Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

90 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
this remark about the unanimity of the community in regards to the
so-called “rudolph case” gives me pause. Not only does it imply that there
were no opposing voices in huntsville, but it also contradicts national and
international discourses about the German rocket engineers that have scrutinized
these scientists past work in Nazi Germany. 3 Such a remark exemplifes a
counter-narrative, fghting to be heard in light of national narratives while
simultaneously excluding narratives that contradict its own dominant stance in
the local community. this “hegemonic counter-narrative” is the impetus for
my dissertation, which explores the impact of Operation paperclip on narratives
of the frst and second generation Germans, non-German huntsville residents,
and the local and national media, as well as on debates between laypersons and
historians negotiating how to evaluate the engineers’ past.
huntsville, alabama, has been home for most of the German rocket team
members associated with Wernher von Braun who were brought to the United
States under the secret military project known as Operation paperclip. those
who arrived before 1950 were sent to Fort Bliss near el paso, texas, where they
worked for the U.S. army and shared their expertise in rocketry developed
while designing and testing V-2 rockets in Germany during World War II.
after one to two years in Fort Bliss, the men’s dependents were allowed to join
them. In 1950, the army moved its rocket development program to redstone
arsenal near huntsville, alabama. this meant that, with few exceptions, most
members of the German team moved to huntsville with their families, and their
children would come to consider huntsville their hometown. In 1960, NaSa
established the Marshall Space Flight Center on redstone arsenal where most
of the Germans had been transferred under Wernher von Braun’s direction.
the following analysis is an excerpt of a larger project that investigates
the impact of Operation paperclip on the German families and their huntsville
neighbors. the project is based primarily on oral histories because answers
concerning impact are largely dependent on how and by whom the past is
told. I have interviewed German and non-German huntsville residents with
diferent social and cultural backgrounds who lived in huntsville in the 1950s
and 1960s. By listening to the ways in which individuals recount the past and
3. I am referring primarily to the many national and international newspaper and magazine
articles and documentary flms reporting on and evaluating the German rocket engineers
in the United States since their presence was made public in 1946. For some book length
sources, see tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1987); Linda hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists,
and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s press, 1991); John Gimbel,
Science, Technology, and Reparation: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford, Ca:
Stanford University press, 1990); Clarence G. Lasby, Project Paperclip: German Scientists and
the Cold War (New York, NY: atheneum, 1971); and Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the
Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York, NY: Free press, 1995).
For examples of sources that refect a less scrutinizing approach to this history, see footnote
11 on page 94.