NP - W von Braun on Nazi Hunter doc

[matthew cissell]

Thanks for both your and Monte's responses.

Although History Channel productions are not my cup of meat for
history, the fact that The Team was in the news, which I had no idea
about, got me to thinking about the post someone put up some weeks
back about American press infatuation with Hitler at home (Sept.4
Daily Mail). As I recall from that post many Americans held a
favorable view of AH. Perhaps all that made it easier to just let the
whole thing roll on by. "German (Nazi) scientists working in the US?
Oh gosh what a shock - can you pass the cornbread?" I mean by that
time the REAL fight was with them Reds.

Didn't Wilhelm Reich say something about at a certain level the
Germans wanted a dictator? This then makes me think about how some of
Pynchon's characters (Frenesi for example) gravitate toward these
fascistic personalities.


Thanks for the Linda Hunt reference, I just downloaded the PDF.

Ciao
MC otis

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 11:04 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