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  • German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era by Monique Laney
  • Jason Krupar
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era. By Monique Laney. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 302. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-300-19803-4.)

Histories concerning space flight and the American quest to reach the moon tend to focus on the technological and engineering achievements that propelled the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Overlooked are the backstories behind the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s [End Page 982] successes, the tales hidden and ignored because of their unseemliness. Monique Laney peels back two of the largely underinvestigated subjects in American space exploration, race and the role of former Nazi/German scientists in U.S. rocketry programs.

Laney relies heavily on oral histories collected from first- and second-generation German residents of Huntsville, Alabama—home of the Redstone Arsenal and Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC)—the city’s small Jewish population, and the larger African American community. She also interviewed white residents of Huntsville whose families predated the arrival of the Germans. The oral histories Laney gathered portray the cultural and economic ways the new arrivals altered this small southern city, and yet, in matters of race, the Germans were indifferent to the plight of Huntsville’s black population. The interviews she conducted among African Americans underscore the socioeconomic gap between the two groups and the bitterness black residents directed at the privileges these former enemy scientists enjoyed while the black community dealt with segregation.

When Wernher von Braun and his colleagues arrived in Huntsville in 1950, local outrage at hosting former enemies, even Nazi Party members, was minimal. Laney reports that initial national coverage and ire at the rapid transfer via Operation Paperclip of German scientific personnel quickly dissipated as federal officials sanitized the records of Braun and his subordinates. White residents accepted the Germans due to the resurgence they helped fuel at Redstone Arsenal and later at MSFC. The educational levels most German scientists brought with them provided the impetus for an alleged cultural uplift in Huntsville.

Huntsville’s small Jewish population, Laney discovered in several interviews, held mixed responses to the presence of Braun and the Germans. Several members worked doggedly to assist Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany and then after the war to help refugees into the United States. The German rocketeers placed Huntsville’s Jews in an awkward position. Some community members worked at either Redstone or MSFC and encountered Germans frequently. Others owned businesses that attracted German customers. Jews coped the best they could in the situation, and some actively avoided interactions with the Germans. According to Laney, Huntsville’s Jewish population suspected Nazis riddled the German cadres brought to Redstone.

White Huntsville residents embraced Braun and the Germans despite the worrisome taint of Nazi pasts. The presence of these technological elites evolved into a source of civic pride, much celebrated throughout the city. When the Arthur Rudolph war crimes case blew up in 1984, the indignation expressed by German families and white residents at the investigation demonstrated the revisionist history gripping Huntsville. Jewish residents were shocked by the accusations that Rudolph oversaw slave laborers working on the V-2 rocket program, but none doubted his guilt. African Americans knew little about the case, and those who did merely regarded it as further testimony of the inequalities in Huntsville.

Laney argues at the end of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era that unlike their kin in Germany, the Germans in Huntsville never had to confront their sordid [End Page 983] past. Instead Operation Paperclip, the Cold War space and arms races, the promotional abilities of Braun, and federal paperwork whitewashed the ugly truths behind Huntsville’s benefactors. German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie reveals the inequalities, indifference, and isolation experienced by Huntsville communities. More than a history of technology, Laney’s book bridges race, the Cold War, science policy, civil rights, and southern history through her extensive use of interviews...

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