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

OperatION paperCLIp IN hUNtSVILLe, aLaBaMa
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the disappointed expectations of solidarity and active support from
Germans for the causes of african americans in huntsville points to an
important fact: being German in the United States had a very diferent meaning
than that of being German in Germany, especially after World War II. 33 the
Germans who came to huntsville in 1950 and, therefore, to the United
States very shortly after the war would not have experienced the German
occupation of Germany to the same extent and have had the opportunity to
bond with african american soldiers. In addition, instead of experiencing the
allied Occupation that had provoked strong feelings of humiliation by many
Germans in the postwar years, the German rocket engineers and their families
encountered very little difculty in huntsville, blended well with the white
majority, and were generally welcomed with open arms by a community that
appreciated the prosperity and cultural infuence they brought to town.
In some ways, the German families seemed to make matters even worse
for the african american community. even though strangers to the town, they
had more privileges than some of the town’s longstanding residents. hereford
explains:
I think some people in my community were maybe jealous
. . . because . . . they were permitted to go to the theatres and
the concerts and to the sports arena, and we were not . . . and
they were permitted to go to the restaurants and the hotels
and motels and what have you, and we were not . . . I think
there was maybe some animosity . . . 34
out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom—they could go where they wanted,
eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people.” Maria höhn,
GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel hill, NC:
University of North Carolina press, 2002), p. 13.
33. For the meaning of being German in the United States, I refer to works on German
immigrants to the United States, such as Wolfgang J. helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner,
German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, (Madison, WI: Max
Kade Institute for German-american Studies, University of Wisconsin, 2004) and russell a.
Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (princeton, NJ: princeton
University press, 2004). the post-World War II period of German immigration has not
yet been analyzed thoroughly, with an important exception that focuses on the postwar
emigration from Germany to the United States and Canada. For examples, see alexander
Freund, Aufbrüche nach dem Zusammenbruch: Die Deutsche Nordamerika-Auswanderung Nach
dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: V & r Unipress, 2004), two articles by the same author:
“Dealing with the past abroad: German Immigrants’ Vergangenheitsbewältigung and their
relations with Jews in North america since 1945,” GHI Bulletin, Fall 2002, 31:51-63, and
“German immigrants and the Nazi past,” Inroads, Summer 2004, 15:106 (12), as well as an
unpublished dissertation by helmut Buehler, “the Invisible German Immigrants of the 21st
Century: assimilation, acculturation, americanization” (ed. Dissertation, University of
San Francisco, 2005).
34. hereford interview, July 19, 2007.