The Nazis Next Door (16 page)

She was just a guard, Braunsteiner said in a self-pitying tone; just a lowly guard who did what she was told. Lelyveld then told her of a letter that Wiesenthal had written about her case, with detailed accusations against her. The letter suggested she was not just a lowly guard, but something much worse. Emotion overtook her again. “This is the end,” she said, pacing across her small living room. “This is the end of everything for me.”

A few days later, a story appeared in the
New York Times
under the headline: “Former Nazi Camp Guard Is Now a Housewife in Queens.”
It was written in the
Times’
s typically understated tone, with none of the rhetorical flair of Chuck Allen’s anti-Nazi writings. But it carried a wallop in New York, and it drew the attention of law enforcement officials in Washington as well. The very next day, with a speed and aggressiveness hardly ever seen in two decades of periodic Nazi reports, U.S. immigration officials announced that they were opening an investigation into the woman who was to become known as the notorious Stomping Mare of Majdanek. The INS wanted to know whether Mrs. Braunsteiner Ryan had lied her way into the United States by concealing her Nazi past.

What, if anything, would happen to her was still uncertain. But for once, the country seemed to be taking notice. American officials could brush aside Chuck Allen’s fevered ranting with no fear of political fallout. But now Simon Wiesenthal and the
New York Times
were on the story. The Stomping Mare of Queens could not simply be ignored.

6

In the Pursuit of Science

November 23, 1974

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

“Does ‘Hubertus Strughold’ mean anything to you?”

Chuck Allen shrugged. “No, why?”

It was 1974, and Allen, the rabble-rousing reporter, was meeting off the record with a former INS investigator named Tony DeVito
about Allen’s favorite topic. It had been more than a decade since the reporter’s big exposé, and the collective shrug it generated had done little to dim his obsession with all things Nazi. In DeVito, he had found a kindred soul, a man almost as outraged as himself by the government’s apathy in confronting its hidden Nazi problem.

DeVito, a pint-sized, gruff-talking New Yorker from Hell’s Kitchen, had taken to the Nazi chase himself a few years earlier when he was put on the INS’s investigation into the Stomping Mare. DeVito was convinced there were more war criminals out there like Queens housewife Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan. His problem was that his bosses at the INS didn’t seem to give a damn about Nazis except when the stories hit the papers. They preferred to deport Communists and pot-smoking rock stars like John Lennon. A World War II veteran who walked through Dachau hours after its liberation, DeVito railed against the agency’s lethargy. “Don’t we owe an immediate inquiry to the six million Jews and some five million others who perished in gas chambers and crematoriums of concentration camps under the Third Reich?” he asked in one memo to his bosses.

DeVito was so frustrated by the INS’s failure to throw the Nazis out of the country that he quit the agency after more than twenty years as an investigator. If the INS didn’t care about Nazi immigrants, DeVito figured there was one person who would want to hear more about them, and that was Chuck Allen.

DeVito’s current fixation was Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Allen had never heard of the man with the odd-sounding name before, but DeVito was about to tell him everything he needed to know.

“Until he retired, he was the chief scientist of NASA’s aerospace medical division,” DeVito began. “The press calls him the father of space medicine.” Strughold had apparently come to America from Germany just a few years after the war, DeVito said, but exactly how he got into the country wasn’t clear. “After Wernher von Braun, he’s the top Nazi scientist who’s worked for the government.”

DeVito wasn’t done. Strughold, he said, is “supposed to have been involved—from the top—in medical atrocities. High-altitude and freezing experiments on prisoners at Dachau.”

Chuck Allen stared back at his tipster, the outlines of a blockbuster story already forming in his mind. Now DeVito had his attention.

Hubertus Strughold, a buttoned-up, bow-tied doctor of aviation medicine, was indeed a star scientist—first for the Nazis, then for the Americans. He was one of the U.S. military’s most prized catches in Project Paperclip, the secret program that brought some sixteen hundred German scientists to the United States after the war.

