Saturday, August 28, 2010

‘Haus Der Deutschen Wissenschaft:’ The Hotel Paradise For Nazi Scientists

Tom Lehrer: Wernher von Braun

Henry Kolm had an interesting job as a 21-year-old.

He smuggled Nazi scientists into Boston Harbor.

He’d meet most of them off Nixes Mate, the smallest of the Harbor Islands — no more than gravel shoals — where a beacon warns ships coming into the harbor. Then, he and a Boston whaler captain named Corky would scoot them out to Long Island and a secret hotel fashioned from the barracks of the old Civil War derelict known as Fort Strong.

The prize get, the leader of the pack and the star of the show at Fort Strong was Wernher von Braun, Germany’s uber-engineer of rockets — most notoriously the V-2.

But technically they were illegal aliens … and many of them, like von Braun, were Nazis to boot. So Project Paperclip had to smuggle them out to Long Island to keep Immigration, Customs and, more importantly, the State Department from finding out they were here....

Full story here.

Times sure have changed.

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