Despite the stigma of having worked for the Nazis during World War II, the German scientists led by Wernher von Braun became heroes of the U.S. space program in the 1950s and '60s.  They were...   Apollo's Rocketeers   By MARCIA DUNN The Associated Press Konrad Dannenberg, pauses during an interview at the Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.  He is one of 30 to 40 surviving scientists of the 118 the U.S. brought over from Germany after World War II.  The men were key players in the American space program culminating in the forst manned moon landing on this date 30 years ago.  At top, Wernher von Wernher, leader of the group, explains his design for a moon rocket.   HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Rudi Beichel is still crunching numbers for a better rocket engine.   Ernst Stuhlinger is still writing about rocket science. So is Gerhard Reisig.   And Konrad Dannenberg is still going to launches and organizing space confabs, only now they're really just reunions, and they are getting smaller and fewer each year.   These men are Apollo's rocketeers, old and overlooked but as passionate as ever about the frontiers they blasted open, with the world's first space shot in 1942, and then by helping put human beings on the moon 30 years ago July 20.   At best guess, only 30 of the 118 original rocket men who came here from Hitler's Germany are still alive. Many are too frail to leave home because of strokes and arthritis. Those who can -- Dannenberg, most notably -- speak for all when they say that what NASA needs is another Wernher von Braun.   Yet many of them fear there will never be another von Braun, the mastermind who led them to America and America to the moon.   And even now, in their late 70s to early 90s, they have yet to outlive the Nazi taint, and they feel deprived of the recognition they deserve.   The fact is that these scientists have led two very different lives: first as loyal subjects of the Third Reich, then as loyal Americans.   Wernher von Braun's wartime rockets indiscriminately killed thousands of people and were built with slave laborers provided by concentration camps. But as World War II ended, the Soviets and Americans found themselves in competition to acquire Germany's rocket expertise. The moral debate was sidelined and von Braun and his men were transformed from servants of Hitler's war machine to heroes of America's race to space.   Von Braun died of cancer in 1977, at age 65, without realizing his fondest dream: leading America to Mars.   Five of his team's sturdier souls gathered last month at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, their adopted hometown and birthplace of the Saturn V moon rocket, to celebrate their achievements and reminisce in fluent but still German-accented English.   "This work we did changed the whole society, the whole life, the whole technology," said the small, smiling Beichel. At 85, he had traveled all the way from Sacramento, Calif., for the big event and was savoring every moment.   "We go to the moon, the biggest industrial revolution the world has ever seen ... and that's only the beginning, ja."   Although as many as 400,000 Americans worked on the $24 billion Apollo program, the Germans contend that without them, the nation never would have put men on the moon by the end of 1969 as President Kennedy decreed.   "It was von Braun's initiative and his drive and motivation and his gift of persuasion, of interesting other people, which enabled us to go to the moon at that relatively early time," said Stuhlinger, also 85, who was von Braun's chief scientist.   As incredible as man's journey to the moon was, so too was these men's journey: launching the first rocket to skim space, the German V-2, V for Vengeance, in 1942; the first American satellite, Explorer I, in 1958; the first American into space, Alan Shepard, in 1961; the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who blasted off on July 16, 1969.   Of all the launches, the one that stands out most for Dannenberg, an 86-year-old propulsion expert, was the first successful test flight of the V-2.   The rocket took off Oct. 3, 1942, from Peenemünde, a German Army research center north of Berlin on the Baltic Sea. It soared 53 miles high (space officially begins 50 miles up) and 118 miles downrange. The army officer in charge of rocket research proclaimed:   "Today the spaceship has been born!"   "At that time, it was clear it would be used by the military," Dannenberg explained. "On the other hand, of course, it was a big step ahead and if you look at the V-2 today and see it next to the Saturn V, you probably think it's tiny. But for us, it was a HUGE rocket, much bigger than any amateur rocket I'd ever seen or even imagined."   The V-2 was 47 feet tall. The Saturn V was 363 feet, more than twice the height of the space shuttle and the biggest, mightiest rocket that ever carried a human being. A 6.4 million-pound monster, it had up to 5 million parts.   