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00:00Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant the stars and stripes of America on the surface of the moon.
00:18Back home on Earth, an audience of 600 million tune in on their televisions.
00:23The world is united around America's greatest achievement, a giant leap for all mankind.
00:37The Apollo 11 astronauts even embark on a worldwide goodwill tour.
00:43A narrative is constructed that conceals a more complicated story.
00:48This account is forged in the flames of World War II and in the Allies' defeat of Nazi Germany.
00:57The themes are, in broadest literary terms, forgetfulness, money, ambition, especially deception and lying.
01:05This is a story that's filled with lying by prominent people.
01:09Using previously classified documents, this film looks at how America turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities.
01:18As Europe smoldered, they embarked on a huge operation to recruit members of the Nazi party, whitewashing their records and gifting them new lives in America.
01:29These scientists would put man on the moon, and one in particular would become a national hero, only occasionally letting the mask slip.
01:41I believe you were forced to join the Nazi party, as I understand.
01:44No, this isn't quite right.
01:50Leaving us to ask, was the 1969 moon landing really a giant leap for mankind, or a last victory for the Nazis?
02:14Apollo 11 is preparing for liftoff.
02:19The team, who have worked on the mission for the last eight years, watch on nervously at the Launch Control Center in Florida.
02:27Kennedy, of course, in 1961, had set this bold, ambitious goal of the U.S. reaching the moon.
02:33I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
02:45After Kennedy made that speech, he went to a park in Washington, sat on a bench and thought, we have no way of doing, we have no knowledge about how to do this.
02:59He sat there, telling himself what, essentially, what on, what the heck are we going to do?
03:07And so, the Apollo mission was dedicated to that, with resources and personnel.
03:12As the rocket carrying Apollo 11 is launched, the hopes of America are invested in an unlikely group of rocketeers.
03:20But the 1969 space mission isn't the first time these men have found themselves at the epicenter of global events.
03:29By the time the war ends, it's quite clear to the Western allies that Nazi Germany was ahead in a number of important scientific and technological fields, not least rocketry, and therefore these are areas which America, Britain and others look to exploit in order to improve their own arsenals and their own industries.
03:54Well, the concept at the time among policymakers was intellectual reparations.
04:00When the Soviet Union moved into Germany, they started to remove every piece of infrastructure that they could ship out, and for good reason.
04:09The Germans had built this powerful and in many ways revolutionary war machine, and there was really a race on between the Russians on one side and then on the other side in the US.
04:24The geopolitics at the time, we go from two allies working together to defeat Nazi Germany, to actually two opposing ideologies that are rivals in every single way.
04:37In the midst of the race to seize German assets and firepower. A partially destroyed list of names is found by a janitor working at Bonn University. The questions for the allies are, is this list real? And if it is, where are the men on it?
04:55The Osenberg list was a record created by the Nazi military research association, detailing 15,000 German scientists and technicians that needed to be recalled from kind of frontline service, and brought back to work on key military scientific projects for the German army and the German armed forces.
05:13The biggest name on the Osenberg list of the scientists would have been Werner Von Braun, who was the mastermind of the V2 rockets that held down London, Antwerp and elsewhere, and kind of the boy wonder of their rocket program.
05:27He was charismatic, handsome, he was a perfect Aryan specimen, which meant everything in that bureaucracy.
05:37The Osenberg list finds itself in the hands of the American government, and they realize that what they need to do is investigate this list.
05:45So they task Major Robert B. Staver as the man who's going to do the intelligence work, because of course what they need to determine is how legitimate is this list?
05:54Actually, who's still alive who's on this list?
05:56Army Major Robert Staver arrives in the middle of the area where the V2 had been mass produced in late April of 1945.
06:06So he goes in to try to scout out documents and equipment and personnel.
06:14Staver is one to see the value very early on in these scientific minds.
06:18He has a Stanford degree in engineering, and he's very mindful of the kind of broader geostrategic conversations that are going on.
06:27He gets permission from his superiors, his army superiors who were in Paris at that point, to get a truck, get all these, you know, like tons and tons of documents out of a cave where they've been hidden.
