Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://moniquelaney.wordpress.com/
CITY: Auburn
STATE: AL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://cla.auburn.edu/history/people/faculty/monique-laney/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/monique-laney-ph-d-80008a5/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2011005666
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2011005666
HEADING: Laney, Monique
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100 1_ |a Laney, Monique
670 __ |a Transnational migration and national memory, 2009 |b t.p. (Monique Laney)
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Goethe University, M.A., 1995; University of Kansas, Ph.D., 2009.
ADDRESS
CAREER
NASA, SHOT-NASA Fellow, 2009-10; Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum, Verville Fellow, 2010-11; MJM Picture and Film Research, research assistant, 2012; American Historical Association, AHA-NASA, Fellow in Aerospace History, 2011-12; University of Maryland Baltimore County andUniversities at Shady Grove, professorial lecturer, 2010-14; Auburn University, assistant professor, 2014—.
MEMBER:Social Science History Association, Society for History of Technology, American Studies Association, Organization of American Historians.
AWARDS:Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2015; Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award, American Astronautical Society, 2016, both for German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008.
SIDELIGHTS
Monique Laney earned her master’s degree at Goethe University in Germany, and then she completed her doctorate at the University of Kansas. Laney has since gone on to serve as a fellow for NASA, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, and the American Historical Association. In 2014, she became an assistant professor at Auburn University. Laney published her first book, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era, a year later. The volume is somewhat inspired by Laney’s personal and professional history; she was born on a U.S. Army base in Germany, her father was a soldier and her mother was German, and Laney grew up in both Frankfurt, Germany, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie explores the complicated reality of immigration policies in the United States after World War II. Laney explains that suspected Nazis were allowed to enter the country, as long as they could contribute to arms race fueling the Cold War. The author then explains how racism, segregation, and the early Civil Rights movement clashed with said “useful” Nazis. NASA-funded projects in Huntsville, Alabama, captured local and national attention during the 1950s, and NASA scientist Werner von Braun and his team of rocket scientists were responsible for the Saturn and Apollo projects at the time. Yet, in 1984, one of the rocket scientists on von Braun’s team, Arthur Rudolph, was officially charged as a Nazi war criminal. As Laney reports, the news served to underscore the racial tensions already at play in Huntsville, and white Christians rallied in support of the accused Nazi.
Reviews of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie were largely positive, and the book won the Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2015. It also won the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award from the American Astronautical Society in 2016. As online Space Review correspondent Jeff Foust remarked: “Laney argues that this question should come up more in Huntsville. She introduces a concept from post-war Germany called Vergangenheitsbewältigung that she describes a reckoning or ‘constructive dialogue’ with the past. The Germans in Huntsville, and the local community that adopted them, didn’t go through that process. Such introspection and examination of the past, she argues, would be worthwhile today to help the community comes to terms not only with the Germans’ past, but also their own legacy of segregation.” Paul Jablow, writing in Philly.com was also impressed, and he found that “Laney shines a light on a fascinating corner of U.S. history. Though not perfect, her book tells an intriguing true story, at times next to incredible.”
Another positive assessment was offered by Robert Huddleston in Air Power History, and he asserted that the book “stands as an indictment of America’s military and civilian leaders in the aftermath of World War II. The Germans were placed above America’s black citizens in the interests of national security; and America’s leaders, military and civilian, shamelessly tolerated, even supported, the injustice while misrepresenting the German rocketeers to the American people.” According to Jason Krupar in the Journal of Southern History, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie reveals the inequalities, indifference, and isolation experienced by Huntsville communities. More than a history of technology, Laney’s book bridges race, the Cold War, science policy, civil rights, and southern history through her extensive use of interviews. This book brings to light a dark aspect of American space history that needs further discussion.” Commending the volume further in Choice, J. Kleiman announced that it serves as “a call for Americans to be honest about confronting their past in all its complexity and to understand the dangers of their failure to do so.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Air Power History, winter, 2016, Robert Huddleston, review of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era.
Choice, October, 2015, J. Kleiman, review of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie.
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, review of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie.
ONLINE
Auburn University, Department of History Web site, http://cla.auburn.edu/history/ (July 10, 2017), author profile.
History News Network, http://historynewsnetwork.org/ (September 26, 2016), review of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie.
Monique Laney Website, https://moniquelaney.wordpress.com/ (August 7, 2017).
Philly.com, http://www.philly.com/ (August 2, 2015), Paul Jablow, review of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie.
