In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era by Monique Laney
  • Martin Collins (bio)
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era. By Monique Laney. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xv+ 302. $35.

In German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie, Monique Laney takes on two intertwined but distinct problems, one historical, the other methodological. The first is to offer a significant addition to the literature on the “rocket team”—those German personnel who developed the World War II V-2 rocket—and the lingering questions regarding their relation to the Nazi state, and then, in the years after the war, their incorporation into U.S. life as technical assets in the cold war competition with the Soviet Union. The outlines of this contextualizing story are well-known, especially through histories on the charismatic figure of Wernher von Braun and the key role that German scientists and engineers played in developing a signature technology of the Apollo moon program, the Saturn V rocket. Laney’s contribution is to shift the focus from the intersection of science, technology, and state politics to the explicitly ethical and cultural story of these Nazi-regime participants as they settled in 1951 into a new, unfamiliar community: Huntsville, Alabama, built on Jim Crow–era values and practices, still in full force when they arrived.

Her account has two chronological frames. The first, and richest, analyzes the 1950s and 1960s as the émigrés entered their new world. The other shifts to the early 1980s, as Arthur Rudolph, a key member of the rocket team and developer of the Saturn V, is stripped of his citizenship and deported by the U.S. government for his direct role in overseeing the Nordhausen Mittlewerk facility that used Nazi concentration camp labor to build V-2s. What gives Laney’s story energy, especially as regards the earlier years, is her attention to the specifics of time and place and the collisions contained therein—between the violence of Jim Crow and the intensifying postwar civil rights movement and the overlap of this struggle with the politics and memory of the Holocaust. These collisions define her task: to understand how a community in cold war America grappled with profound injustices and engaged in a messy, inconclusive process of self-reflection and accountability.

Laney presents this story not as a contest of rhetorics, but of the lived experience of those in and around Huntsville—of the émigrés, of the African American community, of the (small) Jewish community, and of the white Christian community, each with its own hierarchies of wealth and status. In presenting this sociocultural map, a key dimension is the area’s shift from a largely rural, agriculturally oriented economy to one in which high-tech industry and educational attainment became defining factors. The arrival of well-educated Germans and the concurrent U.S. governmental [End Page 691] commitment to build up the Redstone Arsenal (later renamed Marshall Space Flight Center when the facility was transferred to NASA in 1960) stimulated this transformation, which, in turn, provided the means for the German émigrés to play an outsized role in shaping the city in the 1950s and 1960s. Their contributions to NASA successes in the space race thrust Huntsville into larger, patriotic narratives of American accomplishment, oriented toward the future, not the past. The result, as perceived by Huntsville’s white Christians, was to see the émigrés as “our Germans,” vital catalysts in making the area more cosmopolitan, a contrast to other regions of the South. Such narratives obscured Huntsville’s racial politics and suppressed connections to the Nazi past. As the revelations about Rudolph’s complicity in Nazi crimes (and potentially those of others on the rocket team) garnered headlines, the community’s dominant self-conception was shattered.

In pursuing this multi-perspective, entangled story Laney uses oral history to illuminate the quotidian textures of friction, accommodation, and silences as political, cultural, and economic changes re-shaped the community. This methodology, oriented toward the literature on historical memory, is central to the...

pdf

Share