06:39And then he says, by the way, I think we should bring over a hundred of them, too, to work for the U.S.
06:45He ran into a lot of resistance from his immediate colleagues and his immediate boss, who said, that's absurd, we're never going to, you know, we're never going to bring Nazis over.
06:57Despite this opposition, Staver's request is granted. But the man on the Osenberg list he really wants has already fled Germany.
07:06As the end of the war approached, almost every German person was thinking, which side was it better to surrender to or which side did you want to end up in the occupied territory of?
07:14And for the vast majority of them, it would have been the Western allies, particularly the USA.
07:19And the German scientists were no exception to this.
07:21The thinking for many in Nazi Germany and the high command, so to speak, is what to do with the scientific talent in Nazi Germany.
07:32Is it to liquidate the scientific talent in Nazi Germany, a euphemism for killing?
07:37Von Braun and Walter Dornberger, the German general who was really the head of the rocket program,
07:43they and several other prominent V2 figures ran for their lives essentially to Bavaria and holed up in a ski lodge there.
07:55And then when the American army got close, Werner Von Braun sent his brother Magnus down the hill on a bike.
08:01He encounters this young American GI who speaks German, Fred Schneikert from Wisconsin.
08:08And he says to him, I'm the brother of the inventor of the V2.
08:14And Fred supposedly turned to one of his colleagues and says, I've got a nut here.
08:20They realized what they had.
08:23The question of who was exploiting whom is one of the wonderful mysteries of this story.
08:34There was definitely a mutual benefit for both the Americans and the German scientists.
08:39The war department wanted their scientific and technical expertise to try and recreate what they had done in Germany.
08:46And the Nazi scientists wanted to avoid any involvement in war atrocity prosecutions.
08:53And also, in the case of many of them, be able to continue their scientific work.
08:59I mean, Von Braun was looking for his next employer, basically.
09:02An example of how unworried Von Braun was was that a reporter for the army newspaper came within a day or two and said that Von Braun conducted himself more like a celebrity than a prisoner.
09:18Von Braun was interrogated. They all were.
09:21There was a standard denazification process that they were subjected to.
09:28Very soft questioning. And the records of their interrogation is that the Americans were just, wow, golly, gee, you mean you could really do that?
09:40It's almost that bad.
09:44Werner Von Braun, I think, is very aware of making sure that he is following a very particular narrative.
09:51And so it's very much a I was following orders type of narrative.
09:55And so it's really interesting because actually he gives an interview to the press quite soon after his surrender.
10:02I myself and everybody you see here have decided to go west.
10:07And I think our decision was not one of expediency but a moral decision.
10:13We knew that we had created a new means of warfare.
10:19And the question as to what nation to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else.
10:30We wanted to spare, see the world spare another conflict such as Germany had just been through.
10:36And we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible would such an assurance to the world be best secured.
10:50He's kind of almost acknowledging, look, I know that I made V2 rockets that killed civilians.
10:56But ultimately what he's saying is that's already happened. I have the knowledge. It's too late.
11:00But at least isn't it better that I'm safely in your hands in the West?
11:05He's playing a very interesting game. And he toes that line quite consistently.
11:10With Wernher von Braun and his associates in military custody, a debate rages between the State Department and the War Department about what to do with these Nazi scientists.
11:21There was some fairly intense debate within the U.S. government. The State Department, as they saw this coming, was officials there were quite opposed to this.
11:30They said, if this ever gets out, just think how this is going to look.
11:33You know, the optics of this are horrible, basically.
11:36And one of the War Department advocates said they needed the State Department to stop beating a dead Nazi, was a quote from them.
11:43Once again, any opposition is dismissed and plans for a top secret project take shape.
11:50This will bring Nazi scientists to America for a temporary custodianship, utilizing their superior knowledge of ballistic missiles.
11:59The operation will be given the code name Paperclip.
12:04Operation Paperclip was a major American program to bring German scientists, technicians and engineers to the USA, to put them to work on scientific and technological projects, principally related to the military, but not exclusively so.
