In 1960, von Braun and a group of approximately 120 Operation Paperclip scientists, engineers, and technicians were transferred from the army to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, with a mandate to build the Saturn rockets designed to take man to the moon. Von Braun was made director of the new NASA facility, the Marshall Space Flight Center, also located at the Redstone Arsenal, as well as chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, or “superbooster” rocket, as it would become known. Von Braun’s deputy developer on the Saturn program was Arthur Rudolph, the former operations director at the Mittelwerk slave labor facility.
The Saturn V rocket would need its own launch complex and hangar. Cape Canaveral, on Florida’s east coast, was chosen as the perfect site. On July 1, 1962, NASA activated its Launch Operations Center there, naming Kurt Debus as director. Debus was the ardent Nazi who, during the war and on his own volition, had turned an engineering colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Hitler remarks. To house the giant Saturn rocket, NASA constructed the Vertical Assembly Building on nearby Merritt Island. The structure would soon become the most voluminous building in the world—larger than the Pentagon and almost as tall as the Washington Monument. It was designed by Bernhard Tessmann, former facilities designer at Peenemünde and Nordhausen, and one of the two men who, at war’s end, stashed the V-2 documents in the D?rnten mine.
As had Dornberger, von Braun worked carefully to whitewash his Nazi past. He knew never to speak of the fact that he had become a Nazi Party member in 1937. When a reporter once asked him, incorrectly, about his joining the party “in 1942,” von Braun put his scientist’s precision aside and chose not to correct the newsman. Instead von Braun did what he always did—he said that he’d been coerced into joining the Nazi Party. Never did von Braun speak of the SS cavalry unit he joined, in 1933, or that he was made an SS officer in 1944 and wore the SS officer’s uniform, with its swastika on the armband and its cap with the death’s-head image. With a revelation like that, he could have been deported under the Internal Security Act of 1950, which was meant to keep Communists out of the country but also covered anyone who had held membership in a “totalitarian dictatorship.” Instead, the fact that he was an officer with the SS remained a jealously guarded secret by all parties—von Braun, the U.S. military, and NASA until CNN journalist Linda Hunt broke the story in 1985.
But the dark shadow of von Braun’s complicity in Nazi war crimes followed him around. Sometimes it snuck up on him from behind. One day, while visiting the Collier’s offices, he was riding in the elevator with fellow Paperclip Scientist Heinz Haber, from the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base, and Cornelius Ryan, his editor. Also in the elevator were a few Collier’s magazine staffers, one of whom reached out to Haber, rubbed a piece of the scientist’s leather coat between his fingers, and said wryly, “Human skin, of course?”
As man got closer and closer to the moon, Wernher von Braun enjoyed a parallel ascent in fortune and in fame. Because von Braun was a public figure, his Nazi past was always there, but in shadow. By the 1960s, it was sometimes treated as a joke. One night, before an Apollo mission, von Braun stormed out of a press conference after a reporter asked him if he could guarantee that the rocket would not hit London. Tom Lehrer wrote a song famously satirizing von Braun: “ ‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick created a von Braun–inspired character in his black comedy Dr. Strangelove, in which a mad scientist famously gets out of a wheelchair and cries, “Mein Führer, I can walk!” But in 1963, in East Berlin, a popular author and lawyer named Julius Mader wrote a book called The Secret of Huntsville: The True Career of Rocket Baron Wernher von Braun. On the dust jacket there was a drawing of von Braun wearing a black SS-Sturmbannführer’s uniform. Around von Braun’s neck was the Knight’s Cross, bestowed upon him by Albert Speer at the Castle Varlar event. The book, published by Deutscher Milit?rverlag, portrayed von Braun as an ardent Nazi and included detailed pages about the murderous conditions at the slave labor facility at Nordhausen, where von Braun oversaw work, and at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp, which supplied the slave laborers.