In the 1970s, several events led to a major shift in the American public’s perception of the Holocaust, Nazis, and the United States. A series of congressional oversight hearings were convened as a result of many high-profile cases of Nazi war criminals found living in America. The hearings drew attention to the fact that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been negligent in its investigations of these individuals and in turn led to the creation of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. Then came the 1978 broadcast of NBC’s four-part miniseries Holocaust, which broke records for family viewing and made Americans who had never contemplated the Holocaust think seriously about what had happened in Nazi Germany and what the state-sponsored murder of six million people really meant. These events set the stage for a simple, fortuitous occurrence for a young Harvard law student named Eli Rosenbaum, the consequences of which would profoundly impact the Paperclip scientists who had something to hide.
In 1980, Eli Rosenbaum was perusing book titles inside a Cambridge bookstore when he came across Dora: The Nazi Concentration Camp Where Modern Space Technology Was Born and 30,000 Prisoners Died, written by a former Dora prisoner, the French Resistance fighter Jean Michel. The narrative is detailed and revelatory in its brutal honesty. Jean Michel called his book an homage to the thirty thousand slave laborers who died building the V-2s. He comments on the memoirs written by Wernher von Braun and General Dornberger, and the countless interviews given by many of the other V-2 scientists who worked under Operation Paperclip. None of these Germans, notes Michel, utters a word about Nordhausen.
“I do not reproach these men with not having made public confessions after the war,” Michel writes. “I do not hold it against the scientists that they did not choose to be martyrs when they discovered the truth about the [death] camps. No, mine is a more modest objective. I make my stand solely against the monstrous distortion of history which, in silencing certain facts and glorifying others, has given birth to false, foul and suspect myths.”
In that same Cambridge bookstore, on that same day, Eli Rosenbaum came across a second book about the V-2 rocket. This one was called The Rocket Team and was written by Frederick I. Ordway III and Mitchell R. Sharpe, with an introduction by Wernher von Braun. The book discusses and quotes the German scientists involved in the U.S. rocket program. In one part of the book, engineer Arthur Rudolph—praised as the developer of NASA’s Saturn V rocket program—shares his thoughts with the authors. Rudolph is not identified as having once been operations director at the Mittelwerk slave labor facility.
Rudolph relates an anecdote from the war, concerning his dismay at being called away from a New Year’s Eve party in 1943–44 because of a problem with some of the V-2 rockets. An accompanying photograph shows a POW in striped prisoner pajamas moving rocket parts. Eli Rosenbaum had spent the previous summer working for the Department of Justice in its Office of Special Investigations. He knew that the Geneva Convention forbade nations from forcing prisoners of war to work on munitions. He had also just read about what went on in the Nordhausen tunnels in Jean Michel’s book Dora. Rosenbaum later recalled that he “was particularly offended by Rudolph’s taking umbrage at missing a gala party while slave laborers toiled.” The following year, after graduating from Harvard Law School, Rosenbaum started full-time work at the Department of Justice as a trial lawyer. He persuaded his boss, Neal M. Sher, to open an investigation into Arthur Rudolph.