12:25In September of 1945, the inventor of Germany's deadly V2 rocket, Wernher von Braun, arrives in Texas.
12:32He and his colleagues will stay for a fixed period and help the U.S. develop missiles.
12:39In Washington, D.C., Operation Paperclip is officially sanctioned by President Harry S. Truman.
12:45But there are certain directives.
12:50The biggest hurdle for Paperclip staff, if you will, of recruiters, is that Truman says that ardent Nazis and kind of Nazis of the highest criminal classes
13:00could not be recruited and taken into the United States under the terms of Paperclip.
13:05The American intelligence agencies, I would say they take that information and they see it as a bit of an issue.
13:11Because actually, you know, there are a lot of these men, like Wernher von Braun was involved in the SS, for example.
13:17The American recruitment of German scientists and technicians was a morally problematic endeavour.
13:22Some of these men had certainly been closely affiliated with the Nazi Party and the SS.
13:27But the climate of the early Cold War, where everything was seen in the light of how best could America get an advantage over or ultimately beat the Soviet Union,
13:36meant that a lot of those moral concerns were ignored or swept under the rug.
13:41Well, the key word there is ignored. Those directives, I don't think, were ever withdrawn. They were simply ignored by the army especially.
13:53In some cases, Nazi scientists who have proved themselves desirable to the American military are even given the opportunity to alter their own records.
14:03They are able to qualify for Paperclip by erasing their histories.
14:08Any involvement in war crime atrocities was essentially purged from their records.
14:15And for purposes of the program, they became Nazis in name only.
14:19Maybe they were members of the Nazi Party, but on paper they were never loyal Nazis.
14:24They had no relationship with Hitler. They weren't involved in war crimes, whether it was slave labour or medical experimentation on prisoners or anything like that.
14:34The American press become aware of the arrival of hundreds of Nazi scientists in the Deep South in late 1946.
14:43The War Department challenges these reports as Paperclip has to weather its first storm of bad publicity.
14:49The War Department, the agency that administered Paperclip, insisted to the press that they ruled out Nazis.
14:56And that was just a bald-faced lie. And columnists would sometimes, you know, discover the Nazis, you know, the bad Nazis who would come over.
15:03And then they would often investigate the columnists. So that was the level of pushback that was going on.
15:09The first stories about Paperclip scientists start to trickle out in the Washington Post and some other media outlets.
15:15And it's picked up by some very notable people, people like Eleanor Roosevelt.
15:20She strongly opposes it and brings in other notable thinkers like Albert Einstein.
15:25Albert Einstein, who can really speak to the conditions of the German scientific community, the choices that had to be made, the moral dilemmas presented to them.
15:35There were a small number of cases where the U.S. was forced to backtrack because of outside pressure, disclosing what a few of these men had done.
15:45One case was a Nazi doctor by the name of Walter Schreiber.
15:49And there was a prominent newspaper columnist at that time, Drew Pearson, who wrote a column disclosing what he had been involved in in the war.
15:59And horrible Nazi experimentation, including exposing Polish girls to gangrene to see what the response would be and how they would survive and whether they would survive.
16:11This was just one of a whole number of horrible things that they would do to see what their own pilots, German pilots in the Luftwaffe, could withstand.
16:23The military defended him at first and tried to sort of say how important he was, but then the pressure built and finally they just sent him down to Argentina.
16:31And there was no attempt to, you know, prosecute him or hold him accountable.
16:35Operatives working on Paperclip continued to recruit from Germany well into the 1950s.
16:41Altogether, the program relocates over 1,600 Nazi scientists, technicians, engineers and other professionals to the U.S.
16:52America knows they are now in an arms race with the Soviet Union and losing is not an option.
16:59The President has announced the dropping of an atomic explosive within Russia.
17:07Now we are faced with a very grave problem and we must alert the whole world to the dangers of an unrestricted atomic armaments race.
17:18There's any kind of number of instances where the Soviets are seen to be more and more threatening.
