When WWII ended, the US government secretly recruited over 1,600 Nazi scientists — whitewashing their war crimes and setting them to work on rockets and the space race. The man who designed the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 was a former SS officer who used concentration camp slave labor. None were prosecuted.
The complete story of how OSS agents scoured defeated Germany for rocket scientists — and what those scientists had actually done during the war.
The full scope: 1,600 recruits, forged security dossiers, and the bureaucratic apparatus that quietly ran the program under Truman's presidency.
PBS examines how agents physically crossed out Nazi party membership on files — literally whiting out history to pass scientists through American background checks.
How a paperclip on a dossier became the signal to look the other way — and why American officials convinced themselves this was a necessary evil of the Cold War.
NASA's own sanitized biography of the SS officer who became their most celebrated engineer — read it for what it omits about his wartime use of slave labor.
The Cold War context: why US officials believed recruiting Nazi rocket scientists was the only way to stay ahead of a Soviet program that was recruiting the same people.
The technical lineage: how German V-2 expertise translated directly into American ICBMs and ultimately the Saturn V that carried Neil Armstrong to the Moon.