Space Review, http://www.thespacereview.com/ (August 10, 2015), Jeff Foust, review of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie.*
Monique Laney, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor at Auburn University
Auburn University The University of Kansas
Auburn, Alabama 206 206 connections
Send InMail
Experience
Auburn University
Assistant Professor
Company NameAuburn University
Dates EmployedAug 2014 – Present Employment Duration3 yrs
LocationAuburn, Alabama Area
History of Technology
American University
Professorial Lecturer
Company NameAmerican University
Dates EmployedAug 2010 – May 2014 Employment Duration3 yrs 10 mos
LocationWashington D.C. Metro Area
Teach upper-level undergraduate courses for American Studies Program and History Department
University of Maryland Baltimore County, Universities at Shady Grove
Professorial Lecturer
Company NameUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County, Universities at Shady Grove
Dates EmployedJan 2013 – Dec 2013 Employment Duration12 mos
LocationShady Grove, MD
Teach upper-level undergraduate courses for History Department
American Historical Association
AHA-NASA Fellow in Aerospace History
Company NameAmerican Historical Association
Dates EmployedAug 2011 – Aug 2012 Employment Duration1 yr 1 mo
LocationWashington, D.C.
The fellowship allowed me to complete article and book manuscripts based on my dissertation research.
MJM Picture and Film Research
Research Assistant
Company NameMJM Picture and Film Research
Dates Employed2012 – 2012 Employment Durationless than a year
Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum
Verville Fellow
Company NameSmithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum
Dates EmployedJul 2010 – Nov 2011 Employment Duration1 yr 5 mos
NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration / Society for the History of Technology
SHOT-NASA Fellow (History of Space Technology)
Company NameNASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration / Society for the History of Technology
Dates EmployedJul 2009 – Oct 2010 Employment Duration1 yr 4 mos
Postdoctoral Fellowship to revise dissertation for publication
The University of Kansas, Hall Center for the Humanities
Richard & Jeannette Sias Fellow
Company NameThe University of Kansas, Hall Center for the Humanities
Dates EmployedAug 2008 – Oct 2009 Employment Duration1 yr 3 mos
Fellowship intended for completion of doctoral dissertation.
University of Kansas
Research Assistant
Company NameUniversity of Kansas
Dates EmployedAug 2006 – Jul 2008 Employment Duration2 yrs
Assistant to Joane Nagel, Distinguished Professor, Sociology, Center for Research on Global Change at the Institute for Policy and Social Research, University of Kansas
Assist in preparing proposal for an IGERT research grant, $3.2 million (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) from the National Science Foundation for a proposed graduate education program titled, “C-CHANGE: Climate Change, Humans, and Nature in the Global Environment” (http://www.ipsr.ku.edu/GlobalResearch/ climatechange.shtml)
Create and maintain website for NSF-sponsored workshop titled "Sociological Perspectives on Global Climate Change" that will be held at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia in May, 2008 (http://ireswb.cc.ku.edu/~crgc/NSFWorkshop/index.html)
Assist in the design, scheduling, and running of workshops, colloquia, symposia, and other programs involving on-campus and visiting scholars and students.
Design and update Center website.
University of Kansas
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Company NameUniversity of Kansas
Dates EmployedAug 2004 – May 2006 Employment Duration1 yr 10 mos
Teach courses in Western Civilization I + II, Humanities & Western Civilization program, University of Kansas, for 60 students each semester
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Education
The University of Kansas
The University of Kansas
Degree Name Ph.D. Field Of Study American Studies
Dates attended or expected graduation 2003 – 2009
Activities and Societies: American Studies Association Social Science History Association Organization of American Historians Society for History of Technology
Goethe University
Goethe University
Degree Name M.A. Field Of Study American Studies
Dates attended or expected graduation 1986 – 1995
Minors: 1. Slavic Philology (East), 2. Psychoanalysis
Thesis: Black Women and Blues: ‘Classic Blues Singers’ im Amerika der 20er Jahre
Monique Laney
Monique Laney Assistant Professor
323 Thach Hall
(334) 844-4347
laney@auburn.edu
Personal web site
Office Hours
By appointment
Profile
Monique Laney joined Auburn University in 2014 as an Assistant Professor of History. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Kansas in 2009 and her M.A. in Amerikanistik at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1995. Her current research focuses on the immigration history of migrants with “special skills.”.