17:23The most dramatic is the 1949 test of the Soviet bomb.
17:28American kind of thinkers and engineers and politicians had variously estimated that it would be 5 to 20 years before the Soviets got the bomb.
17:38And so that sets the kind of, not just the recruitment, but the retention efforts for Operation Paperclip.
17:47For Werner Von Braun and his colleagues in the South, so keen are the Americans to retain knowledge in this emerging Cold War,
17:54that a way is found to legitimize their presence in the U.S.
17:59The way they finally get visas is that because you have to have a point of immigration.
18:04So they're in Texas on the Mexican border.
18:06So they take them over the border to Juarez and the American Council in Juarez stamps them in.
18:11So that's when they finally have official entry into the U.S.
18:20In 1950, they were moved to Huntsville, Alabama.
18:23So the heart of the segregated South.
18:26Just a kind of backwater.
18:29And that's when they started building the Redstone rocket, which was their first dedicated ballistic missile in the U.S.
18:36Based on German V2 technology, the Redstone is designed to carry a high-explosive warhead.
18:43A bureaucratic fight with the U.S. Air Force means Von Braun and his team have to limit the range of their rockets.
18:50But this will change almost overnight.
18:58There are dates that school children in the United States are required to memorize,
19:03like October 12, 1492, when Columbus discovered America.
19:07Now there was a new date for Russian youngsters to remember.
19:11October 4, 1957, when Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, was launched.
19:18The new moon circled the globe every 96 minutes.
19:24In the history of the Earth, no other event had captured the imagination of so many people as this first step into space.
19:34In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked America and the world with two major technological breakthroughs.
19:41Firstly, they launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite into orbit.
19:45And secondly, they revealed the first intercontinental ballistic missile that, in theory at least, meant that the USA was now within striking distance of the Soviet Union.
19:55Both of these developments were met with shock and horror by the American population,
19:59who felt the idea of a Russian spy satellite orbiting overhead and watching them particularly concerning.
20:05Well, I think that, you know, Russia's getting into space really bothers me,
20:11because it's making the Cold War between Russia and the United States, you know, more intense.
20:17What do you think this is going to be due to our prestige?
20:21I don't think it's going to enhance it any at this time, but I imagine we'll be able to catch up and maybe even surpass them on the way.
20:32Thank you very much.
20:33You're welcome.
20:35It's frightening.
20:36We should find out what they're doing that we're not doing, and we should do something about it very quickly.
20:44Sputnik was a profound change.
20:46This arch enemy, this alien ideology was farther ahead.
20:54In Huntsville, Alabama, one man has been making the case for space exploration for years.
21:01Being the inventor of the Nazi V2 rocket and recruited as part of a top-secret military program could be problematic.
21:10But thankfully for Werner Von Braun and his team, a homegrown American icon has already lent a hand.
21:18My book about Von Braun, Dark Side of the Moon, was published in 2009.
21:31I worked on that book for 15 years.
21:35Astronomers tell us that the Earth we live on and the Moon we see in the sky are but tiny specks in a tremendous universe that contains billions upon billions of stars and other worlds.
21:46But I'm old enough that in the 1950s, I was one of the children glued to American TV screens watching the Disney program where Von Braun was really first presented to a mass audience.
22:00And, you know, I thought he was wonderful.
22:04And certainly his message was inspiring.
22:07So maybe that's the starting point.
22:09Here to reveal a plan for a trip around the Moon, Dr. Werner Von Braun.
22:14When the day arrives for construction to begin, the thousands of parts for the space station will be transported to the orbit by our multi-stage rockets.
22:24We merely replace the winged passenger section with a simple cargo carrying nose.
22:29So Werner Von Braun is there.
22:31He's got his, you know, various props and things like that.
22:34And he takes the public through how he's going to do it.
22:39Von Braun was trying his best to get a satellite into space.
22:43He was specifically overruled by the Pentagon.
22:46They would not, you know, allow him to do this.
22:48He says it will be a disaster for the US if the Soviets get a satellite up ahead of us.
