Obituaries : Arthur Rudolph; Designed Saturn Rocket

Arthur Rudolph, the World War II German rocket scientist who won acclaim as an American for designing the Saturn rocket that put men on the moon, but who then was deported after accusations of complicity in Nazi war crimes, has died. He was 89.

Rudolph, who renounced his U.S. citizenship and returned to Germany in 1984, died Monday in a Hamburg rest home, Robert Magness, a former engineering colleague in San Diego, told The Times on Tuesday.

Brought to the United States after World War II under Project Paperclip, which was designed to capitalize on the talents of German rocketeers, Rudolph worked at Solar Aircraft in San Diego in the late 1940s. After the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created, he spent most of his career at NASA facilities in Huntsville, Ala., where he was instrumental in creating the Saturn V.

Rudolph became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1954. He later received a special award from President Lyndon B. Johnson and several awards from the U.S. Army and NASA in honor of his contributions to the American space program.

The retired Rudolph was living in San Jose in 1982 when the Office of Special Investigations, a Nazi-hunting arm of the U.S. Justice Department, accused him of responsibility in the deaths of thousands of concentration camp workers building V-2 rockets for the Nazis during World War II.

Fearing what a war crimes trial might do to his family, Rudolph renounced his U.S. citizenship and returned to Germany. The Justice Department agreed not to prosecute him, and he was permitted to keep his NASA pension. His German citizenship was restored in 1987.

Rudolph came to rue his hasty departure from the United States and, persuaded by Magness and other supportive colleagues and with official encouragement from such politicians as California Gov. Pete Wilson, sought for years to reenter his adopted country. In 1990, Canadian courts ruled him an “inadmissible person” when he tried to enter Canada to visit his daughter Marianne in Toronto.

In Rudolph’s view, he never set out to build weapons for the Nazis. He simply grew up fascinated with rockets and their potential for space travel. And working on rockets in Germany in the 1930s meant working on armaments.

He began working at the northern German proving grounds of Peenemunde, where the V-2 rocket and German buzz bombs were created. When the British bombed the Peenemunde plant in 1943, Rudolph was ordered to move his V-2 production line to an old gypsum mine under mountains near Nordhausen, dubbed Mittelwerk.

United Nations and U.S. Army records suggest that about 25,000 concentration camp workers who manned the factory died from cold, starvation, air pollution and accidents. The Nazi-hunters implied that Rudolph condoned the poor treatment even if he did not order it. Rudolph countered that he had tried to help the slave laborers and got them extra food.

“He always hoped he’d get his citizenship back and that the government would admit its accusations were wrong,” said Walter Haeussermann, a former colleague at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. “It was his highest desire to get his name cleared.”

In addition to his daughter, who lives in Northern California, Rudolph is survived by his wife, Martha.