Within months of the first successful V-2 launch, Adolf Hitler ordered the production of thousands of these "wonder weapons" and put the SS in charge. Production moved to an abandoned mine near the Harz Mountains of central Germany after Peenemünde was bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1943. Slave labor was used in the underground factory.   In an attempt to lure him over from the army, the SS made von Braun an honorary second lieutenant, then major. He accepted for fear of retribution but stuck his SS uniform in a closet, Stuhlinger said.   The Gestapo, nonetheless, arrested von Braun in 1944. The charge: He intended his rockets for space travel, not weaponry. He spent only two weeks in jail.   By the fall of 1944, V-2's were being launched at Paris and London. But Germany was losing the war and in May 1945, following Hitler's suicide, von Braun and his team surrendered to the U.S. Army. That September, the exodus began under the code name Operation Paperclip; 118 Germans were brought to America along with blueprints and enough parts to build 100 V-2's. Twenty-four more Germans eventually followed.   They quietly settled in Fort Bliss, Texas and helped the Army launch rebuilt V-2's from White Sands, N.M. (One accidentally soared across the border into a hill next to a Mexican graveyard.)   When the rocket and missile effort moved to the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville in 1950, so did the Germans. They became U.S. citizens five years later. When NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center opened at Redstone Arsenal in 1960, von Braun was its first director.   The Germans' presence initially posed a public relations challenge to the U.S. government. On one occasion soon after their arrival, to avoid inflaming the fresh wounds of World War II, they were passed off as a Hungarian Gypsy band.   Later, when von Braun emerged as America's top rocket scientist, Tom Lehrer, the satirical songwriter, lampooned him as an opportunist tailoring his loyalties to whoever employed him: "Don't say that he's hypocritical, say rather that he's apolitical. `Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."   Irene Willhite was walking with her husband, a missile instructor, and their five children through a dark parking lot in Huntsville in 1957 when she first saw the Germans.   "I can see this to this day: four long, black, leather coats. And I thought, they didn't even leave the coats behind," she recalled. "I had total resentment. And I'll tell you the truth, only since I have come to work here, I know their contributions."   "Here" is the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, a visitor complex and Space Camp hub, where she has been the archivist for four years.   She counts the Germans as good friends, and they are entrusting their most valuable possessions to her: books, journals, anything to do with rocketry.   Reisig, 90, wants her to get a truck to empty his house. Stuhlinger and Dannenberg already have sent over loads of boxes.   Stuhlinger published a definitive biography of von Braun in 1994 and still writes scientific essays. Reisig recently published a book about rocket technology in German. Dannenberg is collaborating on a book about early rocketry. Beichel is a consultant for Aerojet, a California-based aerospace and defense company, and works on calculations for future generations of rockets.   Cartons of their work crowd the hallway outside Willhite's cluttered office. Some 3,800 books already fill ceiling-to-floor shelves. There are six V-2 parts, as well as the Army's microfilm of the translated V-2 documents and albums filled with photos of a smoldering Peenemunde.   The subject of Nazis and World War II never came up during the space race, said Ed Buckbee, a NASA PR man in the 1960s who went on to direct the center.   It wasn't until after the rocketeers had retired that stories resurfaced linking at least one of them to the slave labor at Mittelwerk, the underground V-2 factory. Old and ailing, Arthur Rudolph relinquished his U.S. citizenship and returned to Germany in 1984 rather than fight war crimes charges, which he denied. He died in 1996 at age 89.   Of the survivors, Reisig is most distressed by the accusations. He refuses to talk to reporters, saying he has been "back-stabbed."   "It's a situation which is very depressing for us old-timers," Stuhlinger said.   After everything the Germans did for NASA and America, it seems terribly ungrateful, Buckbee thinks.   "We were all working as a team, working day and night," he said. "As von Braun used to say, 'Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.' "   Dan Heald was a young Army corporal assigned to von Braun's team in the early 1950s.   "I don't know if I can judge genius. What I can judge is hard-working and thorough," said Heald, 71, a retired engineer. "Often a boss, particularly a big boss like von Braun, will sit in an office and act important. These guys never were sitting and doing nothing.   They were always checking on every single little detail, asking questions. 'Is that right? Is that right?' Even in the shop."   