22:54When the Soviets launched Sputnik as part of this international geophysical year, Von Braun writes to his superiors and says,
23:03we could have had a man in space or a satellite in space two years ago.
23:09Give me 60 days and I'll get it done.
23:12There's some pushback.
23:13They say take 90 days.
23:14Von Braun said fine, but I meant 60 days.
23:17But that is when his remit really changes.
23:19Operation Paperclip originally, in terms of what they were focusing on,
23:23they were focusing on missiles, on rockets, but also on different types of warfare as well.
23:27Chemical warfare, nuclear warfare, for example.
23:29But what then happens is there's now a space exploration element that is added.
23:35And so we've got a slight pivot now.
23:37But of course, there's a huge crossover because the technology, which a lot of people don't realize, I think,
23:41that the technology within the arms race overlaps hugely with technology necessary for the space race.
23:47And I would say in that kind of Venn diagram,
23:50Werner Von Braun is at the center of that.
23:52And so Sputnik was on October 4th.
23:56And Von Braun answers Sputnik with a satellite of our very own on January 31st of 1958.
24:03So he got it up in a few months.
24:05Before the news conference, the big picture camera and Sergeant Stuart Queen drew Dr. Von Braun aside for a special interview.
24:12Dr. Von Braun, I wonder if you could tell our big picture viewers just what did transpire during those 84 days.
24:23It's a rather hectic 84 days, I can assure you of that.
24:27A project like firing a satellite into orbit is only possible if there's splendid teamwork all the way through.
24:38Once Von Braun gets Explorer up, the space race is on.
24:43In 1960, Werner Von Braun and his team are transferred to the newly formed NASA, building rockets at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
24:53He has become the voice of space exploration.
24:58Werner Von Braun really became a very public and revered figure, not just within the U.S. military establishment, but well beyond that.
25:06He wrote books, a comic book about going to Mars.
25:09He was this very debonair figure, sort of a renaissance man.
25:14He played classical piano.
25:15He was a scuba diver.
25:16He was sort of a dashing, well-dressed man.
25:19And he really made himself into a figure of some renown.
25:24He really is, in a sense, the first space celebrity.
25:27Even before the astronauts, who we all come to know and love, but before the Neil Armstrongs and the Buzz Aldrins and the Shepherds,
25:34Von Braun is this first space celebrity.
25:38Werner Von Braun is even the subject of a biopic, portraying him as a man of peace and remorse.
25:47Things were certainly simpler in the old days, when I used to work here.
25:53I was happy then.
25:55Of course you were.
25:57All you wanted to do then was to reach the moon.
26:00And all I did was to smash up other people's greenhouses.
26:05I didn't know then that I would become an addict.
26:09An addict?
26:11Yes.
26:13For this obsession of mine.
26:20Space.
26:22The depiction of Von Braun as a romantic explorer is one that he and Nasser continue to cultivate.
26:32Von Braun was really great at selling the spiritual aspect of this project.
26:38To really catch people's sort of sense of adventure and this kind of exalted sense of achievement.
26:46The USA emerges after the Second World War as a superpower.
26:50And it starts to conceive of itself as the leading country for all humanity.
26:54So when America's doing something, it's doing it not just for Americans, but for the world at large, or at least for the free world.
27:00And Werner Von Braun is very clever at recognising this shift, recognising the kind of language that's being used for that.
27:06Humanity's future being beyond the earth and into space.
27:10He knows he's going to find an audience for that among the American people.
27:13He very much wants to emphasise that part of his story, which is that he's looking forward and is going to be one of the people that's responsible for pushing the human experience further and further.
27:25And he tries to do whatever he can to acknowledge what's happened in the past, but he downplays it and wants to shift the conversation as quickly as possible to what he can do for us in the future.
27:40With the successful firing of the Saturn, a gigantic stride has been taken in the exploration of space.
27:48Many times I've been asked why we are exploring beyond our earth.
27:53I will give you a few of the many valid reasons.
27:58First of all, of course, is knowledge of the earth, our solar system, and the universe.
28:05Throughout history, new knowledge has always improved the lot of the human race.
