The Nazis Next Door (28 page)

Rosenbaum was vaguely aware of Project Paperclip, the secret government program that had brought some sixteen hundred German scientists to America—non-Nazis, he had always heard, or at least not “ardent” ones—but it seemed beyond the pale for the program to have included scientists like Rudolph, a man involved at such a high level in the systematic brutalization of Nazi prisoners. Where was the outrage? And what had happened to this man? Rosenbaum knew that von Braun had died just a few years earlier, in 1977, feted in the United States and around the world as a visionary of space science, with virtually no mention anywhere of his ties to the barbaric conditions at the Dora factory complex. But what about Rudolph?

Rosenbaum was still fixated on Dora months later, when he graduated from Harvard Law School and returned to the Justice Department as part of an honors program to recruit top law school graduates. The young lawyers in the program normally rotated through different sections of the Justice Department, but Rosenbaum, after his internship at the new Nazi-hunting unit the year before, had only one job in mind: he wanted to spend his entire year at the Nazi office. His supervisors were glad to comply; the nascent Nazi section, with a temporary mission and an unclear future, was seen as a dead end, with few lawyers lining up to work there. If this new law school grad wanted to spend all his time chasing Nazi ghosts, the Justice Department was certainly willing to let him have at it.

His first day back at the Justice Department, Rosenbaum sat down with Neal Sher, the top deputy in the Nazi office and a mentor of Rosenbaum’s during his internship, who welcomed him back and introduced some of the cases he would be handling. Rosenbaum brought some ideas of his own. He still had a name stuck in his head ever since he’d read about the spoiled New Year’s Eve party.

“You ever heard of a guy
named Arthur Rudolph?” Rosenbaum asked Sher.

“No,” his boss answered, “who’s he?”

“He was a scientist who was involved in the German V-2 program.”

“Paperclip?” Sher asked.

“Yeah.”

Sher could already guess where this was heading, and it didn’t sound promising. “Eli, you know those Paperclip cases don’t go anywhere.”

“Well,” Rosenbaum said. “You mind if I look into it?”

Sher gave his new lawyer an indifferent shrug. “Okay,” he said finally, “but don’t spend a lot of time on it.”

With a faint green light from his new boss, Rosenbaum started poking around, gathering up all the information he could find on Rudolph. A phone call to the military arsenal in Alabama revealed that Rudolph was still alive and well and had relocated to a suburb outside San Jose, California, to be near his grown daughter. He was living comfortably in retirement, with dual pensions from both the German government—for his service under the Nazis—and from the United States government for his time in the space program.

Meanwhile, a search of war-era documents connected to the Nuremberg trials confirmed Rudolph’s high-level involvement at Dora. Rudolph, von Braun, and General Dornberger, who also came to America under Project Paperclip, were all participants in a secret, high-level Nazi meeting in 1944 to plan for the use of slave laborers to produce a thousand missiles a month for Hitler. A senior SS commander identified Rudolph as one of the twelve men responsible for the actual operations at the slave factory. Mysteriously, the Army listed only eleven of the dozen as “perpetrators” who would face war crimes prosecution. The only name missing: Arthur Rudolph. Someone in the U.S. military seemed anxious to protect Rudolph from the war crimes trials, Rosenbaum suspected.

Those suspicions only deepened when he found a review of the Army’s security evaluation for Rudolph in 1945. At the close of the war, the initial Army report characterized Rudolph as “100% Nazi, dangerous type,
security threat . . .
suggest internment
.” But rather than being jailed, Rudolph had been brought to the United States in Project Paperclip. By then, the Army had softened its view of him considerably. The official report now declared that Rudolph, rather than being a dangerous, “100% Nazi,” posed no security threat to America and “was not a war criminal, not an ardent Nazi.”

As Rosenbaum kept digging, a deeper portrait of Rudolph began to emerge.

Rudolph was an early Nazi devotee during the rise of the party, marching proudly down the streets of Berlin, swastika on his arm, and singing the “Horst Wessel Lied,”
the Nazi anthem. As a promising young engineer in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s, Rudolph rose steadily in status as he worked to develop rockets for Hitler at a Nazi ordnance factory. One day, he visited a rocket demonstration put on by another team of German scientists. He was confused. How was it, he asked a boyish-looking member of the team,
that they were able to gauge the rockets’ thrust without actually measuring it with instruments, the way they were always taught? “We don’t measure it—we calculate it,” the other scientist told him. Shocked at the notion, Rudolph asked his boss afterward who this brash young Nazi scientist was.

