The Nazis Next Door (29 page)

He also brought an honorary letter from a Florida congressman that he received when he retired from the American space program in 1969, the year of the first moon landing, which he’d helped achieve. He wanted the lawyers to have that letter, too. That was his crowning moment: the lunar landing, when his adopted country reached unthinkable heights in no small part due to him, Arthur Rudolph, under his old friend Wernher von Braun. He had a long record of service to America. He wanted the lawyers to know that. They needed to understand everything he’d done for the United States and not just look solely at his Nazi days in Germany.

He hadn’t told anyone besides his wife about his interview with the Justice Department. He didn’t think he needed any help. If the government lawyers just understood everything that had happened—both during the war and after—he was sure he could erase whatever lingering concerns they may have about him.

The lawyers smiled politely as he pushed all his photos and mementos on the table in front of them and tried to show them off one by one. There would be time for all that later, they told him; for now, they wanted to get on with the interview.

Neal Sher led off the questioning. He wanted to get the legal formalities out of the way. Rudolph understood that the meeting was voluntary and that he could have a lawyer with him if he wanted, correct?

“Ja,” Rudolph answered in his clipped German accent.

“I don’t see anybody here.”

“No, no. I didn’t ask for a lawyer.”

Rudolph had a question of his own before they went any further. Why exactly was he being questioned? Why was he here?

He wasn’t being confrontational. He never raised his voice. He just wanted to understand why Dora and his missile work had come up after all these years.

Sher stuck to the script, revealing little. “Questions have been raised, as we said in our letter, regarding your activities during the Second World War, and because there have been questions raised, we would like to resolve those questions.”

“Uh-huh,” Rudolph answered. His voice was small and emotionless. It was hard to imagine him as the powerful man who once directed thousands of workers—be they slave laborers or Saturn V technicians—in building the world’s most powerful rockets. He once described himself as a choir director at NASA, making all the rocket technicians under him work in concert and sing in harmony. But as he spoke now, his voice so halting and reserved, he sounded almost mute.

Sher began with some questions about Rudolph’s modest schooling in Germany and his background in engineering. Soon enough, he turned to the politics of the Third Reich. Sher wanted to know about Rudolph’s history with the Nazis. He was an early Nazi, wasn’t he, joining the party two years before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933?

“Correct, ja,” Rudolph said, unflinching.

“In Berlin?”

“In Berlin.”

“You weren’t forced to join?”

“No, I could say I was talked into it, but . . .” His voice trailed off unconvincingly.

So, Sher wanted to know, was he familiar with
Mein Kampf
?

“Yes, I read it.”

Mein Kampf
was the book that laid the foundation for Hitler’s entire philosophy in Germany, wasn’t it?

“It could be,” Rudolph said. “I’m, I’m not sure.”

“Okay,” Sher said. “Did you agree with what Hitler said in
Mein Kampf
, with his theories?”

“No, I didn’t agree with everything,” he said softly. “But with a lot of things.”

Sher paused. Rudolph was obviously a smart man, he said. On which parts of
Mein Kampf
did he actually agree with Hitler?

“Yeah, well, the real thing,” Rudolph said, stumbling over his words for the first time, “is that he fought Communism.”

But he said more than that in
Mein Kampf
, didn’t he? Sher asked. More than just fighting Communism?

“Oh, he said more than that, sure.”

“He had certain views regarding the superiority of the races,” Sher noted.

“Oh yeah, but you see, there was no such thing—what he called an Aryan race.” The whole notion of a Nordic race—“it’s nonsense,” Rudolph said. “Far-fetched,” he added. Whatever plans Hitler had for a master race, that wasn’t why he himself joined with the Nazis, he insisted.

As he sat and listened to the interrogation, Rosenbaum kept waiting for some statement of disavowal, an outright denunciation of Hitler, a clear break with his Nazi past. It never came. Instead, Rudolph hemmed and hawed, finding things here and there that he liked about Hitler, and other things less attractive. The Nazis, to him, were a mixed bag.

The lawyers soon steered Rudolph toward their main reason for being here: his work as a rocket production chief at Dora’s mammoth underground factory site at Mittelwerk and the earlier slave-labor factory at Peenemünde, which was bombed out of existence by the Allies in 1943.

