who was really the first man on the moon

#Who was really the first man on the moon tv#

The fact that Beon survived Nordhausen was a miracle. Von Braun’s team were committed Nazis, including Rudolph who, when I interviewed him in 1987, told me: ‘Hitler’s first six years were marvellous. Every day over 100 people died from exhaustion, starvation or disease.’Īs the chief director of the American Apollo programme, von Braun had arranged for Kennedy to witness the test firing of a Saturn rocket (pictured), the type that would eventually deliver Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the Moonīeon recalled how von Braun, an SS major, and other scientists ‘just passed by us without looking at the bodies, without any sign of emotion’. ‘Sometimes an electric crane lifted 12 prisoners at a time, hands behind their backs with a piece of wood in their mouths to prevent them crying out. Every week, dozens were killed that way,’ he said. ‘If he suspected anyone of not working, he hanged them above the production line and left the body dangling above us for a few days, as a warning. Survivors were rare.īeon has particular memories of Arthur Rudolph, the 37-year-old director of production in Nordhausen who, just 17 years later, was the director of Apollo production in America.Īs Beon recalled, Rudolph’s management technique in Nazi Germany was distinctive. Himmler’s SS forced an estimated 60,000 Europeans on to the production line in Nordhausen at the foot of the Harz mountains in central Germany. The world only knows about the true history of the Apollo programme because of people such as Beon, one of the few slave labourers to emerge in 1945 from the underground factory where Hitler’s engineers built the V2s.

#Who was really the first man on the moon tv#

Why, 50 years on, has the BBC refused to re-show The Paperclip Conspiracy, a TV documentary I produced in 1987, for example? It exposed the shocking crimes committed by von Braun’s team and the subsequent conspiracy to conceal the atrocities.ĪMID the sentimental nostalgia of the past few days, the Corporation has ignored a fundamental question: what price conscience and morality for that ‘giant leap for mankind’? Today, the amnesia continues and it seems wilful. The world forgot that 20,000 innocent men were murdered by those Germans.’ ‘Everyone forgot the hell those Nazis created to build their rocket,’ Beon recalled when we met in 1986. These men were veterans of the infamous programme to build V2 rockets, the secret weapons that Hitler believed would obliterate London and save Germany from defeat in the Second World War. The fact that more than 130 German scientists were employed on the design and production of the Apollo 11 Moon landing was conveniently ignored at the time of the mission, and no wonder. The 1969 footage of the three German scientists embracing each other in the centre of the Houston control room never reached the global television audience – and neither was it broadcast amid last week’s 50th anniversary celebrations. He later had a key role in the Apollo programme

While at a V2 factory, Arthur Rudolph (right) would hang slave labourers if they did not work hard enough. Dr Hubertus Strughold (left) used concentration camp detainees for high-altitude experiments - and filmed their excruciating deaths.