Sporting a grey double-breasted suit, slicked-back curls and a slide rule, rocket engineer Wernher von Braun cuts a suave, authoritative figure in Disney’s 1955 television special Man and the Moon. Speaking with a German accent, the then-director of development at the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Ala., uses a series of models and illustrations to explain how America will reach the moon — with the aid of an enormous nuclear-powered space station, of course.

The United States eventually planted a flag on the lunar surface, though without the help of any orbital reactors. And all through the Space Race, von Braun, a German scientist scooped up by the U.S. in the waning days of World War II, was the public face of the American space program, as well as one of its chief architects. But much of the Cold War-era coverage of von Braun downplayed the darker details of his past: before he was building rockets for America, he was building them for Hitler. Germany launched more than 3,000 missiles of his design against Britain and other countries, indiscriminately killing approximately 5,000 people, while as many as 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died assembling the weapons.

In the years since the original Space Race has ended, historians have begun to reassess von Braun’s legacy. Some have portrayed his time working for the Nazis as a survival strategy, but others have gone so far as to frame him as a war criminal, or something close to it. Von Braun died in 1977, so there’s no possibility of hearing him out. But as the country and the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing — a feat that might not have been possible without von Braun’s contributions — his image, as Cold War hero, whitewashed Nazi villain or something in between, is being debated more fiercely than ever, as is the extent of America’s moral bargaining in using him to propel its otherworldly ambitions.

Looking back on the father of the American lunar program, there are few easy answers.

Born to an aristocratic Prussian family, Wernher von Braun became obsessed with space travel early in life, studying fields like physics and mathematics in order to grasp the fundamentals of rocketry. As a young man, he launched primitive rockets with other enthusiasts at an abandoned ammunition dump in suburban Berlin. The experiments, and von Braun’s leadership of the group, piqued the interest of the German army. In 1932, the 20-year-old wunderkind became the top civilian specialist at the German army’s Kummersdorf rocket station, south of Berlin. By 1935, von Braun’s group had successfully fired two rockets using liquid-fueled engines, a then-embryonic technology that became the basis for modern spaceflight. The facility was soon moved to a new location on the Baltic coast at Peenemünde.

With the start of World War II in 1939, von Braun came under increasing pressure to produce useful military weapons. He delivered. In 1942, his group successfully tested the A-4 missile, firing the weapon nearly 60 miles into the atmosphere. The trial caught Hitler’s attention, and the Reich began to mass produce the rockets at a feverish pace, often using slave labor. (The project also drew the interest of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), which briefly imprisoned von Braun as part of an attempted takeover of the program.) By the later stages of the war, when von Braun’s missiles began to rain down on London, Nazi propaganda had given them a new name: the Vengeance Weapon Two, or V-2, so named because they were intended as retribution for Allied bombings of German cities.

The V-2 was a particularly terrifying weapon. The missiles travelled so fast that victims, most of whom were civilians, often heard nothing until after they struck. For his part, von Braun, who was apparently still interested in space travel, is said to have remarked that the rockets worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet — a line that, at best, paints him as detached from the consequences of his work. But as fearsome as the V-2 was, it had little strategic impact and failed to turn the war in Germany’s direction. As the Allies advanced into the heart of Germany, von Braun and his engineering team headed south to surrender to the Americans, rather than await the Red Army.

Von Braun was one of about 120 German scientists who, in a then-secret U.S. project known as Operation Paperclip, were taken to the U.S. to develop military technology. Rather than be held accountable like other important figures in Nazi Germany, they were given new lives. The Soviet Union also took German scientists for similar reasons, foreshadowing the superpower showdown that was to come.

Once he was settled in the U.S., von Braun’s career took off, largely fueled by the U.S.-Soviet technological rivalry that would develop into the Space Race. By 1953, his team developed America’s first ballistic missile, the Redstone, which could hurl a nuclear warhead up to 250 miles downrange. The Jupiter-C, a modified version of the Redstone, launched the United States’ first satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958 — a full year after the Soviets launched their first satellite, Sputnik 1. A von Braun TIME cover arrived in 1958, with the engineer’s calm, coifed likeness superimposed over the flames of a missile launch. Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, developing the behemoth Saturn V rocket, which 50 years ago this week carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon’s surface, while Michael Collins waited in lunar orbit.