“You don’t know who that guy is?” his boss answered. “That is Wernher von Braun. He is the brain of that outfit here. Didn’t you know that?”

“No,” Rudolph answered, “but I know now.”

Von Braun was six years his junior, but Rudolph soon went to work for the “boy genius” as a top engineering deputy in the rocket program, beginning a relationship that would span four decades and two continents. When von Braun began developing and building his long-range ballistic missiles for Hitler, Rudolph was one of his key production people. Although Rudolph fancied himself an inventor, he wasn’t there for his scientific wizardry; that was von Braun’s realm. He was there because he was a competent engineer and a good manager who could make all the intricate pieces fit together precisely the way von Braun wanted.

At the brutal slave-labor factory at Dora,
Rudolph was the chief of production for the V-2. He earned a decent salary as von Braun’s man at the factory. Sometimes, he would sit in the camp’s commandant’s office and drink schnapps. He lived in a nearby village in a room with a nice family. Once or twice each day, he would walk through the sprawling labyrinth of tunnels that made up the underground factory at Mittelwerk to oversee missile production, tend to engineering problems, and make sure he had enough
Häftlinge
, or prisoners, to meet Hitler’s monthly demand for missiles. He needed five thousand prisoners to build three hundred missiles a month, he told the SS. Where they came from, he didn’t much care, as long as the men were strong enough to work. His office in Tunnel 40 sat right next to a giant work crane that the SS used to hang the workers accused of malfeasance. As hundreds of prisoners each month were killed by starvation, disease, overwork, shooting, stabbing, or hanging, Rudolph requested more bodies to replace them. He had to meet his quotas.

With every scrap of paper Rosenbaum turned up, his once-ambivalent boss, Neal Sher, got more and more excited about the prospects for the investigation. After a rocky start in its first few years, the Nazi-hunting unit still had few major victories to claim for itself. The case against Arthur Rudolph was shaping up as a big one.

In the midst of his research, Rosenbaum took a short walk one day down to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. He wanted to see something. There among the exhibits was an enormous black-and-white V-2 missile, the fabled rocket that von Braun and Rudolph had produced in Nazi Germany and imported to America. Rosenbaum gazed up at the marvel of engineering, then studied the display below it that described the missile’s revolutionary technology. He read the display a second time, just to be sure. It wasn’t there: not a single word, Rosenbaum noted, about the brutality of the camps where the rockets were produced. Nothing about the tens of thousands of slave laborers who actually built the Nazis’ great missile, or about the estimated twenty thousand prisoners who died in the process. It was as if their deaths had never even occurred.

As he walked away from Hitler’s V-2, he was more convinced than ever: Arthur Rudolph did not deserve to call himself an American.

For Rosenbaum, trying to bring ex-Nazis like Rudolph to justice was a personal quest, not just a professional one. His own parents had fled Germany for America in the 1930s before the massacres started, but many extended family members were killed in the Holocaust. Rosenbaum knew, too, that his father, a U.S. Army infantryman, had gone into Dachau the day after the Americans rolled into the death camp in 1945 and discovered its horror. As a boy growing up in a Jewish, middle-class family on Long Island in the 1970s, he had read
The Diary of Anne Frank
with grim fascination. He had heard all-too-brief snippets of Holocaust history in Hebrew school and on the occasional TV show. Yet inside his own home, the topic was not discussed. It was verboten; he knew not to ask. It was simply too painful for his parents to discuss, a horrible void they never dared try to fill. They were typical of their generation, but he was typical of the children of that cohort: he wanted to know. Once, not long after his bar mitzvah, Rosenbaum got up the nerve
to finally ask his father about the Holocaust during a long, silent car trip through upstate New York in the midst of a blizzard. What was Dachau like when you got there? What did you see at the camp? The boy yearned to know, to better understand his father’s pain and the silent mark it had left on him. Peering straight out at the highway, his father opened his mouth as if to speak. Instead, his eyes welled with tears, his mouth frozen agape. No words came out. He just continued driving in the storm. The boy had never seen his father cry before. He never asked about Dachau again.

