How Nazi Verner Became an American Rocket Scientist.

     The NPR program This American Life includes a segment this past weekend on the American military personnel who debriefed hundreds of German scientists brought to the U.S. after WWII.

     One of those scientists is famous in Alabama. Wernher Von Braun. There's a civic center in Huntsville named for him. A couple of years ago Al Jazera in America broadcast a report about him, before the network went broke. It goes into his Nazi past the his then Alabama future.

     The U.S. wanted Von Braun and the other German scientists to help America develop its own rocket program. They did the recruiting in a top secret base in Illinois. It was code named P.O. Box 1142. 

     The blog audio covers the show's entire topic....several loosely connected stories of people "in over their heads". 

     The part I found most interesting starts in the second part of the program at 36:24, but it you are in a huge hurry to hear the Vernor Von Braun part, skip to 49:47. And a warning: there's some foul language in it, being an online version of the story, not a broadcast where cussing is bleeped out.