NP - W von Braun on Nazi Hunter doc

[Thomas Eckhardt]

I believe that Pynchon's sources for his take on Paperclip and the 
Mittelwerke/Dora have been identified, among them Walter Dornberger, 
Dieter Huzel (Rocketdyne), James McGovern "Crossbow and Overcast" 
(1964). I am not sure though whether Pynchon would have found the 
details about Dora in McGovern -- certainly not in Dornberger or Huzel. 
Is there another source?


Paperclip was indeed not very secret, as Monte Davis has pointed out. 
Referring to the publicist's blurb for Annie Jacobsen's "Operation 
Paperclip", Monte wrote:

--"...a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government
secret of the twentieth century."

Assuming that by "jealously guarded" you mean "not known to people who
ignored dozens of news reports and books from 1946 on, not to mention
Wernher von Braun's nefarious talks to top-secret Chamber Of Commerce
luncheons in New Mexico, Texas and Alabama."

(...) As I've argued here before, the real Paperclip-WvB story is not

"Look how They kept a deep dark secret from innocent, trusting Americans"

-- which is simply, provably false -- but

"Look how smoothly we -- government, press and public together -- 
replaced the 'Nazi wizards of war' narrative with the 'shiny science 
defends us from Commies' narrative."--

https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1402&msg=179490&sort=date

Well put and convincing, as always. In order to replace one narrative 
with the other, however, a lot of information had to be actively 
suppressed, above all information about Mittelwerke/Dora.


This is the subject of chapter 4 of Linda Hunt's "Secret Agenda", 'A 
Hell Called Dora'. Here are some quotes loosely pertinent to your questions:

"In the fall of 1946 Air Materiel Command headquarters at Wright Field 
was bustling with activity. Dozens of reporters mingled with the large 
crowd that had gathered at the air base. The War Department's news 
blackout had been lifted. Wright Field and other bases were having an 
open house to introduce some of Nazi Germany's finest scientists. AAF 
officers put on frozen smiles as twenty Germans, in their best suits, 
went out to meet the press. The group was carefully selected from among
eighty-six German jet engine, helicopter, and other aircraft specialists 
employed by the AAF at Wright Field or in cities where they worked under 
Army Air Forces contracts at aircraft factories or
universities."

(...)

"The open house resulted in a flood of favorable newspaper and magazine 
stories which highly pleased the War Department. The Germans' Nazi past 
was forgotten. After all, reporters had been told that the Germans had 
been "exhaustively screened." Life, Newsweek, and other magazines
gave prominent display to photographs of the Germans alongside their 
inventions. The local Dayton Daily News was less formal, showing a 
picture of six Germans sunning themselves after lunch. All of the news 
stories created the impression of a congenial, friendly relationship 
between the Germans and AAF officers at the base."

"The problem was, the stories were beautifully orchestrated War 
Department propaganda. The congeniality between the Germans and AAF 
officers was staged. The press was required to clear their copy with 
military censors prior to publication. Most photographs had been 
provided by the U.S. military. Few stories deviated from a lengthy 
five-page War Department press release-a document full of half-truths 
and bald faced lies. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of one 
of the most successful military intelligence disinformation campaigns 
ever foisted on the American public."

(...)

"Contrary to this propaganda, the Nazi past of the Paperclip group 
caused such violent disputes among officers at Wright Field that the air 
inspector once told Colonel Putt, 'The mere mention of the German 
Scientist situation is enough to precipitate emotions in Air Corps 
personnel ranging from vehemence to frustration.'

Air Corps officers stationed in Germany began to arrive in Dayton and 
were outraged to find Germans working there whom they regarded as Nazi 
war criminals."


Most importantly, however, America's brand new rocket scientists had to 
be cleared of all connections to Nazi atrocities. Regarding Dora and the 
suppression of information about the concentration camp, here is the 
description of an exemplary case from the above mentioned chapter in 
Hunt's book which might be of interest to Pynchon readers:

"In October 1946 a letter written by a Paperclip scientist to his 
part-time employer set off a chain of events that instigated Georg 
Rickhey's trial for Nazi war crimes and a military coverup to assure 
that the Nazi past of the rocket group at Fort Bliss remained secret.

Rickhey was an aggressive, cool, and calculating man, one who didn't 
mind attracting attention to himself or his high-ranking position during 
the war. He bragged on papers filed with both Wright Field
and the JIOA that he was the wartime general manager of the Mittelwerk 
underground V-2 rocket factory. During the entire time Rickhey worked at 
Wright Field, from July 21, 1946, until his arrest nearly a year later, 
his name was prominently displayed on U.S. Army war crimes lists as 
being wanted for murder.

His Paperclip job at the air base was analagous to putting a fox in a 
chicken coop. Rickhey was paid to translate forty-two boxes of 
Mittelwerk documents shipped from Nordhausen--the very same
records a U.S. Army war crimes unit sought to use as evidence of his 
crimes."

(...)

"(...) a former Mittelwerk engineer, Werner Voss, openly discussed 
Rickhey's involvement with the hangings. Voss told the Germans that 
Rickhey had instigated several hangings of Dora prisoners in the 
factory. In one case, prisoners were hanged when some of them tried to
revolt after British planes dropped leaflets on the area urging them to 
do so.