Laney is the author of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era (Yale University Press, 2015), for which she received the 2016 Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Astronautical Society’s (AAS) 2015 Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award, and honorable mention for the Deep South Book Prize of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. This study’s main subjects are the German rocket specialists associated with Wernher von Braun and their families, who were brought to the United States after World War II under the military operation Project Paperclip, most of whom followed the Army to Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950. Led by von Braun, the German rocket team was later celebrated internationally for its contributions to the Army’s missile and later NASA’s space programs. Based on oral histories and archival material, the book examines post-Second World War international and national migration linked to military and “Big Science” projects and the effects of this migration on a small southern community, race relations in the U.S. South, and negotiations over U.S. history, memory, and identity during the Cold War.
Laney received funding for her research from multiple entities, including the AHA-NASA Fellowship in Aerospace History in 2011, the A. Verville Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2010, the SHOT Fellowship in the History of Space Technology, supported by NASA, in 2009-2010, a Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF): Science, Technology and Society Program (STS) in 2008, the Richard and Jeannette Sias Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Kansas in 2008, and a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2007.
Before coming to Auburn, Dr. Laney taught for the history department and American Studies program at American University and for the history department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Shady Grove campus) in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
Education
Ph.D. University of Kansas, American Studies, August, 2009
M.A. Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität (Frankfurt, Germany), Amerikanistik, June 1995
Minors: 1. Slavic Philology (East), 2. Psychoanalysis
Representative Publications
Book
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era (Yale University Press, 2015).
Articles
“’Operation Paperclip’ in Huntsville, Alabama,” Steven J. Dick, ed. Remembering the Space Age. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2008, 89-107.
“Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph: Negotiating the past in Huntsville, Alabama,” Schulze, Mathias, James M.Skidmore, David G. John, Grit Liebscher, and Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach, eds., German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss. Waterloo, ON: WilfridLaurierUniversity Press, 2008, 443-454.
“The New York Times and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: Two Perspectives on the War in Iraq,” ed. Kurthen, Hermann; Antonio V. Menendez-Alarcon; and Stefan Immerfall. Safeguarding German-American Relations in the New Century: Understanding and Accepting Mutual Differences. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books – Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, 177-198.
Classes Taught
HIST 7970 Immigration and Technology
HIST 5000/6000 NASA and the South
HIST 3970 U.S. Technology through Foreign Eyes
HIST 1220 Technology and Civilization II
HIST 1210 Technology and Civilization I
Monique Laney, PhD
Research and Teaching
SHORT BIO
RESEARCH
TEACHING
Short Bio
IMG_1015
I research, write, and teach about the United States in a global context with special emphases on human migration, science and technology, the U.S. South, popular culture, and public history. My recently published book, titled German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era, is an interdisciplinary study based on oral histories and archival material about the immigration, integration, and memory of the German rocket experts associated with Wernher von Braun who were brought to the United States after World War II and later became famous for their contributions to NASA’s Apollo Program. You can watch a presentation of my research, read related blog posts here and here , or you can listen to a great podcast by the Southern Foodways Alliance, for which I was recently interviewed.
Raised by an American father and German mother in Tuscaloosa, AL, and Frankfurt, Germany, I reinforced my bi-cultural upbringing by earning an M.A. degree at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany, and a Ph.D. at the University of Kansas—both in American Studies. Before returning to graduate school for the Ph.D., I spent eight years working in the Information Technology industry as a consultant, trainer, and customer liaison.
My book won the 2015 Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award from the American Astronautical Society (AAS), the 2016 Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) as well as an honorable mention for the Deep South Book Prize of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. I received funding for my scholarship from multiple prestigious entities, including two fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and two fellowships funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—one from the American Historical Association (AHA) and the other from the Society for History of Technology (SHOT).
I moved back to Alabama in fall 2014 to join the History Department at Auburn University. You can find my university profile here.
****************************************************************************************
I can be contacted at: laney.monique(AT)gmail(DOT)com
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Print Marked Items
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making
Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era
Robert Huddleston
Air Power History.
63.4 (Winter 2016): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Air Force Historical Foundation
http://home.earthlink.net/~afhf
Full Text:
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era. By Monique
Laney. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. 2015. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xv, 302. $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-300-19803-4
On April 11, 1945, a unit of the U.S. Third Armored Division captured the city of Nordhausen in central Germany.
Although not the heaviest fight of the war, that city will forever remain in the memories of the American soldiers as a
place of horror. Hundreds of corpses lay sprawled over an abandoned Wehrmacht training base, and hundreds more
filled the great barracks. In 1975, New York Governor Hugh Cary said, "Thirty years ago ... I stood with other
American soldiers before the gates of Nordhausen and witnessed the nightmarish horror of slave camps and
crematoriums. I inhaled the stench of death and barbaric, calculated cruelty ..."