The cheerful, well-spoken von Braun became the center of America’s space obsession: an extraordinary engineer, communicator and manager who promised America the moon and delivered, beating the arch-rival Soviets in the process. But his past wasn’t completely hidden. TIME noted in 1958 that, to some, Von Braun’s “transfer of loyalty from Nazi Germany to the U.S. seemed to come too fast, too easy.” That sentiment was echoed in a 1967 song by satirist Tom Lehrer: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.”

More recent examinations of von Braun’s life have gained distance from the nationalistic fervor that prevailed at the height of the Space Race. In Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, Michael Neufeld, former chair of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s space history department, sheds light on how knowledge of von Braun’s collaboration with the Nazi regime was purposefully suppressed. But Neufeld stops short of casting him as a complete villain. It would have been dangerous for von Braun to complain to Nazi leadership about his work or the conditions in which his missiles were made, Nuefeld says. He also argues that von Braun’s membership in the SS, which was classified information in the U.S., was at least somewhat coerced. But at the same time, the “missileman” seldom if ever seemed to consider anything beyond advancing his own career.

“He was not ideologically very interested in Nazi ideas,” says Nuefeld. “Although he was happy to profit from his status as an Aryan aristocrat.”

A more damning take comes from Wayne Biddle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Dark Side of the Moon. Biddle frames von Braun as a war criminal with direct involvement in the V-2 slave labor project, and a man who only escaped justice thanks to the efforts of the American government, which was desperate for help in beating the Soviets.

“One always has a choice in life, and [von Braun] never made a choice that moved him away from the Nazi regime,” says Biddle. He also echoes Nuefeld’s characterization of von Braun as career-obsessed. “He always made choices that resulted in his rapid advancement at a very young age.”

But von Braun wasn’t the only one who prioritized success. Confronted with the growing power of Stalin’s U.S.S.R., the U.S. Government sanitized von Braun and other German scientists’ images in order to use their skills; to a large extent, the American public went along with it. “There was public protest in early 1947 over the importation of the Germans,” explains Nuefeld. “And then Cold War heat got worse, and it pretty much went away.”

That moral calculation enabled von Braun to become an iconic leader in the American space program, admired by many and untouchable out of sheer national necessity. Decades later, Biddle argues, the reassessment of his legacy may have had less to do with a growing understanding of his crimes than the fact that the engineer was simply no longer needed. “[Von Braun] was brought over originally to milk his knowledge,” says Biddle. “Once that was used up, he became expendable.”

That we’re still debating Wernher von Braun’s legacy 50 years after his rockets put men on the moon speaks to the profound effect he had on America’s image. And while he was undeniably an engineering genius, that this onetime cog in the Wehrmacht died a largely unquestioned American hero speaks to what was perhaps his greatest skill: salesmanship. To survive in Nazi Germany, he sold Hitler a dream of victory through superior technology. Later, he sold the U.S. Army a vision of intercontinental nuclear dominance. But von Braun’s biggest sale of all is apparent in that Disney footage. To Americans, he sold the dream of men in space and flags on the moon. And by and large, the nation bought it, no questions asked.

In 1945, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a subcommittee established by the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was tasked with retrieving German scientists, doctors and engineers who were identified as intellectually vital to the Third Reich. 

“Fall of 1944, right after the Normandy landings, scattered among the Allies’ troops are these little units of scientific intelligence officers and they’re working to find out Hitler’s biological weapons, his chemical weapons and his atomic weapons,” said Jacobsen, author of “Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America.” 

These intelligence officers eventually discovered while the atomic weapons program was not as advanced as initially feared, Hitler’s biochemical weapons were. The hunt “for this scientific treasure and ultimately for the scientists themselves” thus ignited Operation Overcast, renamed Paperclip for the paperclips attached to the files of the most “troublesome cases,” Jacobsen writes in her book. 

The U.S. was not alone in this endeavor.

Britain, France and especially the Soviet Union sought to enlist these German scientific experts, as well. A U.S.-Soviet technological rivalry marked by the Space Race and Cold War would also serve as a motivation, and justification, for Operation Paperclip’s existence.

Tens of thousands of Nazi storm troopers take the oath of allegiance to Chancellor Adolf Hitler, in the Lustgarten, Berlin, Feb. 26, 1934. Nazi banners are dipped during the swearing of the oath.

The Nazis and their contributions

By the fall of 1945, German scientists starting arriving on U.S. soil. Not all the men recruited were Nazis or SS officers but the most prominent and valued among them were, having worked either directly with Hitler or leading members of the Nazi Party, such as Heinrich Himmler and Herman Göring. 