The hangings were so gruesome that even today Dora survivors, such as 
Yves Beon, remember them vividly. In one case, twelve prisoners were 
simultaneously hanged on an overhead crane near Arthur Rudolph's office. 
With their hands tied behind their backs and wooden sticks in their 
mouths to stifle screams, the electric crane slowly lifted them above a 
crowd of engineers and prisoners gathered in the tunnel. "Instead of 
letting them drop and killing them on the spot immediately, they let 
them hang very slowly with pain that's absolutely horrible," said Beon. 
Their bodies were left hanging in the tunnel for hours as a warning to 
the other prisoners."

---

By the way: Arthur Rudolph was an important person. His rather typical 
career is described by Wiki thusly:

"After the war, he was brought to the United States by the Office of 
Strategic Services (OSS), subsequently becoming a pioneer of the United 
States space program. He worked for the U.S. Army and NASA where he 
managed the development of several important systems including the 
Pershing missile and the Saturn V Moon rocket. In 1984 he was 
investigated for war crimes, and he agreed to leave the United States 
and renounce his US citizenship in return for not being prosecuted in 
the United States."

By the way 2: The engineers were not authorized to order hangings but 
habitually beat and stabbed prisoners -- the SS had to put an end to 
this kind of unauthorized sadism:

"According to Mittelwerk records, the beatings became so
widespread that Dora's camp doctor complained that prisoners were 
hospitalized for being 'beaten or even stabbed with sharp instruments by 
civilian employees for any petty offense." On June 22, 1944, Rickhey and 
the SS even warned the engineers in writing that punishing prisoners was 
the SS's exclusive domain."

---

Back to Rickhey who was returned to Germany to face trial for war crimes:

"Rickhey's trial posed a serious threat to the Germans working for the 
Army under Paperclip. Detailed explanations of Mittelwerk's management 
structure would expose Rudolph's authority over the Prisoner Labor 
Supply office and his connection to SS officer Simon, who was a 
defendant in the trial. Von Braun would be forced to explain his own 
dubious activities at Mittelwerk. Both might have to explain their 
attendance at the meeting in Rickhey's office in which the idea of
sending more French civilians to Dora was discussed. And then there was 
the ultimate threat-Dora survivors, who were witnesses at the trial, 
might recognize them if they were present in the courtroom."

A summary of Dora:

"In his opening statement, Lieutenant Colonel Berman, the chief 
prosecutor, described Dora as unique among concentration camps in that 
it was created to serve the German war machine. The
entire complex consisted of the main camp, Dora, and thirty-one subcamps 
clustererd around the town of Nordhausen, Germany, in the Harz 
mountains. The camps existed solely to provide forced
labor in the top-secret V-weaponry factory. 'Dora was a concentration 
camp with the avowed purpose of exterminating those who were sent to 
it,' Berman said. 'The method of extermination was not the gas chamber, 
but the method of working them to death, and this they proceeded to
do.'

Of the 60,000 prisoners who had passed through the camp in less than two 
years, one-third died as a result of organized murder. Dora's hospital 
records graphically list the cause of death: 9,000
died from exhaustion and collapse, at least 350 were hanged, and the 
remainder were shot or died from disease or starvation. The bodies of 
those who died were shipped to Buchenwald until Dora's own crematory, 
designed to burn up to seventy-five bodies a day, was complete.

During the trial Rickhey was described as a cold-blooded Nazi who 
ordered the SS to hang prisoners. Four months before American soldiers 
arrived, as Hitler was demanding that more rockets be produced, Rickhey 
took one of his daily walks through the tunnels dressed in full Nazi
uniform and surrounded by heavily armed SS guards. He called the 
prisoners together in the tunnels and threatened to cut off their food 
entirely if they did not work faster. Witnesses said that was
exactly what happened. Soup kettles dried up, potatoes rotted, and the 
death toll mounted. Both Rickhey and Rudolph knew the prisoners were 
dying. Simon's office sent them daily reports on the number of prisoners 
either working, sick, or dead.'

So, what happened?

"Then, in an unprecedented move, the Army classified the entire trial 
record. The American public would not know that Rudolph, Magnus von 
Braun, and others at Fort Bliss had worked at Mittelwerk,
not Peenemunde. The press would not be able to obtain Smith's report 
that noted his suspicions about Rudolph, or see trial testimony of 
witnesses who said it was Rudolph who had signed sabotage
reports that were turned over to the SS. Wernher von Braun would be 
saved from having to answer awkward questions about his frequent visits 
to that underground hell. No one would know about twenty thousand men 
who died while working as slaves on Hitler's V-2. No one would even know 
that Camp Dora existed.

All of that evidence was now safely hidden from public scrutiny. And it 
stayed that way for decades."

Linda Hunt, "Secret Agenda", 'A Hell Called Dora', beginning on p. 36 of 
my pdf-file.

This seems to have been the one trial which laid open the atrocities 
that took place in Dora which were directly linked to the production of 
the V2 and, of course, the celebrated German scientists.

The evidence from the trial was suppressed by the US Army -- in order to 
eventually "put some clown on the moon" (Tom Lehrer).
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l