With all the evidence Rosenbaum had gathered against Rudolph by the fall of 1982, the Justice Department was finally ready to approach the ex-Nazi scientist himself and see if he would talk. That first contact was always a critical time in any Nazi investigation, filled with both promise and peril. Sometimes the Justice Department lawyers would try what they called a “knock and talk”: arrive unannounced at a suspect’s home or business and see if they could coax him into discussing what he had really done during the war. Often, the surprised immigrant would tell the lawyers they had the wrong man, or simply slam the door on them. Talk to my lawyer, many would say. But sometimes, if they got lucky, the suspect would open up to them. At one knock and talk, a Lithuanian tailor in Massachusetts—suspected of serving in a Nazi-led mobile killing unit—chatted with Rosenbaum for so long at the front counter of his tailoring shop that the young prosecutor found a parking ticket on his car when he walked back out onto the street.
In another unannounced visit, a surprised immigrant in Southern California suspected of Nazi ties invited the Justice Department lawyers into his ornate home—a reflection of his financial success in America—to explain why their suspicions about him were off base. With little sign of trepidation or guilt, the man coolly denied any suggestion of wartime involvement with the Nazis. Days later, however, he killed himself.

With Arthur Rudolph, however, the Justice Department’s lawyers didn’t think a surprise visit would produce much. He seemed too smart. They opted to send him a formal letter asking to interview him about the war and his immigration to America. “In particular,” the letter added, “your activities between 1939 and 1945 in Germany will be the subject of some questions.”

Chances seemed slim that Rudolph would agree to talk. But he surprised the Justice Department’s investigators. He agreed to sit down for an interview. And no, he said, he didn’t need a lawyer. Rosenbaum knew he had caught a break.

A month later, Rosenbaum was in the parking lot outside a Hyatt hotel in suburban San Jose, walking into the biggest interview of his short legal career. It was so big, in fact, that he was joined not only by his boss, Neal Sher, but by his boss’s boss, Allan Ryan, as well. The lawyers had been getting ready for this meeting for weeks, preparing questions, going over documents, plotting strategy. Keep Rudolph talking; that was the most important thing. If they hoped to have him deported, they figured they would have to get him to admit not only that he knew about the inhumane treatment of the slave laborers at Dora, but that he was actively involved in carrying it out. That wouldn’t be easy. Rudolph wasn’t some unschooled Nazi camp guard; he was a noted Nazi scientist. As the lawyers made their way through the parking lot to the hotel, Rosenbaum couldn’t help thinking of that old quip used to describe someone of modest intellect:
He’s no rocket scientist
. “Think about it,” Rosenbaum chuckled to Sher. “Rudolph
is
a rocket scientist.”

Inside the Hyatt, the three government lawyers gathered around a long table in a nondescript conference room, a stenographer at their side. Then they waited. The interview was voluntary, and there was no assurance Rudolph would actually show up. But just after 10:00 a.m, the seventy-five-year-old engineer walked in the door. His hands were a bit shaky, but he seemed otherwise steady enough for a man of his age. Slight of frame, he was bald, with a pinkish face and a kindly smile. Rosenbaum peered behind Rudolph as he walked in the door: there was no one else with him—no lawyer, no one at all. Rosenbaum tried to hide a smile. Whether it was arrogance or naiveté that had brought Rudolph there alone, Rosenbaum didn’t care. They had their chance now.

In the movies, when an aging Nazi is shown onscreen, there is inevitably that hint of evil: the dark, deathly stare of a Laurence Olivier, or the knowing scowl of a German villain sucking on a cigarette. Rosenbaum saw none of that in Rudolph. He was soft-spoken and grandfatherly as he introduced himself. He seemed utterly and completely normal. Nothing about him suggested his dark past. The “banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt famously called this odd phenomenon when writing about Eichmann’s trial. Rosenbaum didn’t dwell on it. He was happy just to have the old man sitting in front of him after all the time spent tracking him.

The men introduced themselves. The mood was informal, even friendly, despite the gravity of the meeting. Rudolph had even brought
along some mementos from the production of the V-2: a small rocket model, some photos from the factory, a packet of letters from the Nazis he had known there, and a few other trinkets. He had saved the items all these years. Like a curator at the Smithsonian displaying a prized invention, he was anxious to show them off. He was clearly proud of what he had accomplished at the missile factory. How it had been accomplished was apparently irrelevant. The macabre nature of the souvenirs did not seem to strike him.