At the Bavarian ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, von Braun, Dornberger, and other Peenemünders were interrogated not only by U.S. Army Ordnance but also by numerous American and British intelligence teams, many of which showed themselves to be laughably ill-informed, in the Germans’ opinion. Ordnance officers were well aware that the guided missile interested not only other Allied powers but also other American agencies, such as the Army Air Forces, which everyone expected to become a separate service in the near future. Although the incipient Cold War certainly played a role in Ordnance’s motivations, it was no more important than a “denial policy” that applied to everybody. The American government sought to prevent a repetition of the Weimar Republic’s secret rearmament in other countries, and American services and agencies sought to exploit German achievements to benefit the nation and themselves—not necessarily in that order. (The American tradition of interservice rivalry puts the Third Reich’s internal battles in perspective.) Thus, when the leaders of the German rocket program sought to negotiate with Ordnance, they scarcely needed their document cache as a bargaining chip.2
The real questions became, how many Peenemünders would come to the United States, and on what basis would they be hired? Ordnance’s interest in the German Army rocket program was influential in the creation of “Project Overcast” by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in July. The official rationale for Overcast was the temporary exploitation of 350 German specialists to help in the defeat of Japan, but the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon rendered that purpose moot. Overcast went ahead anyway, and Colonel Holger Toftoy, chief of Ordnance Rocket Branch since late June, moved to fill his quota of one hundred Peenemünders. Von Braun was chiefly responsible for drawing up a balanced list of people and then persuading them to sign on for what was, theoretically, only a six-month commitment. The former technical director decided that he could not do with fewer than 115 or so specialists, and Toftoy went ahead to acquire them. Like many of his colleagues, he did not let the wording of orders get in his way if he could avoid it.3
The Soviets were naturally disappointed not to get von Braun, Steinhoff, and other leading engineers of the program, although they did find low-ranking people and much equipment following their occupation of the Nordhausen area. They broadcast offers to Peenemünders to come over to their zone, where they would receive excellent positions at good pay. A few individuals were willing to accept, the most prominent being Helmut Gröttrup, who had been arrested with von Braun and had been Steinhoff’s deputy in guidance and control at the end of the war. Although he was one of the most left-wing members of the rocket group, personal resentments more than political affinities seem to have caused him to cross the line after being evacuated from Thuringia by the Americans. He was not satisfied with the deal that Wernher von Braun was trying to strike with the United States. Besides, other Peenemünders falsely accused him of being the one who revealed the location of the documents. Gröttrup became the head of a rocket institute near the Mittelwerk after the Russians had begun to restore some of its manufacturing capability.4
Although the French also began to contact some rocket specialists, U.S. Army Ordnance’s main competitor for leading Peenemünders turned out to be the British, and that only temporarily. In order to understand better how the A-4 worked, the British Army had created Operation Backfire. After some inter-Allied conflict, the two countries forged an agreement to lend some of the Germans earmarked for the United States to Backfire, which launched three missiles from the German North Sea coast in October 1945. A few other Peenemünders not wanted by von Braun and Toftoy were taken to Britain, most notably Walter “Papa” Riedel, who had been exiled to the Zement project in late 1943. The one person Ordnance could not get back from the British was Dornberger. According to a U.K. interrogator, the former rocket general had “extreme views on German domination, and wishes for a Third World War.” Moreover, the British were determined to try Dornberger in Kammler’s place for indiscriminate V-2 attacks on civilians. They kept him in a POW camp until 1947, but the hypocrisy of such a charge made a trial untenable—roughly 1 million Germans and Japanese had been killed by Allied bombing. Because of the narrow focus of war crimes investigations, the rocket general also avoided trial on the one charge that could have stuck: complicity in the exploitation of slave labor.5
While Dornberger sat in jail, U.S. Army Ordnance conveyed across the ocean nearly 120 selected Peenemünders, the essence of a development organization that had once employed six thousand people. Von Braun had already departed for the United States by airplane with six others in September 1945, followed in stages by the rest, who traveled by ship during the winter months. All were eventually assembled in the desert at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas. One of their first tasks was to assist in scientific and military V-2 launches that began at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, in April 1946. The chief role of the von Braun group was, however, to cooperate in planning future rocket development with Project Hermes, which Ordnance had contracted to General Electric in 1944 after the magnitude of the German rocket effort became clear. The Germans, however, were frustrated at their primitive laboratories and the postwar cutbacks that seemed to derail any hope for a return to accelerated work.6
Toftoy and the Ordnance Rocket Branch had to struggle to satisfy the Peenemünders in the face of limited budgets and the restrictive boundaries of their ambiguous status. (They ironically called themselves “prisoners of peace”; they were not legal immigrants, and their freedom of movement was limited.) In order to retain a few valued specialists, the Army, like the other services, also had to bend the rules regarding exclusion of individuals with dubious Nazi records. Under Project Paperclip, which had replaced Overcast in March 1946, the long-term use of former enemy scientists and engineers had been provided with a stronger legal basis. But security reports for a number of individuals, including von Braun, had to be revised or fudged to circumvent the restrictions that still existed. Some writers have seen those actions as evidence of a conspiracy in the Pentagon to violate a policy signed by President Harry Truman, but it really reflected a conscious choice by the U.S. government, approved up to the level of the Cabinet at least, to put expediency above principle. The Cold War provided ample opportunity after 1947 to rationalize that policy on anti-Communist grounds, but the circumvention of restrictions on Nazis and war criminals would have gone ahead at some level anyway, because the Germans’ technical expertise was seen as indispensable.7
Thus when the Army’s own investigators came looking for witnesses and evidence for the Mittelbau–Dora war crimes trial, which was held at Dachau in 1947, it is no surprise that Ordnance was none too cooperative in granting access to the Fort Bliss Germans. The whole story of Mittelwerk and its prisoners was to be obscured as much as possible, because it would besmirch Army rocket development. Indeed, from the very end of the war, if not before, the Peenemünders had divorced themselves from any responsibility for slave labor; the SS provided a convenient scapegoat for all the crimes associated with the program. It was a position that the American authorities found easy to accept.8