Friedwardt Winterberg - Rudolph Controversy

Rudolph Controversy

In 1983, Winterberg became involved in a scandal which erupted over the engineer Arthur Rudolph, who had been brought to the United States after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip to work on the U.S. rocketry program. It was Rudolph who then designed the massive famous Saturn V rocket that launched Neil Armstrong to the Moon. In the early 1980s, Rudolph's record as a potential Nazi war criminal at Mittelwerk surfaced and became the center of a political controversy after the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) negotiated to have him renounce his U.S. citizenship, purportedly under duress, after which he returned to Germany. After a thorough investigation by German authorities, it was decided there was no basis for prosecution and his German citizenship was restored. Rudolph pursued lawsuits hoping to regain his US citizenship and was barred entry to the US in 1989.

Winterberg, characterized by King as "Rudolph's most outspoken supporter", lobbied vigorously to paint Rudolph as a victim, giving interviews to magazines and launching his own investigation into Rudolph.

In 1992, Winterberg received documents from the post-unification German Federal Archives showing that in 1983 the OSI had requested information about Rudolph's role as a director of the German "Mittelwerke" rocket factory from 1943 to 1945 from the GDR. The GDR replied by passing on the results of its investigation.