nature: “It is believed that subject [Dornberger] could carry on satisfactorily in the role of a double agent.” Dornberger was a cunning man, and this quality, coupled with his scientific acumen, served him. No matter what the circumstances, Dornberger always seemed to come out on top.