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FILE 062 · VOL XI · We Hired the Monsters
America Hired Hitler's Rocket Men. One Brought a Notebook That Answers.
Every answer in it was paid for. Not by him.
Based on: Operation Paperclip
Intake record
| Recovered from | Estate sale, Huntsville, Alabama; inside a locked drafting cabinet |
|---|---|
| Contents | A German engineering notebook (1944), a second notebook in English (1962 to 1966), one photograph |
| Finder | Estate liquidator; transferred to the Archive by private sale |
| Status | German notebook sealed. Final eleven pages withheld from this record. |
Recovered file
Kranz died on Tuesday. Heart. He was sixty-one. He left me his drafting cabinet, which surprised everyone in the office, including me. I was the only American on the team who ever had dinner at his house. I think that is the whole reason.
The key was taped under the top drawer. Inside: slide rules, a box of German pencils, and a notebook bound in gray cloth, the pages ruled in the metric grid they used at Peenemünde. Every page is equations. Combustion chamber pressures. Turbopump tolerances. Valve timing. Most of it is the V-2.
That is not a secret anymore. Everybody in Huntsville knows where the Germans came from.
Some history, for myself, because I want it written down straight.
After the war the U.S. Army quietly brought German scientists, engineers, and technicians to this country under a program called Operation Paperclip. More than sixteen hundred of them, over the following years. [1] The rocket men came here, to Huntsville, with Wernher von Braun. They are building the rockets that will take us to the moon. I work for them. I like most of them.
Von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937. He became an officer in the SS in 1940. [1] We do not talk about that at lunch.
The V-2 was built underground, in tunnels dug into a mountain near Nordhausen, in a factory called the Mittelwerk. The labor came from a concentration camp attached to it, Mittelbau-Dora. Historians now estimate that more prisoners died building the V-2 than were killed by it in combat. [2] When American troops reached the camp in April 1945, they found thousands of corpses. [3]
Kranz worked in the Mittelwerk. He told me that once, at his dinner table, and then he did not say anything else for the rest of the night.
Something happened I need to put down while it is fresh.
The second stage problem we have been stuck on for three weeks. Combustion instability at full thrust. I took the gray notebook home again. Late, half joking, I wrote the problem on the first blank page in the back. In English. Just to see it written somewhere else.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 062 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.