These were slave-laborers, initially procured from the Buchenwald concentration camp and brought from the nearby
underground V2 rocket factory by their SS guards when no longer able to work. As many as 20,000 of some 60,000
prisoners forced to dig the vast underground tunnels and work on the V2 rocket production lines perished from hard
labor, beatings, hunger, disease, and executions. None of the thousands of German scientists, engineers, technicians, and
production managers remained when the Americans arrived; some surfaced five years later in Huntsville, Alabama, as
employees of the U.S. Army. They, and thousands more, were brought to the U.S. under Project Paperclip.
Well before the war ended, efforts were underway to exploit Nazi advanced military technology and technologists.
Closely behind American combat units, specially organized teams moved quickly to collect coveted military assets
including technical documents. Some Germans were brought into the U.S. as POWs to circumvent visa requirements.
Those who were certain to be barred from employment in the U.S. under Project Paperclip had their investigative
reports altered. And war crimes investigators were denied access to the immigrants. Laney calls this "Machiavellian
logic and morality." Where national security is concerned, you do whatever is required
In The Rocket and the Reich, one of Laney's principle sources, historian Michael Neufeld noted that "... a sample of
twenty-eight prominent [members of the Von Braun rocket team] shows that thirteen or fourteen became [Nazi] party
members and four, including von Braun were officers in the SS ..." One of these, Arthur Rudolf, a highly honored U.S.
Army and NASA official, relinquished his American citizenship in 1984 and left the country to avoid deportation
proceedings alleging he was a war criminal. Fellow rocketeers worried who might be next. Laney devotes an entire
chapter to the Rudolf case and its impact on the Huntsville community.
Though Paperclip is covered in detail, it was but the backdrop to understanding how the Germans, led by America's
future space-age hero, Dr. Wemher von Braun, were assimilated into the Huntsville community in the heart of Dixie as
well as throughout the country Lacey says that this study "reveals connections between immigration, race, ethnicity,
science and technology, nation, history, and memory that affect Americans' identities and political thinking. It shows the
ways in which national decisions have both erased and magnified the rocket specialists' participation in German
weapons development with the help of concentration camp labor ..."
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Laney is the daughter of a German mother and an American father and was raised in both Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and
Frankfort, Germany. Her father married a daughter of one of the German rocket experts in Huntsville in his second
marriage. This background is important, because she could emply the complicated process of relating to, negotiating,
and struggling with the Nazi past. She notes that the German population had to reconcile official narratives with
personal family histories, and the two seldom seem to mesh. Similarly, Americans have to understand that "it is
important for the United States to come to terms with the fact that racism is 'integral to our history and identity as a
nation.'" There are, as African Americans pointed out even before we entered the war (and before the Holocaust became
public knowledge), parallels between the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany and blacks in the United States. When the
Germans arrived in Huntsville in 1950, "they were not even citizens yet, had more privileges than the African
Americans," military veterans included.
As Laney explains, her book (an extension of her doctoral dissertation) explores how the Germans in Huntsville
negotiated their lives in Hitler's Third Reich in the U.S. context and how their white, Jewish, and African-American
neighbors made sense of the Germans' past in context of the U.S. legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. She came to "the
heart of Dixie" and immediately recognized overt racism and the undeserved adoration afforded the immigrants from
Hitler's Germany. She was determined to investigate and document what was and should not have been. The result
stands as an indictment of America's military and civilian leaders in the aftermath of World War II. The Germans were
placed above America's black citizens in the interests of national security; and America's leaders, military and civilian,
shamelessly tolerated, even supported, the injustice while misrepresenting the German rocketeers to the American
people.
At the end of the conflict in Europe, misinformation and lies were fed the American people to justify bringing von
Braun and his rocket team to the United States and eventual U.S. citizenship. Without reservation, I recommend this
book as an outstanding contribution to the history of the Second World War and its aftermath.
Robert Huddleston, WWII combat pilot who served in Project Lusty at the end of the European conflict
Huddleston, Robert
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Huddleston, Robert. "German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights
Era." Air Power History, vol. 63, no. 4, 2016, p. 52+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474548684&it=r&asid=515334bd87e4aef66a32db82e7eb2091.
Accessed 2 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474548684
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German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making
Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era
Jason Krupar
Journal of Southern History.
82.4 (Nov. 2016): p982.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era. By Monique
Laney. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 302. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-30019803-4.)
Histories concerning space flight and the American quest to reach the moon tend to focus on the technological and
engineering achievements that propelled the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Overlooked are the backstories
behind the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's successes, the tales hidden and ignored because of their
unseemliness. Monique Laney peels back two of the largely underinvestigated subjects in American space exploration,
race and the role of former Nazi/German scientists in U.S. rocketry programs.
