Recruitment Into Services of Allied Powers and Move To USA
From July to October 1945, Rudolph was transferred to the British to participate in Operation Backfire. He was then transferred back to the Americans. The U.S. Army picked up Martha and Marianne Rudolph from Stepfershausen before it was occupied by the Red Army and the Rudolphs were reunited at Camp Overcast near Landshut. In November 1945, Operation Overcast brought Rudolph, von Braun and the rest of the V-2 team temporarily to the US for six months. Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip in March 1946 and formally approved by President Truman in August 1946; most of the group stayed permanently.
After a brief interrogation at Fort Strong, the team was sent to White Sands Proving Grounds to work on further V-2 engineering in January 1946. In January 1947 Rudolph was moved to the Ordnance Research and Development Division at Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas, where his family finally joined him in April. Since he had been brought into the US without a visa, he and others were sent to Juárez, Mexico where he obtained a visa and officially immigrated to the U.S. on April 14, 1949. During his time at Fort Bliss, he acted as a liaison to the Solar Aircraft Company, and spent much of 1947 and 1949 in San Diego, California.
During a 1949 inquiry by the FBI, Rudolph made the following statement on his participation in the Nazi party:
Until 1930 I sympathized with the social democratic party, voted for it and was a member of a socialdemocratic union (Bund Techn. Agst. u. Beamt.) After 1930 the economical situation became so serious that it appeared to me to be headed for catastrophe. (I really became unemployed in 1932.) The great amount of unemployment caused expansion of nationalsoc. and communistic parties. Frightened that the latter one would become the government I Joined the NSDAP (a legally reg. entity) to help, I believed in the preservation of the western culture.
On June 25, 1950 Rudolph was transferred to Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama, and his group was re-designated as the Ordnance Guided Missile Center. He was naturalized as an American citizen on November 11, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1950 Rudolph was appointed as the technical director for the Redstone missile project. Rudolph was assigned as the project manager for the Pershing missile project in 1956. He specifically selected The Martin Company as the prime contractor for the program. He also chose the Eclipse-Pioneer division of Bendix to develop the guidance system after he personally inspected the plant in Teterboro, New Jersey.
Rudolph received an honorary doctorate of science degree from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida on February 23, 1959. He received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service, the highest Army award for civilians, for his work on Pershing.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Rudolph
Famous quotes containing the words services, allied, powers, move and/or usa:
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.... From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. But we would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one’s tongue don’t move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.”
—Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969)