NP - W von Braun on Nazi Hunter doc

[Monte Davis]

Thank you for recalling that, Thomas, and for your pointed additions.

The other element of context I'll repeat is that slave/POW labor was very
widespread by 1943 in the German civilian economy as well as in production
of war materiel .While Mittelwerk-Dora was horrific (HFKF Kammler really
did approach the movie stereotype of the SS officer as sadistic monster),
abuse of those laborers -- including casual summary execution of slackers
and alleged saboteurs -- was not rare.

*Many thousands* of German business managers (as well as the SS/military
liaisons who supplied their laborers) were deeply implicated in those
crimes. Very few were ever charged; many continued their careers
successfully; and some became pillars of the Wirtschaftswunder and German
public life. The western allies, to keep a smashed economy going in
1945-1946. and then out of... political delicacy as West Germany became a
crucial NATO ally, chose not to cut the wide swath that we may think
justice demanded.

NONE OF THIS EXCULPATES WERNHER VON BRAUN ET AL. IN THE LEAST. But just as
the "Paperclip and Dora were a deep dark secret" meme is false no matter
how many times it cranks up a new book or History Channel re-hash, so
"these Peenemunde exploiters of slave labor got a unique free pass on their
crimes" is is a gross exaggeration. As Gravity's Rainbow shows, there's
abundant real, bitter irony in how WWII's victors raced to turn that awful
Nazi terror weapon into their own _ultima ratio regum_, while kindly Dr.
von Braun talked of space on Disney TV with military missile models on the
credenza behind him. (And none of that puny Amatol, foax! We got
*plutonium* shrecklichkeit!) No need to paint the lily.

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> 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
>
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