Laney relies heavily on oral histories collected from first- and second-generation German residents of Huntsville,
Alabama--home of the Redstone Arsenal and Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC)--the city's small Jewish population,
and the larger African American community. She also interviewed white residents of Huntsville whose families
predated the arrival of the Germans. The oral histories Laney gathered portray the cultural and economic ways the new
arrivals altered this small southern city, and yet, in matters of race, the Germans were indifferent to the plight of
Huntsville's black population. The interviews she conducted among African Americans underscore the socioeconomic
gap between the two groups and the bitterness black residents directed at the privileges these former enemy scientists
enjoyed while the black community dealt with segregation.
When Wernher von Braun and his colleagues arrived in Huntsville in 1950, local outrage at hosting former enemies,
even Nazi Party members, was minimal. Laney reports that initial national coverage and ire at the rapid transfer via
Operation Paperclip of German scientific personnel quickly dissipated as federal officials sanitized the records of Braun
and his subordinates. White residents accepted the Germans due to the resurgence they helped fuel at Redstone Arsenal
and later at MSFC. The educational levels most German scientists brought with them provided the impetus for an
alleged cultural uplift in Huntsville.
Huntsville's small Jewish population, Laney discovered in several interviews, held mixed responses to the presence of
Braun and the Germans. Several members worked doggedly to assist Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany and then after
the war to help refugees into the United States. The German rocketeers placed Huntsville's Jews in an awkward
position. Some community members worked at either Redstone or MSFC and encountered Germans frequently. Others
owned businesses that attracted German customers. Jews coped the best they could in the situation, and some actively
avoided interactions with the Germans. According to Laney, Huntsville's Jewish population suspected Nazis riddled the
German cadres brought to Redstone.
White Huntsville residents embraced Braun and the Germans despite the worrisome taint of Nazi pasts. The presence of
these technological elites evolved into a source of civic pride, much celebrated throughout the city. When the Arthur
Rudolph war crimes case blew up in 1984, the indignation expressed by German families and white residents at the
investigation demonstrated the revisionist history gripping Huntsville. Jewish residents were shocked by the accusations
that Rudolph oversaw slave laborers working on the V-2 rocket program, but none doubted his guilt. African Americans
knew little about the case, and those who did merely regarded it as further testimony of the inequalities in Huntsville.
Laney argues at the end of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil
Rights Era that unlike their kin in Germany, the Germans in Huntsville never had to confront their sordid past. Instead
Operation Paperclip, the Cold War space and arms races, the promotional abilities of Braun, and federal paperwork
whitewashed the ugly truths behind Huntsville's benefactors. German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie reveals the
inequalities, indifference, and isolation experienced by Huntsville communities. More than a history of technology,
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Laney's book bridges race, the Cold War, science policy, civil rights, and southern history through her extensive use of
interviews. This book brings to light a dark aspect of American space history that needs further discussion.
JASON KRUPAR
University of Cincinnati
Krupar, Jason
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Krupar, Jason. "German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era."
Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 982+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867728&it=r&asid=4b7b4833e65d734889135212f32b0d27.
Accessed 2 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470867728
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Laney, Monique. German rocketeers in the heart
of Dixie: making sense of the Nazi past during
the civil rights era
J. Kleiman
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.2 (Oct. 2015): p310.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Laney, Monique. German rocketeers in the heart of Dixie: making sense of the Nazi past during the civil rights era.
Yale, 2015. 302p bibl index afp ISBN 9780300198034 cloth, $35.00
53-0949
TL781
2014-42886
CIP
Laney's thesis is rather straightforward: Americans have done a very poor job of mastering their past and fail to
acknowledge the darker, more complicated themes that shape their history. To make her point, she explores the legacy
of racism in the Jim Crow South and the expediency of sheltering "good Nazis" to advance the US arsenal in the Cold
War arms race. Post-1950 Huntsville, AL, provides a unique setting where these two streams flowed together. Laney
(Auburn Univ.) explores how Werner von Braun and his team won the hearts and minds of people in this small town
through the Saturn and Apollo projects. In 1984, the federal government charged a leading member of the rocket team
with of war crimes. The town's residents had to decide how to respond, and Laney points out Americans' inability to
confront the reality of US history. Huntsville's southern white Christians defended Arthur Rudolph against charges of
Nazi-era war crimes rooted in racism. In doing so, they ignored their own profound history of racial discrimination and
violence. This study is a call for Americans to be honest about confronting their past in all its complexity and to
understand the dangers of their failure to do so. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division
undergraduates and above.--J. Kleiman, University of Wisconsin Colleges-Marshfield
Kleiman, J.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kleiman, J. "Laney, Monique. German rocketeers in the heart of Dixie: making sense of the Nazi past during the civil
rights era." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2015, p. 310. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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Accessed 2 July 2017.
