German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era

by Monique Laney

This thought-provoking study by historian Monique Laney focuses on the U.S. government–assisted integration of German rocket specialists and their families into a small southern community soon after World War II. In 1950, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, a town that would celebrate the team, despite their essential role in the recent Nazi war effort, for their contributions to the U.S. Army missile program and later to NASA’s space program. Based on oral histories, provided by members of the African American and Jewish communities, and  by the rocketeers’ families, co-workers, friends, and neighbors, Laney’s book demonstrates how the histories of German Nazism and Jim Crow in the American South intertwine in narratives about the past. This is a critical reassessment of a singular time that links the Cold War, the Space Race, and the Civil Rights era while addressing important issues of transnational science and technology, and asking Americans to consider their country’s own history of racism when reflecting on the Nazi past.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 26, 2015

Reviews

[Jennie Floyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written and well-researched study of how Huntsville, Alabama, went from "the watercress capital of the world" (I had never heard this, and I lived there for 23 years) to the "Rocket City" with the help of the German scientists who came there in the 1950s to work on the rockets that eventually took man to the moon. The author presents the evidence of the use of slave labor, sanctioned by Von Braun and others, to develop the V-2 rocket that killed so many in Britain toward the end of the war. She makes the case that the willingness of the Army to turn a blind eye to the engineers' complicity can be tied to the desire of the Southerners who welcomed them to sweep their own reliance on slave labor in the past under the rug. It's an interesting argument. I enjoyed her use of quotes from many interviews with citizens who lived in Huntsville at the time. But it is really dry reading very much in the academic style, and even though I am very interested in the subject as a 18-year resident of Huntsville (1963-1981), I found it tough to finish the book.

[Jeffrey Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

The last two sentences of Monique Laney's time are quite telling.

"Maybe one day, this attempt at Vergangenheitsbewaltigung concerning the rocketeers' past in Nazi Germany will affect how Huntsville grapples with its history of slavery and Jim Crow. For just as the Rudolph case has forced many to reconsider, debate, and learn from the fallout from the Nazi regime, the mistreatment of African Americans in a racially charged and segregated United States deserves the same reflection."

Honestly, you will not get the same reflection from this confusing book.

Laney has a good idea of what she wanted to accomplish when taking on this project, but it suffers tremendously from a lack of focus. In fact, the lack of focus even makes the title misleading, "German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Naxi Past during the Civil Rights Era."

The focus of this book was not on the German rocketeers. We learned very little about the men who worked and built the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. We learned about their family members, mainly children and grandchildren, but there are better sources to learn about the rocketeers than this book.

Also, there was little in the way of reference to the Nazi past when she wrote about the Civil Rights era. She did make a valiant effort at trying to make a comparative analysis of African American segregation in both Huntsville and Birmingham during the Civil Rights era, but there was no tie to Nazi Germany in that section of her writing.

She did explain Arthur Rudolph's case, which was a tie to Nazi Germany, but that didn't start until the 1980s, well after the Civil Rights era ended.

Where she succeeds is bringing up the viewpoints of the various constituencies of Huntsville from when the German engineers arrived to present day. We hear from African Americans, non-German white Americans, Jewish community, and the children and grandchildren of the German rocketeers. The early section about the struggles of the German families adapting to life in Huntsville was the strongest section of writing.

She uses oral history quotes (rather poorly, in fact), but then proceeds to give us her subjective interpretation of what we just read, which is often in conflict with what the subject just stated.

Furthermore, as a descendant of a German rocketeer, she is too close to the subject matter. She interjects herself into a historical monograph where she doesn't need to be. There is too much "I" in this narrative as she is not a central character in this story but a minor figure. It is not an autobiography.

She took on a wonderful concept for an investigation but left it with no clear answers, a muddied narrative, and asking the questions "Who cares?" and "So what?" too many times in this reading.