They still take pride in their meticulousness. When name tags issued at the reunion kept falling off, 86-year-old rocketeer Dieter Grau remarked with a chuckle that they should have been sent to his lab for a checkout.   Their painstaking approach paid off in six moon landings from July 1969 through December 1972. Three additional missions were canned; President Nixon had had enough, especially after the harrowing Apollo 13. President Bush tried to resurrect the program on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 1989, but his pitch for moon colonies and a Mars expedition went nowhere.   Nothing has been officially done -- or said -- since.   "To make it happen that somebody went to the moon and came safely back to Earth ... it was amazing that it all worked," said Ursula Mueller, 77, who worked with von Braun in Berlin.   "And then what we have now is the shuttle to go a little bit around." She sadly shook her head.   Müller went alone to the reunion; her husband, Fritz, 91, one of the 118 original rocketeers, was under doctor's orders to stay home.   The official reason for the get-together was a rare visit by von Braun's thirtysomething nephews (his niece, their sister, just moved to Huntsville), not to mention the 30th anniversary of that giant leap for mankind.   The real reason, Elizabeth von Braun confided, was that the only other excuse to gather the old-timers is a funeral, "and we just felt that we need to get them together, as many as we can ... it may be the last time."   The five rocketeers in attendance seemed as much a relic as the artifacts surrounding them, only far more fragile.   A Saturn V rocket lay majestically on its side, collected piecemeal by von Braun in the late 1960s for exhibit at the Space & Rocket Center. Nearby, ground had recently been broken for a full-scale, vertical model.   Down the hall from the gathering was a recreation of von Braun's 1960s office at Marshall Space Flight Center; two of his slide rules were displayed in a quaint, quiet reminder of the times.   Hardly any NASA brass attended the reunion, but Jim Dunn, one of two latter-day space station engineers who dropped by, couldn't help but marvel at the Germans' accomplishments.   "And they did it without computers!" ARTHUR RUDOLPH OF DORA AND NASA By Linda Hunt In 1969, Americans cheered as our astronauts took their first steps onto the moon. The giant rocket that blasted them into space was Arthur Rudolph's crowning achievement as NASA's project director for Saturn V. Fifteen years later, Rudolph relinquished his U.S. citizenship and left the country rather than face Justice Department charges that he had committed war crimes while working in an underground factory that had used Dora concentration camp prisoners as slave labor. The charges stemmed from Rudolph's "complicity in the abuse and persecution of concentration camp inmates who were employed by the thousands as slave laborers under his direct supervision," according to former Justice prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum, who directed the Rudolph case. Dora played a significant role not only in Hitler's efforts to win the war, but in the lives of Rudolph, Wernher von Braun, and other German rocket scientists who are now touted as American heroes in our history books. Ironically, except for two books by French survivors, Dora's history has been totally ignored by Holocaust historians. Rudolph's supporters, however, currently use every opportunity to claim there were no Jews at the factory, prisoners were "well fed," and reports of "alleged" deaths were nothing but KGB propaganda. As a result, publicity surrounding Rudolph's case reeked with Holocaust revisionism, perpetuating what survivor Jean Michel describes in his book Dora as the "monstrous distortion of history" that "has given birth to false, foul, and suspect myths." Dora's camp records, however, quickly dispel those myths. Sixty thousand prisoners passed through Dora in the brief year and a half the camp existed. United Nations and U.S. Army records reveal that at least 25,000 never got out alive. They were starved, beaten, hanged, and literally worked to death building Hitler's secret weapon, the V-2 rocket. "The method of extermination was not the gas chamber, but .of working them to death," said a U.S. Army prosecutor in 1947. This account is based on records from U.S. Army v. Kurt Andrae, Albert Speer 's Inside the Third Reich, U.S. Army 104th Infantry reports, personal interviews, and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the National Archives, Army Intelligence and Justice Department Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Dora's history began as a result of British air attacks in 1943 that blasted the Peenemünde rocket base into ruins. Peenemünde, located on the Baltic Sea, was a testing ground for Nazi "buzz bombs" and the V-2 rocket. With its building leveled and rocket engineers scattered into the hills, the Nazis sought a safer location to mass-produce V-2 rockets, a site guaranteeing both secrecy and protection against further air attacks. In the Hartz mountains, located near the city of Nordhausen in central Germany, two enormous tunnels ran parallel