As they began talking about the missile production, Rudolph finally got to show off his souvenirs. He had been in America for nearly four decades, but the Nazi rocket factories still clearly held a nostalgic air for him. “You see here?” he said, pointing out a photo in a book. “Here is the whole missile—with no warhead, of course.” The early design work at Peenemünde, especially, was good work, he said. Most of the Germans there were good people. After the war, he had even come to the defense of a top SS man at the camp and other Nazis there who were convicted at Nuremberg for Dora atrocities, writing letters vouching for their good character. He laughed when the lawyers showed him some of the old Nazi organizational charts at the factories with his name right near the top. He hadn’t seen them in quite a while, but they did bring back memories.

The lawyers weren’t there for nostalgia. They wanted to know about the victims. Sher’s voice grew stern. Rudolph surely must have known, he asked, that the thousands of laborers he was using to build his missiles were prisoners, slaves of the Nazis?

“That’s right,” Rudolph said flatly, in that same small voice.

Jews, Frenchmen, Poles—all forced into slavery to build his V-2 missiles, yes?

“Poles and Russians,” Rudolph corrected him.

And the conditions were very, very bad, Sher said. People were dying from disease, from starvation, from overwork. “You must have known that,” he said.

“Ja,” Rudolph said. “I know that people were dying.”

Did he review the ghastly SS reports that gave the running tallies on just how many prisoners at the factory lost their lives in the production of his missiles?

Rudolph shrugged. “Ja,” he said.

And what happened when he needed more bodies to replace the workers who had died? Would he simply ask the SS for more men?

“Ja, I did,” he said.

The lawyers needed to understand how things worked, Rudolph said. He was one of the good ones at the factory, he insisted. He tried to improve the workers’ conditions, Rudolph asserted, to the incredulous stares of the lawyers. He tried to shorten their work shifts—to keep them strong for their jobs. “If you put too much pressure on them, the work would be no good,” he said. If a prisoner had blisters on his feet, Rudolph said earnestly, he would get him help. The lawyers knew that prisoners were eating gruel out of garbage cans. Yet here was Rudolph, claiming that under his watch, prisoners got as much to eat as the German civilians working at the factory—as much as Rudolph himself ate, in fact.

“But these people were dropping dead of malnutrition,” Sher reminded him.

“Oh, not that time, anymore,” Rudolph insisted.

“The summer of ’44, they were not dropping dead?”

“No,” Rudolph said, catching himself. “Well, they still were dropping dead probably from disease, but not malnutrition.”

“They were eating well?”

“Ja.”

Now Sher wanted to know about all the gruesome hangings he had read about, all the men executed because they were accused of sabotaging the V-2 missile equipment or plotting revolts against their heavily armed SS jailers.

The lawyer brought up one scene he had read about with particular interest in a batch of Nazi documents. “Isn’t it true, Mr. Rudolph, that at some point, you yourself actually witnessed the hanging of between six and twelve
Häftlinge
? You were there and you saw it?”

“Ja,” Rudolph answered, nodding his head.

The other prisoners were made to watch the spectacle, Sher said. “The purpose was to scare these people to think that if they were involved in sabotage, they too would be hung?” Sher asked. “Wasn’t that the purpose of it—to scare them?”

“Ja,” Rudolph said, nodding his head again.

And hadn’t Rudolph himself ordered a stop to the missile work one day while another group of prisoners were summoned to the assembly tunnel to watch the hangings?

“Ja, I think so,” he said.

It was an important moment. Sher now had the scientist on record, acknowledging his role in executions at the factory. But he still couldn’t get over Rudolph’s claims that the prisoners were well fed and cared for during his time there. He wanted to come back to that. He showed Rudolph a photo of some of the survivors of Dora discovered by Allied troops in May 1945, after the Nazis fled. Their bodies were grotesquely emaciated, their faces gaunt and sickly.

“Do those people look like they’re working under good conditions?” he asked.

“No, certainly not,” Rudolph said. “Certainly not.”

He spoke with that same small, flat voice, that same vacant stare, whether he was telling the lawyers about his daughter’s birth in Germany two years before the war started, or the deaths of thousands of slave laborers building his missiles. The absence of any human pathos, of any emotion altogether, was jarring. Sher wanted to try to shake him out of his malaise. “How did you feel when you saw those people working like that, Mr. Rudolph?” Sher asked. “I’d like to know. I’d like to know how you
felt
.”