No one rose to greater heights among the German scientists than von Braun and Strughold, longtime colleagues from their days together in the German military. By the time General Eisenhower became president in 1953 on the strength of his war record in defeating their homeland, von Braun and Strughold—though not yet American citizens—were already living in the rarified air of scientific royalty, a fairytale existence out of reach to all but a few of America’s native sons. With America racing to catch up with the Russians in the space war, they were at the center of it all as scientific emissaries testifying before Congress, lobbying the military for money, and selling the public on the promise of space travel. At an air force base in San Antonio, Strughold would pose for photos and give tours of his flight simulator to VIPs like Senator Lyndon Johnson and the shah of Iran. From his new perch at the military arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, meanwhile, von Braun wrote popular space novels, became lionized as the subject of a feature film, and even earned that high mark of American cultural status, a spot on the cover of
Time
magazine—as America’s “Missileman.” The German-born scientist had ready access to leaders throughout the Pentagon and the space program, and he learned to work the American political system as well as any Washington insider. If a military subordinate in Alabama came to him with a gripe about the rocket program, von Braun would dismiss it with a wave of the hand and say: “Go tell it to your congressman!”

Von Braun and Strughold were ex-Nazi scientists now standing at the cross-section of Hollywood and Washington; of comic-book fantasy and awe-inspiring reality; of America’s wartime past and its boundless future. Von Braun made America’s rockets fly, and Strughold kept its pilots alive. Together, they were poised to take America into space.

Strughold’s newfound stature had crystallized in the fall of 1957, when he was sailing aboard the
Queen Mary
en route to Europe. Hollywood filmmaker Walt Disney happened to be aboard
the stately ship with him. Disney, learning that a space scientist of some renown was onboard, quickly latched on to Strughold and arranged for a nightly tutorial. Disney had always been awestruck by the prospect of space travel, and with the Russians set to launch their Sputnik satellite into orbit for the first time in a matter of weeks, he wanted to learn all he could. So each evening after dinner, teacher and pupil, each in his fifties, would stroll the moonlit deck of the ship, with Strughold revealing to Disney the secrets of “zero gravity,” cabin pressure, and everything his research had taught him about keeping a man alive in space.

On their last walk together before Dr. Strughold disembarked in France, Disney gazed up at the moon and reflected on all the advances in travel and technology he had witnessed in the twentieth century. “If somebody told me that during my coming lifetime that somebody will fly to the moon,” he remarked, “damned, I’d believe it.” Strughold shook his hand, and they said their goodbyes. Anointed as the father of space medicine, Dr. Strughold had met all sorts of big-name military officials and politicos, but this moment—pondering the future of space side by side with an American icon—topped them all for him. Giddy, Strughold hurried back to his cabin to write down all the details still fresh in his mind, and he told of his nightly walks with Disney for years afterward.

Von Braun did Strughold one better with a panoply of Disney moments of his own that same year—not for an audience of one, but for millions. With Walt Disney’s help, Dr. von Braun became a celebrated televangelist for space exploration. In 1955, when Disney’s production company began airing what turned out to be a hugely popular series of television specials on the potential for space travel—to outer space, to the moon, and to Mars—von Braun was a natural choice as an on-air expert. With his slicked-back blond hair, his chiseled, ruddy face, his finely tailored double-breasted suits, and his worldly, debonaire charm, von Braun could have passed for an actor, at least until he began speaking into the camera. His voice—small and nasal, with a heavy German accent—was decidedly un-Hollywood. But he held the country’s attention as he unlocked the secrets of rocket propulsion and demonstrated an atomic shield designed to protect the crew members—“zuh cruuuuuh membuhs,” as he pronounced it—from dangerous radiation.

On camera, von Braun clutched
the nose cone of a shiny, four-stage rocket prototype, a futuristic version of one he was designing at NASA’s Marshall space center in Alabama. “I believe that a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within ten years,
”
he predicted. (In fact, it would take only six.) Disney’s theme song, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” played fittingly in the background.

The Disney series, part schoolhouse cartoon and part scientific documentary, introduced mainstream America to Dr. von Braun, solidifying his reputation as the father of rocket science. President Eisenhower received a private White House screening of the show. There was even a tie-in to a Mars ride at a new amusement park in Southern California called Disneyland.

