By Debbie Schlussel
In the past, I’ve written about how I enjoy reading the “Remembrances” feature, which appears in the Saturday Wall Street Journal. They are articles about unsung people who died recently. Usually, they consist of great Americans–inventors and entrepreneurs–but sometimes, the recently deceased so featured are not so admirable.
Such is the case with Konrad Dannenberg, designer of the V-2 rockets used to attack Allied lands during World War II. As I read the WSJ article, I knew that Dannenberg was a Nazi. My late grandfather Isaac, a Holocaust survivor, was forced to work on the V-2 and helped build these rockets at one of the many concentration and death camps, where he struggled to survive. So, I was disappointed to read that Mr. Dannenberg, who died last week, passed on in Huntsville, Alabama. Why does this Nazi get to live a full life and die in the U.S.?, I asked myself.

Astronaut Wally Schirra & Former Nazi Konrad Dannenberg of NASA
Of course, it was a rhetorical question. As we all know, the U.S., sadly, brought many Nazi war criminals into the country and gave them essentially full immunity, if they would help us in the sciences or in combating Communists. Dannenberg contributed greatly to the U.S. space program and is in large part credited with putting Americans on the moon.

Konrad Dannenberg helped design the engine of the German V-2 rockets that terrorized Antwerp and London during World War II. He later helped forge the Saturn V rockets that took U.S. astronauts to the moon. . . .
[He] contributed to many space milestones, from the Army Redstone missiles to early designs for the U.S. space station. After retiring from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1973, he served along with other German space veterans as a tour guide at local rocket displays around Huntsville, home to the Marshall Space Flight Center. . . .
Mr. Dannenberg served briefly in the German army during the invasion of France. He then joined Werner von Braun’s rocket-development team at Peenemunde, a village on an island in the Baltic where the German army had gathered a scientific elite for weapons development. Like many of the scientists, Mr. Dannenberg was also a member of the Nazi Party, having joined in 1932, according to the book “Missiles for the Fatherland: Peenemunde, National Socialism, and the V-2 Missile,” by Michael B. Petersen. . . .
After the war, Mr. Dannenberg was one of 117 German rocket scientists, including Mr. von Braun, brought to the U.S. to jump-start America’s missile program. After a few years working on Army missiles at Fort Bliss in Texas, the team was transferred to the Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, where work on ballistic missiles began in earnest, including the Redstone and Jupiter systems that carried nuclear weapons.
The sudden appearance of dozens of Germans who had worked for the German wehrmacht was initially unsettling to some. . . .
In 1960, Mr. Dannenberg was named deputy manager of the Saturn program, which was energized by President Kennedy’s call for a moonshot. “It makes you jittery to think of the pace at which we must move,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 1961. NASA awarded him its Distinguished Service Medal for his role in developing the Saturn, the largest rocket ever built.
After retiring, Mr. Dannenberg helped initiate Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville in 1984

Who knew that American space camps were developed by a Nazi?
Was it worthy to bring so many Nazis–like Dannenberg who joined the Nazi party in 1932–into America? Could we have made the gains we did in space and in defeating Communism, without them?
I think the answer to the second question is yes, we could have, though it would have been a lot tougher. And it’s regrettable that people whose work helped kill allied populations and send Jews to ovens never got their just reward. Yes, they were scientists and not SS guards or Gestapo members, but they were part of the Third Reich and knew which side they were on.
Konrad Dannenberg got to live to the age of 96 in freedom. Many of the victims of Hitler’s regime of which he was a part had their lives ended far too soon. I wonder if Mr. Dannenberg ever publicly renounced his Nazi party membership and, with it, Nazi party views on Jews and others. I wonder what he’d have said about the Jews in a casual conversation.
Sadly, America’s patriation of our enemies onto our soil didn’t end with the Nazis, and we’ve brought far worse vermin on our soil. We have several individuals–including a man associated with the Achille Lauro hijacking and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, and another man responsible for the Hezbollah bombings of 300 U.S. Marines and Embassy officials in Beirut. Both of these men are living on American soil, under the protection of the American government, under the guise that they are “helping us find bigger fish.” As if these fish, themselves, aren’t big enough to be fried.
And trust me, these Islamic terrorists given free reign here aren’t contributing even an infintesmal fraction of what Dannenberg did.
Konrad Dannenberg, you didn’t face real justice in this world. But at least some of your work was helpful to America. Still, did your help and aid to the U.S. somehow erase that you created weapons for a regime that murdered six million Jews and five million others?
I wonder what my late grandfather, who was forced to work on the V-2s in the camps, would say about this man’s long, grand life on American soil.