Wernher von Braun, a rocket engineer, was instrumental in developing the first U.S. ballistic missile, the Redstone, and later the Saturn V rocket while serving as director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

As a Nazi ideologue and member of the SS, he traveled to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he “handpicked slaves to work for him as laborers,” said Jacobsen in a 2014

Hubertus Strughold, a physiologist and medical researcher, headed the German Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine, known for its torturous medical experiments on inmates from the Dachau concentration camp. Strughold claimed ignorance of any such activity until after the war, yet he appeared among a list of 95 doctors at an October 1942 conference discussing their findings. In the U.S., he was chief scientist of the aerospace medical division at Brooks Air Force and has since been credited as the father of space medicine. 

Walter Schreiber, a former Nazi general, also oversaw inhumane medical experiments involving bioweapons that resulted in countless of deaths. Following the war, he was captured by the Soviets but defected to the U.S. He worked for various government entities before finally settling in Texas at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, Jacobsen writes. 

While Schreiber would later serve as a witness during the Nuremberg trials, he, von Braun, Strughold and the rest of their fellow Nazis brought to the U.S. would never be held accountable for their own atrocities.

Operation Paperclip remained secret throughout much of the Cold War.

“Operation Paperclip” had its origins while World War II still raged. Starting in 1943, a top secret American military program called the Alsos Mission sent American scientists into Nazi Europe along with Allied troops: their mission was to search for information about the Nazis’ biological, chemical and nuclear programs and to transport that information back to the US.

At first, Alsos officials were able to make contact with Italian and later French scientists who’d worked for the Nazis, who assured the Americans that the Nazis were far from creating advanced non-conventional weapons. Also operatives made little progress in uncovering Nazi scientists’ weapons-making secrets.

Their luck changed in late 1944, during protracted fighting in the French town of Strasbourg. While fighting still raged outside, Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch-born scientist working for the Americans under Alsos, made his way to the home of Dr. Eugen Haagen, a senior Nazi scientist who helped plan Nazi Germany’s feared biological weapons program. Haagen had fled just hours earlier, leaving his papers inside his luxurious apartment. With American soldiers guarding them, Dr. Goudsmit and his Alsos team stayed up all night reading through Haagen’s papers by candlelight.

They made for grim reading. “Of the 100 prisoners you sent me,” Dr. Haagen had written to a colleague, “18 died in transport. Only 12 are in a condition suitable for my experiments. I therefore request that you send me another 100 prisoners, between 20 and 40 years of age, who are healthy and in physical condition comparable to soldiers. Heil Hitler…” This and other papers showed that the Nazis were indeed moving full speed ahead to build potent biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

The Alsos officials made copious notes, writing down the names of scientists involved in these projects. Their goal wasn’t to bring these scientists to justice for their evil experiments. They were creating a list of scientists to track down, capture and interrogate. The United States was determined to learn what it could do about the diabolical weapons they were inventing.

“One by one, across the Reich,” explains journalist Annie Jacobsen in her book Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Back Bay Books: 2014), “Hitler’s scientists were taken into custody and interrogated.” Two core goals emerged among Allied officers uncovering the extent of the carnage and horrors in Europe created by the Nazi regime. Many sought Nazis to arrest and bring to justice. At the same time, a key US and Allied goal was also to harness Nazi scientists’ technical know-how. “The scale on which science and engineering have been harnessed to the chariot of destruction in Germany is indeed amazing,” noted W.S. Farren, a British aviation expert with the Royal Aircraft Establishment. “There is a tremendous amount to be learnt in Germany at the present time.”

On July 6, 1945, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a top-secret memorandum that was so explosive it was never even shown to President Truman. Titled “Exploitation of German Specialists in Science and Technology in the United States”, it outlined a program for “procurement, utilization and control of specialists” – in other words, a plan to recruit Nazi weapons scientists and bring them to the United States. The Military Intelligence of the War Department, a unit known as G-2, was given control of the program.

The US, as well as Britain, was engaged in an arms race with the Soviet Union. The Cold War was a terrifying time of escalating arms races, and recruiting Nazi weapons experts instead of bringing them to justice was seen as a key way to gain an edge. Still, the program was seen as morally problematic, and officials were keen to shroud it in secrecy.