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Review: German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie
by Jeff Foust
Monday, August 10, 2015
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German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era
by Monique Laney
Yale University Press, 2015
hardcover, 320 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-0-300-19803-4
US$35
In recent years, many in the space community have developed more nuanced impressions of Wernher von Braun. During the 1950s and 1960s, von Braun was widely seen in America as one of the leading warriors in America’s Space Race with the Soviets, a key engineer, manager, and even visionary, but with little discussion about his past, working for the Nazis to develop the V-2 during World War II. Only later, well after his death, has there been a more critical examination of von Braun as well as the other German scientists who came over to America at the end of the war. (See “Review: Von Braun”, The Space Review, November 26, 2007.)
An exception to this reconsideration of von Braun and his colleagues, though, may be Huntsville, Alabama, the town they moved to in 1950 and made their home. In Huntsville, writes historian Monique Laney in her new book, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie, there’s been little historical reexamination, even as new information came to light on the roles some of the Germans played in the war. “Reactions to suggestions that the rocket team might have been implicated in Nazi atrocities were often marked by indignation” by locals, she writes.
“Reactions to suggestions that the rocket team might have been implicated in Nazi atrocities were often marked by indignation” by locals, she writes.
Laney’s book is based on an extensive series of interviews she performed with people in Huntsville. They included first- and second-generation Germans but also others, such as the city’s small Jewish community and its larger, but often overlooked, African-American one. The interviews paint a picture of how the groups interacted—or didn’t interact—given their diverse backgrounds.
When the Germans arrived in Huntsville in 1950, five years after the end of World War II, there was only a little consternation and concern among the locals about hosting them. But most Huntsville residents soon accepted them because of the role they were playing in the economy—their arrival was tied to a resurgence of activity at Redstone Arsenal—and because they were “highly educated and culturally sophisticated,” offering something for locals to aspire to. The Germans, meanwhile, while welcomed by the community, had to cope with the process of “becoming American” to various degrees: embracing enthusiastically, or sometimes more reluctantly, their new country.
While the Germans and Huntsville’s white population bonded, the same is not true for the city’s African-American population. Blacks in Huntsville had little interaction with the Germans, and felt some animosity towards the Germans, who could go places in the still-segregated city that blacks could not. Germans, meanwhile, “managed to obscure the obvious parallels between the Nazi regime and the Jim Crow South,” she writes. (The issue of segregation in Huntsville, and the space program’s role in fighting it, is addressed in the recent book We Could Not Fail.)
She introduces a concept from post-war Germany called Vergangenheitsbewältigung that she describes a reckoning or “constructive dialogue” with the past. The Germans in Huntsville, and the local community that adopted them, didn’t go through that process.
Huntsville’s acceptance of the Germans, and the civic pride they provided during the Space Race, explains the local reaction when one of them, Arthur Rudolph, was accused of war crimes in the 1980s for his role overseeing slave laborers who produced the V-2. While Rudolph had moved to California years earlier, local leaders rallied to support him against the charges despite the weight of evidence against him. The city council passed a resolution calling on the federal government to restore his citizenship (Rudolph relinquished it as part of a deal with prosecutors, moving back to Germany), and other lobbied on his behalf long after Rudolph passed away in 1996. Jewish residents of Huntsville, by contrast, had little doubt of Rudolph’s guilt, and African-Americans knew little about the case.
Near the end of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie, a local official, quoted in a New York Times article, says, “The Nazi question ‘just doesn’t come up… That was then, this is now.’” Laney argues that this question should come up more in Huntsville. She introduces a concept from post-war Germany called Vergangenheitsbewältigung that she describes a reckoning or “constructive dialogue” with the past. The Germans in Huntsville, and the local community that adopted them, didn’t go through that process. Such introspection and examination of the past, she argues, would be worthwhile today to help the community comes to terms not only with the Germans’ past, but also their own legacy of segregation.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
9-26-16
Review of Monique Laney's “German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era”
Books
tags: book review, Monique Laney, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie
4 1 4
by Robert Huddleston
Robert Huddleston, a combat pilot, served on the Army Air Forces Project Lustyat the end of the European conflict. In the 1950s he was employed at the White Sands Proving Ground (WSPG) in New Mexico and in the 1960s with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in Washington. He never met Dr. Von Broun but came to know several of his German colleagues.