“Awful,” the scientist said finally, claiming a flicker of emotion for the first time. “Oh, Mr. Sher, I knew I was in a trap. When I went there, I didn’t know what was underground.”

“Doesn’t it haunt you even today?” the lawyer asked. “Don’t you have terrible memories of that?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said without elaboration.

And isn’t it a bit ironic, Sher continued, to realize that his honored career in the American space program got its start at a place as barbaric as the V-2 factory? This was why U.S. military officials had wanted him and dozens of other space engineers from the V-2 project to come to America: because of what they had accomplished in building Hitler’s missiles on the backs of those slave laborers.

“It is sort of ironic, isn’t it?” Sher asked.

Rudolph just shrugged his shoulders. He said nothing.

They talked for almost five hours that day, and they still weren’t done. Rudolph agreed to meet with the lawyers a second time a few months later, still without a lawyer. Again, he pulled out some photos of his prized missiles, pictures that he forgot to show them at their first meeting. This time, Rosenbaum took the lead in questioning him. There was one thing in particular he was anxious to ask Rudolph—a scene that had gnawed at him ever since he first read about Arthur Rudolph in that bookstore at Harvard nearly three years earlier.

Rosenbaum had read something interesting about a New Year’s Eve party at Dora in 1944, he told Rudolph. The scientist apparently had to leave the party early to handle a problem with some missile parts back at the factory?

Ja,” Rudolph said. “Correct.”

Rudolph laughed. Nearly forty years later, he still remembered the party well, and he was still miffed at being forced to leave it early. Some friends had been celebrating at the home of a fellow Nazi when Rudolph got a call about a problem at the plant, he recalled. Four missiles were supposed to be shipped out soon for bombings, but the straps used to secure them for the move weren’t working properly. An SS commander, a Nazi by the name of Sawatzki, summoned him back to the factory immediately to fix it. Rudolph hated Sawatzki. “Since it didn’t work, Sawatzki called me and said, ‘Rudolph, come here,’” he said. He sounded annoyed even as he retold the story. “I couldn’t do a darn thing”
to fix the straps, he said. But even so, “I had to be there, because Sawatzki obviously didn’t like that I was, you see, at a party.” There was no mention of the slave laborers. Even now, as he recounted the scene, Rudolph seemed remarkably indifferent to their plight. He was just peeved to have to leave his party. Now that Rosenbaum had met Rudolph, his first assessment of the Nazi scientist’s callousness at the bookstore three years earlier appeared spot-on.

Rudolph had now been going at it with the lawyers for nearly seven hours over two sittings. With each question about Dora, with each photo of the brutalized prisoners, his German accent seemed, oddly, to become thicker. His English, so impeccable at the start of the questioning, became more muddled the more he spoke about those days at Mittelwerk. The stenographer was beginning to have trouble understanding him. “The SS was supposed to get the verd,” Rudolph said at one point. The stenographer stopped him. “The verd?” “The verd,” he repeated. Rosenbaum broke in: “
W-O-R-D
.”

All his years in America, Rudolph told the lawyers, he had never really worried about being held to account for what happened at Dora. Even as his friends and fellow Nazis at the factory were being prosecuted for war crimes at Nuremberg, none of it fell on him. No one in the United States had ever really asked him about the slave laborers at Dora before, he said. But now, for the first time, he was worried that Dora might have finally caught up with him. He had answered all their questions, but he seemed to realize that he hadn’t convinced Sher and Rosenbaum. He made one last push. As the lawyers tried to wrap up their questioning, Rudolph broke in with a final thought—a last, feeble attempt to show that he was not the brutal Nazi they obviously thought him to be.

He began to tell them a story. There was one time at Dora, he said, when the prisoners serving lunch spilt some food on the floor, and Rudolph slipped on the mess, hitting his head. The prisoners apologized profusely. They were worried about getting into trouble. Another Nazi might have disciplined the prisoners. Maybe even beaten them. “I didn’t,” Rudolph said, as if to demonstrate his righteous character. Then there was another story he wanted to tell: the time he suspected that a young Russian prisoner—the
Häftling
who cleaned his shoes—had stolen a piece of meat from his office. Again, another Nazi might have punished the prisoner, or worse. But not Rudolph. He wasn’t that type of man. “So I did nothing,” he said.