through Kohnstein mountain, providing a perfect location for the new factory, called Mittelwerk (Central Works). WIFO, a government company, excavated the tunnels as a bomb-proof storage place for oil and gasoline. Two railroad lines ran the entire length of both tunnels, with enough space for trucks and huge, intricate machinery to line the walls. Mittelwerk was a combined effort of the Armaments Ministry and the SS. The engineering staff was headed by technical director Albin Sawatzki, an engineer who produced the Tiger tank. Rudolph, who worked at Peenemunde on rocket development and production, was named operations director in charge of V-2 production. When Rudolph was told by Peenemünde's director, Army General Walter Dornberger, "You go with Sawatzki," he and his staff dismantled a pilot production plant and moved to Mittelwerk. One underground tunnel was complete; the other, partially finished, opened out on the northern side of the mountain. SS General Hans Kammler, who headed the SS construction branch that build Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the gas chambers, was in charge of completing Mittelwerk's tunnels in order to make room for the factory. Dora was founded as the out-camp of Buchenwald to supply the slave labor to reconstruct Mittelwerk's tunnels and work under SS and civilian engineer supervision building rockets. According to armaments minister Albert Speer, using concentration camp prisoners, who had no contact with the outside world, was SS chief Heinrich  Himmler's way of guaranteeing that the plant would be kept secret. "Such prisoners did not even get mail," said Himmler. Beginning on September 3, 1943, a steady stream of convoys into Dora unloaded 60,000 prisoners from 31 nations - Russians, Poles, Belgians, Italian prisoners of war, members of the French resistance, Jewish children, even a black American flier named Johnny Nicholas. According to Army records, Nicholas told other prisoners he was captured when his plane crashed in France. He worked as a doctor in Dora's hospital. "he was to everybody a mystery, someone unusual because we had never seen a black person in Europe," remembers Dora survivor Sam Taub. Yves Beon was a member of the French resistance when he was arrested, sent to Buchenwald, and then to this secret place beneath the mountain where he worked as an SS slave. For months, Beon was one of as many of 4,000 prisoners at a time who lived in the freezing cold tunnels, amid lice and filth, digging and carrying huge boulders to clear area for a rocket factory. "We were in the center of the mountain with no air," Beon recalls. "We slept there, we ate there, we spent months there before going outside." The prisoners - called Häftlinge, "men in arrest" - lived and slept in barracks in the tunnels, surrounded by choking dust and fumes. Hundreds were crushed by rocks, beaten to death, starved, or died from tuberculosis and other diseases. After a December 10, 1943, visit to Mittelwerk, even Speer described conditions as "barbarous" and said his men "were so affected that they had to be forcibly sent off on vacations to restore their nerves." Bodies of the dead were taken to Buchenwald for burning until Dora's own crematory was built. Dora camp records describe Buchenwald prisoners as so horrified at seeing bodies crushed by boulders or mangled from beatings that they committed suicide upon learning they were to be sent to Dora. On November 1, 1944, Dora became an independent camp located near the tunnel entrance, with 31 sub-camps scattered around the mountains. While the Häftlinge now lived outside the tunnels, living and working conditions grew worse. Prisoners were hanged, beaten, and terrorized by brutal SS guards from the moment they arrived. A transport of Hungarian Jews, arriving half-dead from Buchenwald, were forced to carry heavy boards to build their own barracks until many dropped dead from exhaustion. Children who arrived with the group were beaten to death in the camp yard because they were too young to work. Eli Pollach, 16, who lost his family at Auschwitz, worked on the "Sawatzki commando" team in the tunnels loading rocket parts on wagons. Before working a 12-hour shift in the tunnels, Pollach and other prisoners were forced to stand for hours in the camp yard for roll call, then walk for miles under SS guard into the mountain. "We had to go in at six o'clock in the morning into the tunnel," said Pollach. "Some didn't come out, because they died in there." Mittelwerk's management changed after the Dora camp was built. In the spring of 1944, prisoners and engineers assembled in the tunnels as Georg Rickhey, dressed in full Nazi uniform, announced that he was Mittelwerk's new general manager. Rudolph gained more influence when Sawatzki returned after a month of illness and was transferred to V-1 production. "I was free of his darn interfering," Rudolph told OSI. Rudolph said he walked through the tunnels once or twice a day and even visited Dora's SS camp commandant Otto Foerschner for a glass of schnapps on a few occasions. Army records show he received daily reports