Operation Paperclip .... recalled

I met Bruce Gagnon, at Leeds Metropolitan University last year when he talked about the program at Vandenburg Air Base CA .A 70 mile strip of the Californian coast where ICBM's are tested .

I saw a report that another Minuteman had been tested last week, An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, was launched from Launch Facility-10 on North Vandenberg at 12:01 a.m. today. The launch was part of a test to demonstrate the ability to integrate modified products into existing weapon systems.

"The purpose of the flight was to verify the Minuteman III's ability to carry the safer and more accurate Mark 21 warhead, originally designed for the Peacekeeper missile," said Lt. Col. S.L. Davis, 576th Flight Test Squadron commander.

The missile's single unarmed re-entry vehicle traveled approximately 4,800 miles in about 30 minutes, hitting a pre-determined target in the North Pacific Ocean at the Kwajelin Missile Range in the western chain of the Marshall Islands.

So I went over to Bruce's blog "Organsing Notes"

As ever, Bruce is full of life, energy and drive .... I came across this potent little insight into the impact of the German rocket scientists scientists the US stole, we all know about Werner von Braun, but there were many, many more ..and they had children who had eventually to come face to face with the war, and it's horrors and their parent's role in it.....



While In Albuquerque I met a woman whose father had been one of the Nazi rocket scientists brought to the U.S. in "Operation Paperclip" right after the end of World War II. Her father, Ernst Steinhoff, had been the guidance department chief at Hitler's V-1 and V-2 test facility at Peenemunde in northern Germany. Once brought to the U.S., the Nazi rocketeers test range moved to New Mexico and the White Sands Proving Ground. One hundred copies of Hitler's V-2 and over 100 former Nazi rocket scientists created the U.S. space program.

Sternhoff went on to work in the aerospace industry on the west coast and eventually
returned to New Mexico when he was appointed to a high position at Holloman AFB.

Sternhoff's daughter told me that she did not learn about the Nazi holocaust until she was 18 years old. When she approached her mother asking if it was true, her mother said it was necessary and retrieved an old Readers Digest article to explain her side of the story.

The Nazi rocket program in Germany killed tens of thousands of Jews, French esistance fighters, Communists, homosexuals, and prisoners of war, who were all used as slave labor to build Hitler's V-1 and V-2 rocket program. (For more information about this story read Secret Agenda by Linda Hunt.)

Ernst Steinhoff is an inductee in the New Mexico Museum of Space History, P O Box 5430, Alamogordo, New Mexico 88311-5430

You can find some fascinating history about what Steinhoff did at Peenemunde here .

Steinhoff's brother was on submarines and it was through this connection that the first submarine launched missiles were developed.

Go and read some more ..... here

Pic is The DORA camp at Nordhausen where deportees from all over Europe assembled the complex V2 mechanisms.