Photo Source Black Zero | CC BY 2.0
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun– Tom Lehrer
On Sunday, July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. His brief sojourn climaxed a euphoric week for the US space program and answered John Kennedy’s challenge that within the decade of the Sixties NASA should put a man on the moon and safely return him to earth. A film celebrating this accomplishment titled The First Man is soon scheduled to open, but on screen as in life a singular aspect of the U.S. space program goes largely unmentioned: Nazi scientists were almost wholly responsible for the success of that first lunar landing.
Fifteen years after Apollo Eleven’s epic flight a UPI story by Judi Hasson dated October 17, 1984 and titled Rocket Scientist Renounces U.S. Citizenship reported the following:
A German scientist who worked on America’s man-on-the-moon program renounced his U.S. citizenship and left the country amid charges he used slave labor to build Nazi V-2 rockets, officials said Wednesday.
Arthur L. H. Rudolph of San Jose, Calif., a key figure in the Saturn 5 program, left the United States in March after negotiated a deal a year ago with the Justice Department.
The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which tracks down Nazis living in the United States and seeks their deportation, had charged Rudolph participated in the…