containing information about prisoner's deaths. "I knew that people were dying," he told OSI. One department subordinate to Rudolph was the Prisoner Labor Supply Office, which West German court records show was responsible for "the quantity of food" the prisoners received, which was "completely inadequate." The department also was in charge of requesting "the required prisoner labor supply" from Dora's SS labor allocation office headed by SS officer Wilhelm Simon. When asked by OSI if he had gone to the SS and requested that more prisoners be taken from Dora and brought down into that subterranean hellhole to be used as slaves, Rudolph replied, "Yes, I did." Rudolph claimed that he and Simon tried to improve the prisoners' conditions. In 1947, Simon used that defence when he was tried for war crimes by the U.S. Army. It is significant to note that Army prosecutors rejected his defence, convicted him for being a "sadistic" killer, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. There is extensive evidence that civilian engineers subordinate to Rudolph beat prisoners and caused some to be hanged. Army records identify Rudolph's subordinates, including his deputy, Karl Seidenstucker, by name as abusers of prisoners. Georg Finkenzeller testified, "practically all civilians who were working in the Prisoners' Labor Allocation" either ordered the punishment of prisoners or "carried out beating on their own." Abuses by civilians became so widespread that on June 22, 1944, Mittelwerk personnel, including Rudolph, were warned in writing by the SS and Rickhey that punishment of prisoners was supposed to be the SS's exclusive domain. Dora's camp doctor had complained that prisoners were being hospitalized for being "beaten or even stabbed with sharp instruments by civilian employees for any petty offense." Peenemünde officials were well aware of Mittelwerk's deplorable conditions. Army documents show that Wernher von Braun, whose brother Magnus was in charge of gyroscope production at Mittelwerk, frequently visited the factory. "I saw Mittelwerk several times, once while these prisoners were blasting tunnels in there, and it was really a pretty hellish environment," said von Braun in a 1971 interview. "The conditions there were absolutely horrible." Knowing about the conditions didn't stop von Braun from attending a meeting in Rickhey's office on May 6, 1944, to discuss slave labor, according to documents found by Eli Rosenbaum. Other Nazis on the list as attending the meeting, and who later lived in America, include Rudolph, Rickhey, General Walter Dornberger, Hans Friederich, Ernst Steinhoff, and Hans Lindenberg. The group discussed bringing more innocent civilians from France to Mittelwerk as slaves and the requirement that Frenchmen wear striped prisoner uniforms. "it will be possible to utilize French workers in the Mittelwerk only if dressed in appropriate clothing," notes the menu, which does not indicate any objections to the proposal. Despite vicious living and working conditions, Dora prisoners found subtle ways to fight back. When the V-2s produced at Mittelwerk were test-fired at a proving ground in Poland, many of the missiles disintegrated soon after launch. Dieter Grau, a Peenemünde engineer, was sent by Wernher von Braun to Mittelwerk to find out why the rockets failed to operate properly. During an inspection, Grau found that prisoners had sabotaged the rockets. "They knew where they could tighten or loosen a screw, and this way tried to interfere with the proper function of the missile," Grau said in a 1971 interview with another author. The prisoners sabotaged rockets by urinating on wiring, removing vital parts, and loosening screws. "It was common practice," says Beon, who sabotaged the rockets he worked on as a welder by making his welding appear sound when, in fact, the rocket parts were not welded at all. Beon believes their sabotage saved Americans' lives - U.S. troops landing at Normandy would have been killed if the rockets had functioned. "It would have been terrible for the Allies and for the American Army," says Beon. More than 200 prisoners suspected of sabotage were hanged at Dora or on overhead electric cranes in Mittelwerk's tunnels, in some instances as a direct result of civilians reporting them to the SS. Cecil Jay described to Army prosecutors how one prisoner was caught making a metal spoon, accused of sabotage, and hanged over his workbench. "The order was given from the civilians to the SS that the prisoners be punished for sabotage, and it was carried out," Jay said. In one case, 12 prisoners were simultaneously hanged on an overhead crane near Rudolph's office. With their hands tied behind their backs and wooden sticks in their mouths to stifle screams, the electric crane slowly lifted them above a crowd of engineers and prisoners gathered in the tunnel. "Instead of letting them drop and killing them on the spot immediately, they let them hang very slowly with pain that's absolutely horrible," says Beon, who knew if he was caught sabotaging rockets he could be hanged next. "But as I knew I would never get out