Several German-speaking U.S. citizens alerted NASA about the allegations against von Braun, as if NASA did not know. The space agency’s three top officials, James E. Webb, Hugh Dryden, and Robert Seamans, discussed the situation with von Braun and counseled him on how to handle it. If anyone were to ask him about this matter, NASA administrator James Webb told von Braun pointedly, his answer was to be, “Everything related to my past activity in Germany… is well known to the U.S. Government.” In the end, nothing much came of the book in the Western world. The narrative mixed “damaging facts” with “completely fabricated scenes,” explains von Braun’s biographer Michael J. Neufeld, which made the book easy to discount. When NASA learned that the book’s author, Julius Mader, worked as an intelligence agent for the East German secret police, the revelations lost their potential power. If need be, Mader’s book could be discounted as Soviet-engineered lies, meant only to damage the prestige of the U.S. space program.
The Secret of Huntsville: The True Career of Rocket Baron Wernher von Braun was a success in the Eastern bloc. It was also translated into Russian and sold half a million copies in the Soviet Union. The book inspired a Soviet-sponsored film, Die Gefrorenen Blitze (Frozen Lightning), also written by Mader and released by the East German state film studio, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), in 1967. The same year, West German prosecutors opened a new Dora-Nordhausen trial, this one called the Essen-Dora trial. An SS guard, a Gestapo official, and the chief of security for the V-2 were all charged with war crimes that took place while V-weapons were being built in the Mittelwerk tunnel complex. Mittelwerk general manager and former Paperclip scientist Georg Rickhey was called as a witness, as was Wernher von Braun. Rickhey, who lived in Germany, took the stand. He testified under oath that he did not know about the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp; that he learned about it after the war. “I don’t know much more because they were secret [concentration] camps,” Rickhey told the court. “It was a secret commando group in charge. Eyes only. There were bad catastrophic conditions [at Nordhausen] but I learned about this only after the war.” This was an absurd misrepresentation of the truth.
Back in America, NASA general counsel refused to send the star of their space program to Germany; this would open Pandora’s box. Instead, they allowed von Braun to deliver oral testimony at a West German consulate in the United States. As a venue, NASA lawyers suggested New Orleans, Louisiana—a place about as far away from the media glare as there was. Representing the Soviet-bloc survivors of Dora-Nordhausen was an East German lawyer by the name of Dr. Friedrich Kaul. Upon learning that von Braun would not be coming to Germany, Dr. Kaul arranged to travel to New Orleans to take von Braun’s testimony himself. Kaul was a supremely skillful lawyer, and he had information on von Braun that was damaging.
According to Michael J. Neufeld, the U.S. government knew that Dr. Kaul had served as legal adviser on Die Gefrorenen Blitze, and that Kaul’s goal in interviewing von Braun was “to broadcast the connection between the rocket engineer, the SS and the concentration camps.” NASA’s moon program would never survive that kind of publicity, and the State Department denied Dr. Friedrich Kaul a visa.
Instead, at the courthouse in Louisiana, von Braun answered questions put to him by a German judge. As the U.S. Army had done with the 1947 Nordhausen trial, the government sealed von Braun’s testimony. Word leaked to the news media that von Braun had been deposed for a war crimes trial, causing von Braun to issue a brief statement on the matter. He said he had “nothing to hide, and I am not implicated.” When a reporter asked if there had been any concentration camp prisoners used as slave laborers at Peenemünde, von Braun said no.
The judge prosecuting the Essen-Dora trial also took the testimony of General Dornberger, in Mexico, where the now-retired Dornberger spent winters with his wife. Some months later, von Braun and Dornberger corresponded about the matter. “In regards to the testimony, fortunately I too have heard nothing more,” wrote von Braun. No news was good news for both men.
After the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, columnist Drew Pearson—whose fierce exposés of Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber had helped to banish the man from America—wrote in his column that von Braun had been a member of the SS. But von Braun’s glory had reached epic proportions, and Pearson’s article went by relatively unnoticed. Von Braun was an American hero. Citizens all across the nation showered him with praise, glory, and the confetti of ticker-tape parades.
After the Apollo space program ended, von Braun moved into the private sector. In his new life as a defense contractor, he traveled the world and met its leaders, including Indira Gandhi, the Shah of Iran, and Crown Prince Juan Carlos of Spain. In 1973, he decided to take up flying, and in June of that year he applied to get his pilot’s license with the Federal Aviation Administration. This required a physical and a body X-ray, which revealed a dark shadow on his kidney. Von Braun had terminal cancer but would live for another four years.