The program was originally called Operation Overcast. A list called “List 1” included over a hundred German rocket scientists to recruit. Before the Nazi rocket scientists were given permission to move to America, Britain requested access to the scientists to do some rockets experiments of their own with the Nazi experts. One Nazi weapons expert, Arthur Rudolph, later recalled how the Nazis and British weapons experts immeidately formed a friendly bond. One night, a group of British and Nazi rockets experts even got drunk together; Rudolph recalled them standing arm in arm, “apparently comrades now, and lustily singing Wir Fahren gegen England, or ‘We Will March Against England’” (quoted in Operation Paperclip). Far from condemning these Nazis for their actions, it seems that at an early stage, Allied scientists were willing to overlook their crimes and embrace them as colleagues and even friends.

Several of these Nazi rocket scientists who’d worked on that first British experiment were later brought to America. In time, they were joined by hundreds of other weapons experts. Their cases were marked for special consideration by a paperclip in their file. This meant that no matter what crimes they’d committed as Nazis, their cases would be expedited as they were approved for admission to America. Within months, Operation Overcast changed its name to reflect this, becoming Operation Paperclip, that allowed hundreds of ardent Nazis to escape justice and build new lives in the United States.

Arthur Rudolph

Arthur Rudolph, the operations director of the Mittlewerk labor camp and expert in Germany’s powerful V2 rocket systems, was flagged by American officials as a desirable asset to bring to America. (In photo at top of the article, Dr. Wernher von Braun, center, explains the Saturn Launch System to President John F. Kennedy in 1963 as NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans looks on. [NASA])

Mittelwerk was started in 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald. When it was liberated in March 1944, 40,000 prisoners were in the camp. “The noise, dust, and noxious gasses…exacerbated an already catastrophic health situation for the prisoners, the United States Holocaust Museum, of the conditions during the camp’s construction and expansion. Water was in short supply. The only toilets were oil barrels cut in half with boards over them, but they were too few in number; many relieved themselves in the (underground production) tunnels. The stench became intolerable, and disease and vermin proliferated. Soon, cases of pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid, and dysentery took a dreadful toll, combined with total exhaustion inflicted by 12-hour days of backbreaking labour with poor sleep and minimal equipment…”

Arthur Rudolph –
a prime force in the development of
the V2 rocket for Nazi Germany.
Photograph: National Aeronautics
and Space Administration

Approximately 20,000 workers died at the camp. Yet despite the horrendous conditions for the Mittlewerk slave laborers, the factory produced high level technology and weapons. It was this expertise that the United States was willing to do anything to obtain, even ignoring the crimes of a Nazi scientist such as Rudolph.

When he was granted entry to the US under Operation Paperclip, Rudolph was described by American officials in Germany as an “ardent Nazi”. He’d personally overseen slave labour and been present when prisoners were executed. West German and American officials classified him as a war criminal. Yet these accusations were quietly erased from his official file, and Rudolph worked for NASA.

In the 1960s, Rudolph became a key engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, managing teams of scientists working on the Saturn 5 rocket that in 1969 launched the Apollo rocket in the first manned flight to the moon.

Rudolph never made any mention of his previous job as director of Mittelwerk, where his workers were emaciated slaves in Nazi Germany, of course. Thanks to Operation Paperclip, almost nothing was known of Rudolph’s Nazi past until 1979, when the State Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), charged with hunting Nazis who’d hid their past and were living in the United States, was formed.

OSI officials interviewed slave laborers from Mittelwerk and approached Rudolph with an offer: he wouldn’t be charged if he voluntarily left the United States and gave up his US citizenship. He and his wife moved back to Germany, but in 1987 a German court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to try him for war crimes. He tried for years to regain his US citizenship – helped by some former colleagues from NASA – but was unsuccessful. He died in 1996 at the age of 89.

Wernher von Braun

Arthur Rudolph worked at NASA under the leadership of another “Operation Paperclip” recruit, Warner von Braun. Identified as a key asset at the close of the war because of his work on the Nazis’ V2 rocket, Braun was transferred to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a luxurious ski town in Bavaria, for questioning by Allied forces.

Wernher von Braun (center) in 1961
with fellow Operation Paperclip
scientists working on a Saturn rocket.

At first he and his fellow rocket scientists refused to cooperate with their Allied captors, refusing to divulge any scientific information. He knew he held a foolproof bargaining chip: in the waning days of the war, Braun and his co-workers had hidden vital documents in an abandoned salt mine. Braun was determined to trade these papers for a new life in the United States.

After his capture, Braun “posed for endless pictures with individual GIs, in which he beamed, shook hands, pointed inquiringly at medals and otherwise conducted himself as a celebrity rather than a prisoner, treat(ing) our soldiers with the affable condescension of a visiting congressman,” remembered one disgusted American Counterintelligence Corps official (quoted in Operation Paperclip).