of Dora, what's the difference?" When they died, prisoners were taken to Dora's crematory and burned. Bodies were emaciated to such an extent that the oven could take as many as four at a time. "They would pull out from the hospital hundreds of people," remembers Taub. "They were put into the crematory - it was going day and night, burning." As the war progressed, frantic work speed-ups to mass produce more rockets caused prisoners to drop dead like flies. Those who became ill or too weak to work were sent to other camps and killed. Dora hospital records show from January 6 to March 26, 1944, 3,000 "sick and exhausted liquidation camp Lublin. Reports note that except for a few, there was "no chance" for prisoners, riding in cold freight cars in the middle of winter with no food, even to live out the trip. Jean Michel had been a leader of the French resistance in Paris before his imprisonment at Dora. In late 1944, he organized a French underground movement among prisoners. "Everybody knew that the SS had decided to kill everybody at the end of the war," Michel said in an interview. "So, I decided to try to do something about it." The group was caught, arrested by the SS, and jailed. Some of the group were beaten to death by the SS during interrogations in a small cell. "I would have been hanged if the end of the war didn't arrive as it happened," says Michel, who was awarded the French Legion of Honor and the American Medal of Freedom after the war. In the beginning of April 1945, as American troops advanced rapidly into the area, Mittelwerk's civilian engineers fled into the mountains amid rumors that the SS would kill them rather than let their secrets fall into Allied hands. For some, such as Arthur Rudolph, the end of the war was the beginning of a new adventure and life in America, where he would eventually work for the U.S. Army and NASA. For the Häftlingen, it was a massacre. The SS planned to force the prisoners into the tunnels, wall them in, and gas them. Instead, 2,000 were taken from Dora and its sub-camps under heavy SS guard on foot, by cart and train, westward to the town of Gardelegen. Less than half survived the trip after days of being starved, beaten, and shot. On the afternoon of April 13, 100 SS. Luftwaffe, and labor front soldiers forced the 1,100 remaining prisoners inside a barn. SS troops spread gasoline on the straw-covered floor and locked the prisoners inside. For the rest of the night, the troops threw hand grenades, shot flares, and fired bullets into the barn, burning it to the ground. Two days later, American troops found charred remains and fewer than 20 prisoners left alive. Meanwhile, the city of Nordhausen surrendered after American attacks on April 11, 1945. The battle-tired men of the 104th "Timberwolf" Infantry Division were combat wise - blood and all kinds of hell were daily routine - but what the Timberwolves found on the outskirts of Nordhausen made them howl with rage. Colonel James L. Collins was leading an infantry unit when his liaison officer called over the radio. "Colonel," he said, "you'd better get up here and see what we've got. It's terrible." Collins moved ahead of the unit and went into the camp. On the hill was the huge cavelike entrance to the factory; 6,000 bodies covered the ground as far as the eye could see. Rows upon rows of skin-covered skeletons were frozen solid in grotesque shapes, bearing bruises and wounds from beatings. "They had been starved to death," said Collins. "Their arms were just little sticks, their legs had practically no flesh on them at all." Army medic David Malachowsky heard machine guns fire. When he went over the hill, he found the SS frantically trying to finish the job. "They had a bunch of prisoners lined up against the fence and were gunning them down," said Malachowsky. As an infantryman, Hugh Carey saw Nazi cruelty when fighting SS divisions, but was unprepared for Dora. Survivors, barely alive, wandered around lost and dazed; others lay as they had fallen - starved, stacked like cordwood, discolored, and lying in indescribable filth. "We had never seen civilian human beings put into a mass torture shop in order to build weapons," said Carey. Bombs from Allied air attacks had ripped large holes in the two-story structures used to pen the prisoners. The bombs had ground flesh and bones into the cement floor. As the soldiers moved through the choking stench of death, they found the still-smouldering furnaces of Dora's crematory. "The doors were open when we got there, where they had been shoveling people in and burning them up," said Collins. As more American troops entered the area, Malachowsky and other medics fed and cared for those few prisoners who survived. Another unit stood guard as 100 Nordhausen townspeople and captured SS moved the dead and dug graves with their bare hands. In the tunnel, a special American unit called "T-Forces" loaded V-2 rockets on truckbeds, then searched the mountainside for Arthur Rudolph and other rocket scientists. Many of these scientists escaped prosecution for war crimes by being sent to the United States to work