Ghosts from the Past

Arthur Rudolph was one of 118 top German scientists, including his longtime friend Wernher von Braun, who were secretly brought to the U.S. at the end of World War II. Later made manager of the Saturn V project in Huntsville, Ala., he led the development of the rocket that first took men to the moon. An American citizen since 1954, Rudolph was honored by NASA in 1969 with its most prestigious award, the Distinguished Service Medal.

Last week the Justice Department disclosed that Rudolph, 77, had voluntarily left for West Germany last March and renounced his U.S. citizenship in May. According to the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, beginning in 1943, Rudolph helped procure prisoners from the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp in central Germany to build tunnels for the underground factory producing V-2 rockets. The laborers lived at the work site, sleeping on bare rock, working with their hands twelve hours a day, seven days a week, without ventilation, heat or drinking water. By the time Germany surrendered, more than a third of the 60,000 inmates had died. After being presented with corroborated evidence gleaned from archival documents, testimony and information contained in a 1980 book, Dora by Jean Michel, Rudolph was persuaded to leave the U.S.