Braun was brought to the US in 1945 and for the next fifteen years he worked for the US Army, most notably as chief of the US Army ballistic weapon program. He oversaw teams that developed the Redstone, Jupiter-C, Juno and Pershing missile systems. Under his command, an incredible 120 former Nazi scientists worked on these and other jet systems.

In 1977 Braun even received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the United States’ highest civilian honor.

An affable and charismatic figure, Braun wrote popular books and articles on space flight, and became a well-known figure explaining the burgeoning space program to the American public. In the 1960s, he moved to Huntsville, Alabama, and became Director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where the Saturn space boosters that enabled manned space flight were produced. A beloved figure, in 1977 Braun even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor.

Wernher von Braun and his team in the fall of 1959 in Huntsville, Alabama. Those in the photograph have been identified as Ernst Stuhlinger, Frederick von Saurma, Fritz Mueller, Hermann Weidner, Erich W. Neubert (partially hidden), W.A. Mrazek, Karl Heimburg, Arthur Rudolph, Otto Hoberg, von Braun, Oswald Lange, General Bruce Medaris, Helmut Hoelzer, Hans Maus, E.D. Geissler, Hans Hueter, and George Constan.

Braun acknowledged he’d been a member of the Nazi party, but claimed he’d never been a true believer and had no choice. He insisted that research, not politics, was his passion.

However, there was much more to Braun than this whitewashed version of his history, and the US Army and Operation Paperclip enabled him to evade justice. Far from being an unwilling Nazi, Braun was a member of the feared SS. Instead of being unaware of the horrors of Hitler’s “Final Solution” of murder and destruction, Braun actually visited the Buchenwald concentration camp to personally select workers to become slave laborers in his V2 rocket program.

His SS officer rank and Nazi records were classified by the US Army. For years, until his death in 1977, Braun was able to evade justice. He died in Alexandria, Virginia, a beloved figure. President Carter even issued an official statement after his death: “To millions of Americans, Wernher von Braun’s name was inextricably linked to our exploration of space and to the creative application of technology. Not just the people of our nation, but all the people of the world have profited from his work….”

The many unnamed victims of his torture and forced labor remained forgotten, seemingly erased from history by Operation Paperclip.

Recruiting Agents of Torture

“It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true,” Dr. Leopold Alexander told his wife one day in 1945. Dr. Alexander was a Jewish doctor from Vienna. He’d escaped from Europe before the Holocaust, and made his way to America where worked in psychiatric hospitals in New England, specializing in shellshock and trauma. He volunteered for the US Army, and at the close of the war, he was sent to Europe to investigate allegations of gruesome medical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors.

One of the key doctors he interviewed was Dr. Hubertus Strughold, a senior Nazi official who oversaw a vast network of researchers who conducted experiments on hypothermia. Nazi scientists insisted to Dr. Alexander that they only conducted experiments on animals, but it soon became obvious that humans – particularly Jews – were the subjects of hundreds of sadistic medical experiments.

Wernher Von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, Hubertus Strughold

Unbeknownst to Dr. Alexander, Strughold was a long-time personal friend of a senior American military official, Lt. Col. Harry Armstrong, chief surgeon of the Eighth Air Force. While Dr. Alexander was stationed in Europe investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity, Lt. Col. Armstrong had a very different remit: to find Nazi medical researchers and bring them to the United States.

“During the war, physicians with the U.S. Army Air Forces heard rumors about cutting-edge research being developed by the (Third) Reich’s aviation doctors,” explains journalist Annie Jacobsen. These experiments were never published in mainstream medical journals, but were disseminated in Nazi magazines such as Luftfahrtmedizin (“Aviation Medicine”). Secretly, both British and US Air Forces would often translate the works and disseminate them to Allied doctors to study. With World War II coming to a close, Lt. Col. Armstrong and other US military officials wanted to get to Dr. Strughold and other Nazi scientists and bring them to America.

Lt. Col. Armstrong made Dr. Strughold a top-secret offer: no charges would be brought against him if he became co-chairman, along with Armstrong, of a new research center the American Air Force was setting up in Heidelberg called the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center. Dr. Strughold was allowed to select the physicians he wanted to work with, and he chose 58 Nazi physicians, including some who’d worked with him on gruesome and cruel human experiments. Within a few years, many of these physicians were brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip.