in its fledgling space program. Exactly 40 years after the liberation of Dora, in April 1985, the Alabama Space and Rocket Museum paid tribute to 40 Germans who stood surrounded by the press, in front of old V-2s and the Saturn V rocket they helped build for the United States. Inside the museum, dozens of awards lay encased in glass as a memorial to Wernher von Braun. There is no monument to Dora - Americans do not wish to be reminded of what Jean Michel said about the day that U.S. astronauts first walked on the moon: "I could not watch the Apollo mission without remembering that that triumphant walk was made possible by our initiation to inconceivable horror." Linda Hunt is a Washington DC, based investigative reporter. She won the 1986 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for her article "U.S. Cover-up of Nazi Scientists" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (April 1985). She is former executive producer of Cable News Network's investigative unit. Her book "Secret Agenda" details this horrible story and "Operation Paperclip" that brought over 1,600 Nazi scientist to the U.S. to work for the Pentagon. May 5, 1945  Soviet Army occupies Peenemünde.  Little is found. Western intelligence is convinced that the Soviets conduct missile tests from Peenemünde in the late 1940's (the Scandinavian 'ghost rockets'). But Russian historical sources available after the downfall of the Soviet Union do not support this belief.  July 5, 1945 Soviets occupy Mittelwerk as the Americans withdraw from the Soviet zone, having taken key V-2 tooling and parts.   Last Rocketeers Set Sights on Mars 8 December 2004   HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Four men and one woman, all around 90 years old, gather in a conference room and pour themselves coffee -- rocket fuel for the last of the original rocketeers.   Just outside, in Rocket Park, looms some of their handiwork: Gemini and Mercury rockets, a lunar lander and a gigantic rusting Saturn V from the Apollo program.   These five people were among 118 German rocket scientists bundled up and brought to the USA after World War II. Working for the Nazis, the rocket scientists had made Hitler's deadly V-2s. Reconstituted in Huntsville, the group vaulted U.S. rocket technology ahead by a decade and developed the rockets that allowed their adopted country to win the space race.   The group's inspirational leader, Wernher von Braun, helped persuade President Kennedy to make his famous commitment to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.   Today, only 12 of that group are still living, including the five gathered here recently to help raise money to restore the Saturn V outside. Even as the remaining rocketeers fade away, they are suddenly relevant again to a new generation. For almost 30 years after Apollo, the American public seemed indifferent to space. But now, technology entrepreneurs -- members of a generation raised on Star Trek and Star Wars -- are again making space sexy.   Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen funded SpaceShipOne, which this fall won the X Prize for boosting civilian space travel. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has started a private company that will work toward putting people on Mars. Elon Musk, who founded online bill-paying service PayPal, has started a space company. Mogul Richard Branson is aiming to be the first to put hotels in space.   To this new generation, the German rocketeers are an inspiration. For the rocketeers, the techies are reviving their dearest hope: that man will go to Mars.   ''If private industry takes tourists into space, it might uplift the whole program again,'' says Konrad Dannenberg, 92, a propulsion expert on Apollo. ''I'm very hopeful.''   Ernst Stuhlinger, 92, who was von Braun's right-hand man, twinkles when asked about the new generation's dreams of Mars flights. ''We old-timers have been thinking that way for a very long time.''   Forced to make missiles the rocketeers have long been haunted by their earlier lives.   In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of research into the new idea of launching rockets into space. A young von Braun took the lead, launching his first rockets in 1934. As World War II approached, the Nazis created a rocket team under von Braun at a secret base on an island at Peenemünde, Germany. They were ordered to make military missiles, not spaceships.   The team developed the V-2, which killed 2,500 British civilians. The rockets were built by concentration camp labor in tunnels.   The rocketeers have always said they had no choice. They say they wanted to build rockets to go to the moon and Mars, not to carry explosives. ''We couldn't even talk about space flight,'' Dannenberg says. ''Von Braun was at a party and talked about it with some people, and the Nazis found out and put him in jail.'' He was later released, but the message was clear.   