Von Braun’s focus was squarely on the future; there was little talk of the past or of the wartime legacy that had brought him to such a lofty place in American history. In Disney’s retelling, the V-2 missiles that von Braun built became symbols not of destruction in Europe, but of technological prowess. “The V-2 emerged at the end of the Second World War,” the Disney narrator remarked in one of the TV specials, “as the most successful rocket yet devised by man.” Hitler was not mentioned. Even the most obvious remnant of the V-2’s role in the war—the swaths of London and Antwerp reduced to rubble and the thousands of civilians killed by the missile’s unique firepower—did not merit notice.

Omitted, too, was the brutal story of just how von Braun and the Nazis actually built the rockets. There was no mention of the slave laborers hauled from concentration camps; or of the prisoners from Dora routinely whipped, beaten, or hanged for shoddy workmanship; or of the twenty thousand prisoners in all who died of disease or malnourishment at the missile factories in what von Braun himself acknowledged were “hellish” conditions.

Nor was there mention, by Disney or any of von Braun’s many admirers in America, of more than a dozen tours von Braun had taken
of the rocket factories during the war to inspect his prize invention. No mention of the meeting he attended at Mittelwerk with senior factory administrators to discuss the need for requisitioning “another 1,800 prisoners” from the camps. No mention of the high honors bestowed on him by Nazi leadership for his good work at the factories. And certainly no mention of the personal briefings he gave on rocket production to Adolf Hitler, a man von Braun likened after the war to a “new Napoleon”
for his “astounding intellectual capacities, the actually hypnotic influence of his personality.” American viewers saw none of this. They saw only the pictures of the smiling, photogenic von Braun posing with Walt Disney next to one of his rocket prototypes, not the grainy wartime images of him in a Nazi officer’s uniform with a swastika on his arm.

After the war, Von Braun held onto a few photos showing slave laborers at work at their stations at the underground missile plant. But these earlier images, so stark and brutal, were not for public display. They were best left buried in the rubble, like the slave laborers themselves. They did not fit the Disney motif.

These were not state secrets, even in the 1950s and 1960s. Articles and books in Europe were already beginning to tell the story of how von Braun had used many thousands of slave laborers to build the V-2, and von Braun himself practically gloated about it in an interview with the
New Yorker
just six years after coming to America. He spoke almost wistfully about his use of slave laborers in Nazi Germany as he mused about the ease with which Stalin and the Russians, America’s new rivals, could produce workers to build their bombs. “Working in a dictatorship can have its advantages, if the regime is behind you,” von Braun said. “I’m convinced that the man in charge of Stalin’s atom bomb just has to press a button and he’ll be supplied with a whole concentration camp full of labor. We used to have thousands of Russian prisoners of war
working for us at Peenemünde.” It was said not with shame, but with pride.

Sometimes, one particular rival of von Braun’s in the American space program, bitter over the immigrant scientist’s growing fame and funding, was known to complain drunkenly to his fellow scientists about “that damned Nazi.”
But such reminders of von Braun’s ties to the Third Reich were generally verboten in Alabama and Washington, only mumbled under one’s breath, if at all. Whatever skeletons his closet held, von Braun was too powerful and too revered to attack directly, at least not in America, and he certainly was not anxious to revisit the war himself. For the most part, von Braun took the advice of an American officer who told him that if anyone asked about his Nazi days, just tell them that it had all been investigated when he came to America.

The Germans, however, were not so willing to let it go. Von Braun, ironically, was not the Teflon figure in his homeland that he became in the United States. Just as von Braun was preparing for the crowning achievement of his career—America’s moon landing in 1969—he learned that the West Germans wanted to hear what he had to say about the hidden horrors of Mittelwerk. Nearly a quarter century after the war, prosecutors in Essen were putting on trial three SS officers at Mittelwerk for executing one hundred prisoners at the missile plant, and they wanted von Braun, the chief scientist for the project, as a witness. Von Braun, understandably, worried about damage to his own reputation and to the Apollo space program. He certainly didn’t want to go back to Essen; witness or not, he was worried
what the West Germans might do to him on their soil. Besides, he had nothing of relevance to add to the tribunal, he assured the court.