This is a book that I really wanted to like. Perhaps if she would have had a better focus on the one group whose voice was missing most, those of the actual German Rocketeers, it would have made for a more compelling read. As it stands, this book offers little in the way of advancing our knowledge of the German Rocketeers and the Rudolph Case, and a marginally better understanding of Huntsville during the Civil Rights era. The best part of it was the oral history collection, but their use in this book was surprisingly weak.

I give it two stars instead of one because of the oral history interviews and the depth of sources used in the research.

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

My friends who have spent time in Huntsville, Alabama may be interested in this book. Monique Laney, now a professor at the Auburn History Department where I earned my master's degree, has written a unique study of the German rocket experts who entered the United States and lived in Huntsville after World War II. Many books have been written about Dr. Wernher von Braun and his colleagues over the years, but this author makes a fresh contribution by interviewing 73 people to gain a sense of how Huntsville residents reacted to the presence of people in their town who had developed rockets for Nazi Germany. The rocket experts became American heroes for their work developing rockets for the U.S. Army and then NASA, including the Saturn V that sent astronauts to the Moon. But how does this hero status square with the fact that they had earlier developed the V-2 rocket for a heinous regime and relied on the brutal exploitation of concentration camp labor to do so?

Laney generally finds that the white Christian residents of Huntsville felt comfortable living with the Germans and all of the economic prosperity they brought to the town, even to the point of vigorously defending Arthur Rudolph when the U.S. government investigated him and he agreed to renounce his U.S. citizenship. These residents and the Germans "were linked by similar histories and cultures" and "became like extended family members," in Laney's words. On the other hand, the African-American and Jewish residents of Huntsville did not consider themselves part of this "extended family" and were more likely to believe that Rudolph was guilty of the crimes the government investigated. Thus although the Germans and white Christians formed a tightly knit transnational community, this did not extend to everybody in Huntsville.

Although the writing here may be a bit dry and academic, the book is valuable in that it makes a unique argument and engages so many important fields: not just the history of rocketry, but also historical memory, transnational history, oral history, and social justice.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has an interesting premise and is clearly well-researched, but it feels substantially disjointed. Seemingly the only cogent argument that the book advances is that the German rocketeers who moved to Huntsville to work at the MSFC in the 50s and 60s benefited substantially from a societal structure that allowed them to be seen as broadly White in spite of the fact that they were recruited from a foreign power that the US had recently waged war on. A solid quarter of the book focuses on the Rudolph trial and its aftermath, but the takeaway can be largely summarized as "this was a thing that happened and people felt all sorts of ways about it." The author dances and flirts with the idea that the South's culture of segregation made the Germans feel at home, but aside from a handful of offhand quotes from Huntsville's Black population, leaves this aspect of the migration largely unexplored.

[Tim Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent; based on the author's Ph.D. dissertation also on articles she published in 2008 and 2011 for"Spaceflight Quarterly" and a scholarly "German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss" edited by M. Schulze, James Skidmore, David G. John, G. Liebscher, S. Seibel-Achenbach. Highly recommended to put into context the transporting of Nazi Scientists at 1945 war's climax into 1940s & 20th Century Huntsville, Alabama context and local history. 5* out of 5

[David Uptagrafft · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone that grew up in Huntsville Alabama in the 1980s and 1990s this book was well worth the read for a variety of reasons. I rated it 4 stars instead of 5 because I grew up surrounded by rocket scientists/engineers and a perfect 5 stars would be an indicator of something that could not be improved upon.

Virgil Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Von Braun were automatic household name in Huntsville due to the local facilities named after them. However, being born in the 1980s, the voluntary extradition of a member of the German rocket team due to the US special investigation did not make any mark upon my memory. I was surprised to read that had happened so recently. While I was aware of Project Paperclip and some of the controversy surrounding that thanks to the History Channel and Dr Space by Bob Ward on Von Braun, I had completely missed the persistent pursuit of potential war-criminals even among this locally esteemed group of scientists.