As Germany's defeat seemed certain in 1945, the rocketeers made a calculated move. ''It was clear nothing was going to happen in Germany in space after the war,'' Dannenberg says. If the rocketeers wanted to pursue their dream, they would have to go elsewhere. The group decided they'd have their best shot with the Americans. They hid their research papers in a mine shaft, forged travel documents, and as many as 500 people -- scientists and their families -- moved toward the approaching American Army -- avoiding the Gestapo, who might have arrested or shot them. They holed up in an abandoned fortress in the Alps.   Von Braun sent his younger brother, Magnus, off on a bicycle to try to find the Americans. He stumbled across Pvt. Fred Schniekert of Sheboygan, Wis., and tried to explain that a whole team of rocket scientists wanted to surrender. Schniekert said, ''I think you're nuts,'' but relayed the message to his superiors, who recognized the value of the rocketeers.   The Army raced to Peenemünde to get there before the Soviets. The rocketeers' papers and every project and spare V-2 part were loaded on 300 rail cars that were shipped to the USA. And then the U.S. government took its own calculated risk: It transferred the 118 former enemy rocket scientists and their families to Fort Bliss, Texas, and eventually to an abandoned military base in Huntsville.   Beating Russia to the moon over the next decade, the rocketeers didn't have much to do. ''We called ourselves PoPs -- prisoners of peace,'' Stuhlinger quips. John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and soon after fell from grace with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. A few years before, the USSR had beaten the USA to space with its Sputnik satellite.   ''Kennedy wanted to do something to regain America's prestige,'' Stuhlinger recalls. Kennedy asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson to write letters seeking advice. One went to von Braun.   Stuhlinger has copies of memos that bounced between von Braun and the White House. Von Braun laid out everything he knew about the capabilities of U.S. and Soviet rockets. He concluded that the USA would have little chance of beating the Soviets to a manned space lab, but would have a ''sporting chance'' of beating them to an orbit of the moon and ''an excellent chance'' of beating them to a moon landing.   In other words, the USA didn't go to the moon because it was there. We went because we could get there first.   In a speech in May 1961 Kennedy laid out one of history's great mission statements: ''This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.''   ''The irony is that in the 1960s, we went from nothing to landing a person on the moon in eight years,'' says space entrepreneur Musk. ''Today it would take two or three times as long, and that's crazy.''   Astronaut Walter Schirra, 81, who flew three space missions, was one of the seven original Mercury astronauts when he heard about Kennedy's speech. ''I couldn't believe we'd made that commitment,'' he recalls. ''So many things happened so fast. I'd just flown Mach 2 for the first time in 1958.'' To get to the moon would require speeds of Mach 25, which would take engines 60 to 70 times more powerful. ''That's a big leap.''   The von Braun team numbered 400 in 1961. It quickly swelled to 8,000. But the Germans were the leaders, and von Braun was the star. ''That was important,'' Stuhlinger says. ''We had a von Braun. There is no von Braun today.''   ''If the Germans had not been here, the technology would've been delayed by 10 years, 15 years,'' says Mark Smith, who knows the Germans from his years as CEO of Adtran,a Huntsville tech company. ''No group of people is indispensable, but they shrunk the time frame.''   Rules about federal contracts and processes were tossed. ''We could make decisions in almost no time,'' says Walter Haussermann, who led development of guidance controls. He remembers talking with IBM about supplying the mission's computers. He was able to say yes in two days. ''Today, it would take years,'' he says.   Thanks to the Germans' experience, glitches rarely slowed the project. The only disaster: a fire in the Apollo 1 that killed the three-man crew. Manned flights were delayed for nearly two years to make sure it didn't happen again. Ask the Germans how they accomplished so much so quickly, and they struggle for an answer. They note the commitment from Kennedy, the military and the American public -- all pulling toward a single goal. Schirra, who often worked closely with the Germans, says the space race was like a years-long adrenaline rush. ''It was a competition with Russia, and we had to beat them,'' he says.   Mostly, though, the Germans seem nonchalant, as if it were easy to put a man on the moon in eight years. ''We all believed it could be done,'' Dannenberg says with a shrug.   New generation takes over so now comes a new age.   Interest in space dropped after the first moon landings. Travel to Mars seemed unlikely. Discouraged, the Germans dropped out of NASA. Von Braun died in 1977.   But a young generation at NASA has put two robot rovers on Mars and wowed the public. President Bush has talked of Mars missions. Mostly, though, entrepreneurs have picked up where the rocketeers left off.