AnnieJacobsen

I think the scientists were hoping not to go to prison. And to continue their work. From the USG they got both wishes, plus American citizenship and a shot at the American dream. I did not learn more about Mengele, but I did learn that he was far from the only madman physician working under the Third Reich. The Nazis produced thousands of morally compromised physicians. At the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, one of the chief prosecutors pointed out that in his opinion 90% of all physicians working in Germany under the Reich were culpable.

He looks better in a hat than I do.

Great point. There were more than 1600 German scientists who came to America as part of the program. I focus on the narratives of about 20 of them, the great majority of whom were hardcore Nazi ideologues. Wernher Von Braun, however, was not just, as you say, a scientist who made stuff. He was well aware that slave laborers building his rockets were culled from concentration camps, and that more than 10,000 of those workers were worked to death. Documents also show that von Braun himself went to the Buchenwald concentration camp to pick slaves, as he wrote in a memo. Looking at each case is key, I think, to making a judgement for oneself. NASA helped him whitewash his past.

It's impossible to say exactly how many of the 1600 were Nazi ideologues, but after all my research and reporting I'd say it's safe to say that to have worked in weapons research for the Reich, in any capacity above janitor, you had to have been a Nazi party supporter. They were not ones to tolerate dissent, as we know.

I think that hiring Nazis was a moral compromise. A short-cut. With that said, there were a number of generals at the Pentagon who disliked the idea but felt it was the lesser of two evils -- that if we didn't get them the Soviets would. What surprised me most in my research was learning that others, like Brigadier General Charles E. Loucks of the Army Chemical Corp actually grew fond of some of Hitler's top chemists including a member of Himmler's staff, Dr. Walter Schieber. In one archive, I located Christmas cards the two men exchanged for years...