Thanks to the Space Program and the ongoing influx of people from around the world, citizens of Huntsville often regard the city as not particularly Southern (and certainly unlike the rest of Alabama). Nonetheless, many of us have ties to the more traditional South with it's colorful, controversial, beautiful and shameful past. From that perspective, this book brought to mind two particular points of reflection:

1) I imagine the ongoing local defense of the German Rocket Team has merged in with the general white-southern defense of other heroes from the past. The broader American culture continues to debate how to handle Southern Civil War memorials as well as struggling with how to properly frame the Founding Fathers with their now damnable but typical-for-the-time views on slavery and other issues. Among many, great loss is perceived if all lionized heroes are reduced to demons; "throwing out the baby with the bathwater." This bent to honor the past may be prevalent in relation to flawed characters as varied as Thomas Jefferson, Robert Lee and Dr Von Braun's team. The book discusses the "excusing" by the locals of a shady war-time past due to the space and local economic accomplishments of the team. I believe there is room for additional examination of the ongoing local defense of the rocket team within the context of the broader white-southern zeitgeist imperative: to defend the best of the past 250 years while looking past the worst. Admittedly, as a transplanted German, Monique Laney may not be the one to write this part of the story.

2) In Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy there is an interesting discussion of this German coming to Union Seminary in America in the 1930's and being particularly appalled by the stories of an Africa-American man from Alabama. The Alabamian is not named and I don't know if his name is known, the German was, of course, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The ironic social-racial parallels of The Rocketeers (post-WWII German Scientists thriving in Jim Crow Alabama) and Dr Bonhoeffer (pre-WWII German Scholar-Theologian appalled in New York by the treatment of an Alabamian) seems like it's worthy of a Malcolm Gladwell article or some other popular consumable analysis. At the least, I hope to hear Monique Laney speak locally again on her book one day and ask if she is familiar with the account.

[Angie Reisetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a free copy of this book through Net Galley.

The subject of this book is somewhat specialized, something I hadn't thought of before but culturally and historically interesting as a microcosm of our ideas about race and nationality. It is, I believe, an adaptation of Laney's thesis, so it has an academic, rather dry tone that makes sure to cross t's and dot i's as far as the research is concerned, but does not make any of the interview subjects into characters. But the dry tone is my primary complaint, and the story was interesting enough to make up for it.

The U.S. government relocated german rocket scientists her after WWII because they had technical expertise and, importantly, were white. And they settled into their new Alabama home and fit right in to the segregated culture there. Both the government that employed them and the town officials who recognized the benefits of federal program dollars were eager to make the settling of these engineers and related folks successful. It worked, for the most part. And then in the 1980s, another branch of the government decided that maybe we had been too hasty to offer citizenship to people who might have been Nazi war criminals, and investigations into the past bewildered the community. The most famous case was the Rudolph 1984 case. I found the reactions to it from the people in Huntington interesting. They didn't have any more information than anyone else, but were sure that none of the Germans, no matter their elevated position in the Nazi war machine, had done anything bad that they weren't forced to do. No one had done anything wrong. They were sure of it. These are the good Nazis. Most distressingly, some told Laney that it was clear that a conspiracy of Jews in the US government were responsible for besmirching these upstanding gentlemen's names. That sounds, well, a whole lot like something a Nazi would say.

But those who simply argued that this was strange inconsistency, and unjust -- we brought them here knowing who they were, permitted them to work for us and contribute to our programs, and then after they are retired we decide to prosecute -- these did sound like reasonable people to me. We have not had to face the kind of anguished reflection on the Nazi past that Germany as a whole has, but this town in Alabama probably needs to. But time has passed. Is this something that will just slip into the past?

I think Laney's research will help us do some necessary thinking about these historical events and how they have helped shape us. The benefits of our national rocket program were certainly not limited to Rocket City, USA. It's an intriguing and important corner of our national identity.