In the case of Dr. Strughold, there was some difficulty in smoothing his way. The FBI had investigated him in Germany and found that he seems to have been an ardent Nazi. He’d “expressed the opinion that the Nazi party had done a great deal for Germany” and claimed that “prior to Nazism, the Jews had crowded the medical schools and it had been nearly impossible for others to enrol.” Military officials asked another German doctor, who himself had been accused of war crimes, to vouch that Dr. Strughold had high “ethical principles”. With this bogus endorsement in hand, Strughold set sail for the United States.

Strughold became Professor of Space Medicine at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. In 1950, he co-founded the Space Medicine Branch of the Aerospace Medical Association. In 1963, it established the “Hubertus Strughold Award”, given each year to recognize excellence in space medicine. (In 2006 the Space Medicine Association Executive Committee debated removing Strughold’s name from the award. His Nazi past had been so thoroughly hidden, in part by the U.S. Army, that no evidence of crimes was found, and the award continued to bear Strughold’s name. After a 2012 article about Dr. Strughold’s Nazi atrocities, the award was finally suspended.)

In total, about 1,600 Nazi scientists
were brought to the US under
Operation Paperclip, as well as their families.

In total, about 1,600 Nazi scientists were brought to the US under Operation Paperclip, as well as their families. They evaded justice and in many cases were able to erase all mention of their Nazi pasts in their official biographies. For most of these scientists, justice never caught up and many died in America, seemingly innocent workers whose neighbours and friends and co-workers never knew the gruesome secrets in their pasts.

It was only in 2006 the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) finally succeeded in publishing an official record documenting Operation Paperclip, after objections from the Justice Department. The OSI was disbanded in 2010, but its research and the mirror it held up to America continues to shed light on Operation Paperclip and this shameful chapter in American history.

For years, Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States the OSI concluded. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became – in some small measure – a safe haven for persecutors as well.”

Dmitry Rogozin ex-director general of Russia’s main space corporation explained, he asked his leadership team to look into whether NASA had actually landed a dozen astronauts on the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

After all, Rogozin reasoned, “It was not clear to me how the United States, at that level of technological development of the ’60s of the last century, did what they still cannot do now?”

This comes after NASA admitted they can’t go to the moon again because of Technology that was lost after the 1960s ( what kind of technology could have been lost, while one of todays Smart Phone is more advanced than all NASA computers combined together of the 1960s) .

Dmitry Rogozin investigation team
found not one evidence
NASA landed on the moon.

Russia had the technology to see where the moon landing was and knew the specific landing site, but in real time of the moon landing their was no photographs or documentation of the site and a half century later their is still no evidence or photographs of any trace landings of NASA on the moon.

Dmitry claims a coverup with Russian space agency and NASA took place and Russia did not want to EXPOSE NASA as fraud because they had good relations and Russia was scared to break international ties with NASA – besides, the world would not have believed Russia anyway and put any dissention information down disinformation and to jealousy.

With only one photo of the Earth taken by NASA in 30 years ( now there are a few photographs the past 25 years but still the photos are time lapsed photos and spliced together in sections, with the same excuse because of clouds) since the moon landings, its reported the one photo in existence was stripped together in pieces due to clouds.

Today thousands of professional photographers and editors use Editing tools and can change the exposure of photos on computers and can clearly see the photos of the moon, the Earth from the 1960s as cut and PASTED ..

Even photos from the 90s of Earth are clearly computer cut and pasted. In today’s fast moving world of the internet and leaks…

Hundreds of videos emerge of NASA Astronauts who are caught using green screen.

Floating with hidden wire harness, dropping objects in a supposed zero gravity environment of space and so many other videos of Flies, mouses and air-bubbles in NASA videos in space.

Is it coincidence that Prescott Bush ( Bush family) funded Hitler (this is in U.S. Archives and Google also has the data) and Operations Paperclip brought the NAZIS over to the U.S.

And created NASA

And was it coincidence that Prescott Bush was inside YALE’S SKULL AND BONES secret society that help create the CIA and years later George H.W. Bush would be the director of the CIA and was also part of SKULL AND BONES (that was once considered conspiracy but now proven a true secret society)…..

Is it all coincidence how NASA
was created with NAZI’S?

How did Apollo 11 travel 500,000 (half a million miles) miles to the moon and back with one tank of fuel?

And travel through 25,000 miles of the radiation belt and the radiation did not effect the electrical system?

Why did NASA never go back to the moon?

Then claim they lost the technology to travel back to the moon along with all the records ?