Was NASA Rocket Expert Before Leaving U.S. : War Crime Suspect Now German Citizen

WASHINGTON —  Arthur Rudolph, a one-time rocket expert for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who left the United States under threat of deportation for alleged war crimes, has had his German citizenship restored, his attorney said Friday.

Rudolph, now 80 and in failing health, returned to Hamburg, West Germany, in 1984 as the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations was preparing deportation proceedings against him. Investigators said evidence showed that Rudolph had been involved in working thousands of slave laborers to death in an underground plant that assembled V-2 rockets.

Jurgen Rieger, Rudolph’s attorney in Hamburg, said in a telephone interview that German prosecutors had notified Rudolph several days ago that their investigation was closed and that Rudolph since has received citizenship papers.

‘Should Have Been Dropped’

“The case is over in favor of Dr. Rudolph,” Rieger said. “The worst thing was that there was no case at all. The investigation should have been dropped a year ago but the state prosecutor had to study it more because it was not a normal case.”

Rudolph was one of 119 members of the Wernher von Braun rocket team brought to the United States at the end of World War II.

After developing Germany’s V-2 rocket, they pioneered missile development for the U.S. Army, launched the United States’ first satellite and later designed and developed the Saturn rockets used in Project Apollo.

Rudolph himself worked on the Army’s Pershing missile, and later at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and was responsible for production contracts for NASA’s Saturn 5 rockets used to launch astronaut teams to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Money Raised for Defense

Since Rudolph’s return to Germany, his former colleagues who came from Germany with him had raised money for his defense fund. Before his return to Germany, Rudolph was retired and living in San Jose.

Rieger said Friday that prosecutors had interviewed about 40 witnesses, some of them in East Germany and as far away as Australia and the Soviet Union, before concluding that there was not sufficient evidence to go forward with a war crimes prosecution.

During the three years since he left the United States, Rudolph in effect had been a man without a country, since he had not retained his German citizenship after his formal immigration to America.

Although Rieger and Rudolph’s associates in the United States said witnesses interviewed by German investigators had sworn that Rudolph was innocent of war crimes, the chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations said he remains confident that the evidence gathered by the Justice Department was sufficient to deport Rudolph.

Before leaving the United States, Rudolph had undergone coronary bypass surgery and suffered from a palsied condition. His health, Rieger said, further deteriorated during the investigation.