28:10Achievement of our major goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth within this decade will be of inestimable value.
28:20We have been given the scientific knowledge, the technical ability, and the materials to pursue the exploration of the universe.
28:29To ignore these great resources would be a corruption of a God-given ability.
28:35Kennedy was completely pragmatic about going into space. He really wasn't interested in it.
28:43Leading up to his famous May 25th, 1961 speech that we were going to put a man on the moon before this decade is out, was two things that happened that spring.
28:54One was that he had just taken over the presidency and inherited a really idiotic CIA plot from Eisenhower, which was an invasion of Cuba.
29:06And the second one was the Soviets put up the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.
29:12We now know it as a moonshot, right? Kennedy's moonshot. But before Kennedy's moonshot, Kennedy was looking for the language of a moonshot.
29:21And it's Von Braun who has this reservoir, this history of selling space, selling the optimism of space, selling the hope of space, selling the frontier of space.
29:34He has that at the ready, and he gives that to Kennedy.
29:38Even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.
29:47But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket, more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, to an unknown celestial body, and this will be done in the decade of the 60s.
30:12One of the few voices to speak out in opposition to Werner von Braun and his growing celebrity is a daring satirist named Tom Lehrer.
30:21Well, speaking of bombs, what is it that makes America the world's greatest nuclear power?
30:27And what is it that will make it possible for us to spend $20,000 million of our taxpayers' money to put some idiot on the moon?
30:36Well, it was the great, enormous superiority of American technology, of course, as provided by our great American scientists, such as Dr. Werner von Braun.
30:49There is some criticism of Werner von Braun and his team in the years leading up to the moon landing.
30:54Very famously, there's a song by the satirist Tom Lehrer where he pokes fun at the fact that Von Braun seems to have a very flexible allegiance, shifting from Germany to the USA, and even hinting that in the future he might end up working for China instead.
31:09Gather round while I sing you a Werner von Braun, a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown. Nazi schmatze says Werner von Braun.
31:28Paperclip finally was not a secret. Everybody knew these scientists were around. The confection of who they were and why they were in America was so perfect, so pervasive, that anyone who would have questioned it vigorously, their patriotism would have been questioned.
31:51In January 1969, Werner von Braun is called to give evidence at a trial in West Germany.
32:04Three SS guards are accused of hanging 70 prisoners while posted at a concentration camp called Mittelbau Dora, connected to the V2 rocket factory.
32:15Von Braun denies any awareness of, or involvement in, war crimes.
32:21The U.S. grudgingly allowed Von Braun to be deposed, but only in the U.S., in New Orleans, right before, maybe a month or two before the moon landing.
32:31So you have this ironic sequence of, here he is, his past being thrown in his face over his involvement in Nazi war crimes, and then immediately afterwards, the biggest achievement of his life, which was the U.S. landing on the moon.
32:44Well?
32:45I'm so excited, I don't know what to say. It's so beautiful.
32:47Real good, real good.
32:48It's a triumph for the United States, and it'll show the Russians that, uh, if we, if we got to know what to say, it's so beautiful.
32:54Real good, real good.
32:55It's a triumph for the United States, and it'll show the Russians that, uh, we, if we got to know how.
33:04In the years after the moon landing, Werner Von Braun really secures his position. He really is a kind of unimpeachable American figurehead.
33:11My first guest tonight is the father of the rocket, he was in charge of developing rockets for the Germans during, before and during the Second World War.
33:22This seems so strange when we remember the Second World War.
