DOCUMENTARY EXAMINES NAZI SCIENTISTS IN U.S.

A documentary tonight on public television’s “Frontline” series details the World War II records of a group of German scientists who later came to the United States and played key roles in the development of the U.S. space program.

The one-hour documentary, “The Nazi Connection,” was produced for public-television’s weekly documentary series by British journalist Tom Bower. Airing at 8 p.m. on Channel 50 and at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, it reports that some of the Germans knowingly used concentration-camp inmates in early rocket experiments in Germany and as slave labor at Nazi rocket-testing facilities.

“We feel it is part of ‘Frontline’s’ mandate to raise consciousness,” David Fanning, the series’ executive producer, said by telephone from Boston’s WGBH-TV, where “Frontline” is produced.

“There has been talk of this Nazi connection, of what the scientists did during the war, and of how the U.S. government helped bring them to this country and cover up their past, over the years,” Fanning continued, “but even in the course of the brief news reports that have appeared on television over the years, the tendency has been to let these stories be. We felt that it was enormously important to get the story out, while many of the key players are still alive.”

The program examines the involvement of a team of about 100 former German scientists, led by Wernher von Braun and others whom the U.S. government had once labeled “ardent Nazis,” in the U.S. space program. It says that U.S. officials not only brought the scientists to this country following the war, but also “conspired to help them keep their terrible secrets.”

“We saw no moral problem (in bringing them into our space program). . . . After all, they had been working on weapons of war for their country, just like we were for our country,” says a former Pentagon official.

The program utilizes interviews with Germans and Americans who knew of the Nazi connection, along with newsreel footage, sketches by concentration-camp inmates of executions at the experimental rocket facilities, and other on-camera interviews with survivors of these facilities.

Fanning, citing the fact that the U.S. Justice Department for the past several years also has been examining the war records of the scientists, said much of the material for the new documentary was made available under the Freedom of Information Act.

Included in the documentary is what Fanning believes to be the first on-camera interview with German scientist Arthur Rudolph, former head of production of the Saturn 5 rocket, who also was chief of production at one of the Nazi rocket-testing facilities during the war. Rudolph relinquished the U.S. citizenship that was granted to him following the war, apparently as a result of recent Justice Department investigations, and returned to Germany. Like other Germans interviewed on-camera in the program, he denies complicity in Nazi atrocities during the war.