On April 11, 1945, just short of a month before VE-day and the end of the conflict in Europe, a unit of the U.S. Third Armored Division captured the city of Nordhausen in central Germany. Although the taking of Nordhausen, as reported in the Division's wartime report, did not constitute the heaviest fighting, that city will forever remain in the memories of the American soldiers as a place of horror: “Hundreds of corpses lay sprawled over the acres of the Boelcke Kaerne, an abandoned Wehrmacht training base,” read the Division's history, Spearhead in the West: 1941-1945. “ Hundreds more,” went the report, “filled the great barracks. They lay in contorted heaps, half stripped, mouths gaping in the dirt and straw; or they were piled naked, like cordwood, in the corners and under the stairways.” In 1975, Hugh I. Cary, New York's Governor spoke of his personal experience: “Thirty years ago as an officer of the US Army, I stood with other American soldiers before the gates of Nordhausen and witnessed the nightmarish horror of slave camps and crematoriums. I inhaled the stench of death and barbaric, calculated cruelty.”
These were slave-laborers, initially procured from the Buchenwald concentration camp, and brought from the nearby underground V2 rocket factory by their SS guards when no longer able to work. When war crimes investigators moved in, they estimated that of some 60 thousand prisoners forced to dig the vast underground tunnels and work on the V2 rocket production lines, as many as 20 thousand perished from hard labor, beatings, hunger, disease and executions. Though thousands of German workers were involved, none remained when the Americans arrived including the scientists, engineers, technicians and managers in charge of production. Some surfaced five years later in Huntsville, Alabama as employees of the U.S. Army. They, and thousands more, were brought to the US under Project Paperclip.
Well before the conflict in Europe ended efforts were underway to exploit Nazi advance military technology and technologists. Closely behind American combat units, specially organized teams moved quickly to collect coveted military assets including technical documents. Later, the exploitation program was extended to the Germans who had developed and/or produced what the victors now coveted but some, perhaps most, would be banned from the U.S. if their past were laid bare.
Determined to exploit Nazi expertise, some Germans were brought into the U.S. as prisoners (POWs) thus circumventing visa requirements. Those who were certain to be barred from employment in the U.S. under Project Papercliphad their investigative reports altered. And war crimes investigators were denied access to the immigrants. This was necessary some officials would later insist in the interest of national security. Author Laney called this “Machiavellian logic and morality.” Loosely defined it means that where national security is concerned you do whatever is required. No small wonder, Operation Paperclip came to include Germans whose contributions to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich would invite prosecutions in Germany under rules laid down by the occupying powers.In The Rocket And The Third Reich, one of author Laney's principle sources, historian Michel Neufeld noted that “a sample of twenty-eight prominent [members of the Von Braun rocket team] shows that thirteen or fourteen became [Nazi] party members and four, including von Braun were officers in the SS.” And in 1984, Arthur Rudolf, a “prominent member,” and highly honored U.S. Army and NASA official, relinquished his American citizenship and left the country to avoid deportation proceedings alleging he was a war criminal. An entire chapter of The Rocketeers is devoted to the Rudolf case and its impact on the Huntsville community. His fellow rocketeers worried as to who might be next. It was a “Jewish conspiracy” some suggested and the white citizens took the position that the Germans had “brought prosperity and fame” to the community and therefore we “should forgive and forget rocketeers' deeds under the Nazi regime.” The African -Americans accepted that their lives were unaffected.
Though Project Paperclipis covered in great detail, this was but the back-drop to understanding how the Germans, led by America's future space-age hero, Dr. Wernher von Braun, were assimilated into the Huntsville community in the heart of Dixieas well as throughout the country. “This study,” declares the author, “reveals connections between immigration,, race, ethnicity, science and technology, nation, history, and memory that affect Americans' identities and political thinking.” She goes on to say, “It shows the ways in which national decisions have both erased and magnified the rocket specialists' participation in German weapons development with the help of concentration camp labor. ”
“As the daughter of a German mother and an American father,” the author writes in her Introduction, “I was raised in both Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Frankfort, Germany. I was educated primarily in Germany [becoming fluent in German] but earned a Ph.D in the United States. Since my father married a daughter of one of the German rocket experts in Huntsville in his second marriage, I also have a family connection to the subjects of this research.” Continuing, she points out that “This background is important because I will be using a concept unfamiliar to most non-German readers.” This is vergangenheitbewaltigung, which she describes as “the complicated process of relating to, negotiating, and struggling with the Nazi past.” She goes on to note that “while [Germans] tried to grapple with the Nazi past . . . the German population had to reconcile those official narratives with personal family histories, and the two seldom seem to mesh.” For Americans to understand this “it is important for the United States to come to terms with the fact that racism is 'integral to our history and identity as a nation.' ” There is, as African Americans pointed out even before we entered the war, (and before the Holocaust became public knowledge), “parallels between the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany and blacks in the United States.” And when the Germans arrived in Huntsville in 1950 “they were not even citizens yet, had more privileges than the African Americans,” military veterans included.