33:25american figurehead my first guest tonight is the father of the rocket he was in charge of
33:30developing rockets for the germans during uh before and during the second world war this
33:35seems so strange when we remember the second world war and now through a quirk of history
33:39he's in charge of developing our space program uh one of those ironic things will you welcome
33:44please the legendary dr werner von braun dick cavett is known as a really intelligent candid
33:50interviewer and dick cavett kind of takes the bait and he gets distracted almost by verda von braun's
33:59passion for this kind of space story i believe you were forced to join the nazi party as i understand
34:07no this isn't quite right oh um the situation was such that i just figured as long as i'm working
34:16on rockets here rockets here i really can't afford not to use any any any help i can get i needed
34:22every bit of help and uh to uh to turn this down would have been tantamount to say i i give up working
34:31in this field which as i said a little earlier uh would have meant uh pretty close to defecting
34:39the cause and times of war but i decided was not the thing to do well van braun was an american
34:46celebrity you know he was on the dick cavett show in alabama especially he was uh which is where he
34:52had built his his base with many of the the nazi scientists um he was a revered figure it's almost
34:59exactly 20 years that i first came to huntsville once you received us newcomers with perhaps some amused
35:10tolerance we were fully aware of that as those crackpot scientists who want to go to the moon
35:18but after you found out that there was at least some seriousness in us you soon became our most
35:24loyal supporters and so all this became possible he was you know a frequent guest at the pentagon
35:31and the white house among senior senior politicians and presidents despite their fame
35:37the men who put man on the moon can't outrun their nazi pasts as documents are declassified and victims
35:45speak out the secretive world of operation paperclip begins to emerge
35:51the links between paperclip scientists and engineers and the crimes of the third reich did not become
36:10concretized until the 1980s mostly because archival evidence was opened up in 1982 following work by
36:20investigative reporters the justice department sets up a dedicated unit to locate war criminals residing
36:27in the u.s the so-called nazi hunters focus their attention on a man named arthur rudolph
36:34arthur rudolph was a german rocket scientist who came over to the usa at around the same time
36:38as venner von braun and worked quite closely with him particularly on missile development but later on
36:43the space program as well arthur rudolph
36:52in the 1980s so after verner von braun had died some unpleasant truths come to light around arthur
36:58rudolph's service during the nazi regime now retired and living in san jose california
37:05rudolph is questioned by three justice department officials
37:09rudolph it becomes fairly apparent in 1982 and 1983 that he was indeed an ardent nazi and that he
37:18did oversee human suffering and death whether or not he directed it is debated at the time but he does
37:26oversee human suffering and death so the deal is rudolph go back to germany we're stripping you of your
37:33american citizenship you are no longer our german arthur rudolph becomes one of the first paperclip
37:39recruits to be removed from america since walter schreiber in 1952. i sometimes wonder whether von
37:47brown's sheer charisma and success would have shielded rudolph from them from from this if he had been alive
37:57because i think if they got rudolph they would be forced to go after von brown
38:02the line of inquiry pursued by the nazi hunters is a familiar one to followers of operation paperclip
38:08the underground v2 rocket factory and its connected concentration camp middle bow door it consisted of
38:15twin tunnels that had been there for many years which were utterly primitive a camp was established by
38:23the ss which bureaucratically was in charge of utilizing slave laborers so many of the laborers were dying that
38:30they uh built crematoria there you wouldn't want to be called upon to rank those human catastrophes
38:39during that era but um this was this was a terrible one between 1943 and 1945 60 000 prisoners were brought
38:51to middle bow by the nazis even a conservative estimate puts a number who did not survive at 20 000
39:00as a man in charge of production of the v2 arthur rudolph was unable to convince investigators that he
39:07didn't know about the scale of the suffering a claim that had been made successfully throughout the life of
39:14werner von braun the great lie that he told was that yes he had visited the production facility but
39:21he had never been in the camp i remember vividly seeing it for the first time and thinking my god
39:30these are the same place you can't say you were in one and not the other he was intimately familiar
39:36with uh the operation there and the conditions 80 years on where does this leave the legacy of
39:43operation paperclip and the man most central to the 1969 moon landing werner von braun there have been
39:52attempts to get a better understanding of von braun and each new detail seems to further cloud the picture
39:58of what we thought we knew of von braun from you should say 1933 to 1945 part of this is because