“My study,” author Laney explains, “combines and extends the two [German and American] approaches to Vergangenheitsbewaltigung by exploring how the Germans in Huntsville negotiated their lives in Hitler’s Third Reich in the U.S. context and how their white, Jewish, and African-American neighbors made sense of the Germans' past in context of the U.S. legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Historian Monique Laney embarked upon her research (the book is an extension of her doctoral dissertation) with little knowledge of the post-WW II “exploitation” program. Her open-mindedness (a generational advantage) was bolstered by her remarkable background and extensive study of Project Paperclip. She came to “the heart of Dixie” and immediately recognized overt racism and the undeserved adoration afforded the immigrants from Hitler's Germany. She was determined to investigate and document what was and should not have been. The resultstands as an indictment of America's military and civilian leaders in the aftermath of World War II. The Germans were placed above America's black citizens “in the interests of national security” and America's leaders, military and civilian, shamelessly tolerated, even supported, the injustice while misrepresenting the German rocketeersto the American people.
While library shelves are sagging from books covering the Second World War, room must be found for Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie. At the end of the conflict in Europe, misinformation and lies have been fed the American people to justify bringing Dr, Wernher von Braun and his rocket team to the United States and eventual U.S. citizenship. As historian Monique Laney points out, her study “reveals connections between immigration, race, ethnicity, science and technology, nation, history, and memory that affect Americans' identities and political thinking.” That's quite a challenge but she produces.
Without reservation, I recommend German Rocketeers as an outstanding contribution the history of the Second World War.
Monique Laney's 'German Rocketeers': An unbelievable true tale
Updated: AUGUST 2, 2015 — 3:01 AM EDT
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German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie
Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era
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Monique Laney's 'German Rocketeers': An unbelievable true tale
By Monique Laney
Yale University Press. 320 pp. $35.
Reviewed by
Paul Jablow
In German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie, Monique Laney shines a light on a fascinating corner of U.S. history. Though not perfect, her book tells an intriguing true story, at times next to incredible.
As World War II wound down in Europe, the U.S. government faced a difficult decision about a high-level group of German scientists led by Wernher von Braun.
None had apparently participated in high-level political decisions of the Third Reich, but all had been involved in the design and production of the V2 rocket, built and assembled largely by concentration camp inmates under slave-labor conditions. But the Cold War was starting, and the U.S. government feared that if the Americans didn't recruit the scientists, the Soviet Union would.
We made this deal with the devil to gain an advantage in the Cold War to come. Under what was called Project Paperclip, the German scientists were brought to Fort Bliss, Texas, to work on long-range missiles and other projects. In 1950, they were moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. A decade later, NASA opened the Marshall Space Flight Center there. That helped convert Huntsville from a sleepy backwater to the headquarters of the space program.
By the time he died in 1977, von Braun, a former member of the German SS, was a national hero. Other members of the group became respected local citizens, including Arthur Rudolph, a former V2 production manager.
Then, in 1984, the past resurfaced. Largely through the digging of Eli Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, Rudolph was publicly branded as a war criminal for his treatment of V2 laborers. He was pressured to renounce his U.S. citizenship and return to Germany. Laney spends the rest of the book detailing the public reaction, in Huntsville and nationally, to the revelations, which set off a chain of rationalization, Holocaust denial, and anti-Semitism that eclipsed any rethinking of Project Paperclip.
Alas, the Rudolph case, which is really the heart of the book, comes almost three-quarters of the way through. And attempts to make Jim Crow part of the story seem forced, as Huntsville played no significant role in the civil rights movement. The ease with which the scientists fit into the segregated South isn't lost on black interviewees, of course, but it never became part of the public dialogue the way the Rudolph case did.
Laney, a history professor at Auburn University, was born at a U.S. Army base in Frankfurt, Germany, to a G.I. father and a German mother. She was raised in Frankfurt and in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and is a native speaker of German and English. This makes her singularly well-qualified to research and write this story. One wishes she had spent more time on the most interesting parts.
Paul Jablow is a former Inquirer reporter and editor. pjablow@comcast.net
Published: August 2, 2015 — 3:01 AM EDT