40:07there's been a kind of dedicated core of memorialist of von braun who are attached to what you might call
40:15the huntsville school of aerospace and see von braun's legacy and the advancement of that legacy is is
40:22critical to the continued advancement of space exploration but then you have a competing school
40:31who want never to forget the horrors of nazi germany and want never to forget the holocaust and understand
40:39how that memory is essential to the continued healthy functioning of american society and american
40:46democracy in the western world you know i i look very deeply at uh von braun's history for my book um
40:53as have uh as have some others but it still remains sort of a mystery to to most people or a complete unknown
41:00i was actually just just talking to a a retired scientist who worked in huntsville for years and years
41:06in america and he was seemed sort of astounded to know what bernard von braun had done during the war
41:12so uh his accolades overshadowed his his involvement with the nazis alongside his considerable scientific
41:19achievements perhaps vernon braun's greatest accomplishment was his ability to whitewash
41:24his own reputation transforming himself from a nazi military scientist who played a key role in the german
41:30war effort in the second world war to an american hero who pioneered space flight and helped land an
41:36american astronaut on the moon i think it's actually really useful to think about vernon braun as a
41:41salesman not only did he sell his vision but he he sold himself as well i do think that he was very
41:50aware that if i make myself a household name which i would argue that in lots of ways in the you know
41:57in the in the 50s and 60s he was i think he was also doing that to ensure that they couldn't just if
42:03something came out about him they couldn't just hide him away in south america so why has he sort of
42:10avoided the stain of of the third reich you know i think that everybody needs a good nazi and it may
42:19be because we want to think that if we were put in that position that we would be able to transcend the
42:27evil and so von braun was the good nazi genius in a way you know there were times when he let the public
42:36see this this sort of mercenary side of him there was an interview that he did about six years after
42:42he came to america with with the new yorker where he spoke almost almost wistfully about the use of
42:48slave labor in in germany and how successful they were in using that to build rockets uh he said that
42:55quote working in a dictatorship can have its advantages if the regime is behind you i'm convinced that the
43:00man in charge of stalin's adam bomb just has to press a button and he'll be supplied with a whole
43:05concentration camp full of labor von braun cannot be protected at this point we know all this stuff
43:11by now he's a condemned man if he survives as as a hero for some people it's out of ignorance
43:18and celebrating 50 years of the von braun center the entertainment hub in the heart of huntsville
43:24has brought the community together for decades yes it does rob the von braun center's executive
43:30director tells me that this building here it has so much life and legacy behind it he's seen the
43:35city grow around it and he expects it to keep boosting the rocket city's economy don't say that
43:41he's hypocritical say rather that he's apolitical once the rockets are up who cares where they come down
43:51that's not my department says verner von braun
43:59i think we have to remember that the moon landing happened very specifically in the context of the
44:04cold war but also there is such a crossover between the technology of weaponry the technology of arms
44:11and that is the technology that was harnessed by verner von braun in order for there to be humans safely
44:19on the moon and operation paperclip was central to that and it all starts with a ripped up list
44:25found in a toilet in von university the u.s military in bringing 1600 of these nazi scientists to america
44:33after the war was clearly making a deal with the devil a faustian bargain where they were willing to
44:39overlook and even even whitewash what they had done in germany often being directly involved in in
44:45horrible horrible nazi atrocities because they saw them as uh as so valuable in terms of their
44:53scientific brain power that's one small step for man
45:01one giant leap for mankind
45:05the image of neil armstrong planting an american flag on the moon is one of the most enduring of the
45:10modern age it is a sign of american triumph and also of humanity's technological potential but
45:16there is a dark side behind that image which links to warfare to the development of intercontinental
45:22ballistic missiles the shadow of which we still live under today and it's also a story which can
45:27be traced all the way back to the second world war to the awful conditions in which concentration
45:32camp inmates worked in order to produce these weapons of war so when we think about the moon
45:37landing as this moment of human greatness we should also remember that there's a much darker side to
45:43be explored behind it
45:49the most ambitious road traffic experiment ever staged a real world study into car safety
45:55pile up world's biggest crash test tomorrow night at nine here on channel four
45:59amelia fox and professor david wilson pair up again to walk in the footsteps of killers
46:04that's at 10 on tuesday
46:13you