Space artifact or Nazi weapon? Displaying the
Smithsonian’s V-2 missile, 1976–2011
David H. DeVorkin and Michael J. Neufeld*
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA
Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4Debates over how or how not to display intrinsically con-
troversial subjects in a museum setting have been part of
museum life for decades. And the Smithsonian Institution
on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., has more often
than not been a ‘flash point’ [1] for episodes ranging from
the interwar controversy over the Langley Aerodrome and
Wright Flyer, to the so-called ‘rerun of the Scopes trial’ in a
1978 suit brought against the Smithsonian, to the Enola
Gay affair of 1994–1995. Stakeholders from every conceiv-
able walk of life have, at one time or another, expressed
annoyance with the way some part of human culture, or the
natural world, is portrayed. Accordingly, the Smithsonian
has gone through cycles where it becomes very cautious
about what it displays, and how it displays, social, cultural
and scientific artifacts, notably since Enola Gay [2–8].
To be sure, in behaving this way, the Smithsonian is no
doubt a reflection of larger forces that have tried to shape
what it is and does, forces that reflect behavioral norms
and values in a nation’s constant search for identity. A case
in point, for the purposes of setting the stage for this essay,
is why the National Mall of the United States does not have
an explicitly military museum, and how the Smithsonian
has become, in effect, a surrogate agent in the process.
Beyond a pervasive suspicion and antipathy toward show-
casing the armed forces on the Mall, as Joanne London has
argued, there were other forces, including ‘the Smithso-
nian’s exhibition traditions, personalities, bureaucratic
obstacles, the military establishment’s ambivalence about
the value of museums, the United States’ involvement in
the Korean and Vietnam war and the general environment
of the Cold War, and changes in museology. . .’ [9, p. 259].
London traces the historical pathways through which
military interests attempted to establish a presence on the
National Mall, and how, in 1961, Congress attempted to
control or moderate this drive by creating a National
Armed Forces Museum Advisory Board to the Institution
that would authorize some form of coverage. This fostered
a debate centered on the question of whether the Smith-
sonian’s newly established Museum of History and Tech-
nology (now the National Museum of American History)
could better address the expressed desires of the military
than could a wholly new museum bureau devoted to the
subject. The Smithsonian resisted the idea of a new bu-
reau, arguing in a position paper in about 1960 that it could
better integrate ‘the military exhibits into a museum*Corresponding author at: NASM Space History Division, Smithsonian Institu-
tion, MRC 311, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013-7012, USA.
Tel.: +1 202 633 2434; fax: +1 202 786 2947.DeVorkin, D.H. (devorkind@si.edu);
Neufeld, M.J. (neufeldm@si.edu)
Available online 24 August 2011
www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ – see front matter . Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.101designed to cover the entire scope of the nation’s history’
to ‘set into a proper context’ for the nation’s armed forces
history [9, p. 167].
It was, indeed, the question of creating ‘proper context’
and educating its visitors and patrons to the place of the
military in American society that drove the Smithsonian’s
agenda. As London points out, the postwar Smithsonian,
led by Leonard Carmichael, its first Secretary from acade-
mia, and after him S. Dillon Ripley, consistently rejected
the compelling desire to retain the museum ‘as shrine’ and
fostered more ‘critical and thematic approaches to exhibi-
tion’ [9, p. 266]. But she also shows that the National Air
Museum – which Congress had established as a Smithso-
nian bureau in 1946 to meld existing aeronautical collec-
tions with the Army Air Forces’ World War II collection of
foreign and domestic aircraft – resisted this trend at first,
favoring galleries that celebrated achievements through
overcoming technological obstacles. That trend continued
even after the Air Museum became the National Air and
Space Museum (NASM) in 1966 and received its own
building on the Mall in 1976 [9,10].
Here we will look at some of these traditions and
personalities as well as changes in museum practices to
plot out how the National Air and Space Museum, as the
most prominent surrogate for a military presence on the
Mall, has over time altered its display of an artifact central
to its collection and, to be sure, its very nature. First, we
will portray how the NASM originally presented its cap-
tured German V-2 missile as a prominent and persistent
symbol of the Space Age, the embodiment of what the
historian Brooke Hindle has called the ‘True Cross’: the
iconic original artifact, rather than a copy or representa-
tion [11]. Then we will outline how NASM later modified its
exhibit to show the missile more as a military artifact
manufactured by concentration-camp labor. And third,
we will briefly compare how the evolution of NASM’s
treatment of the missile in its 1100 square meters Space
Hall compared to treatments in other museums. That
comparison will show that the transformation in NASM’s
V-2 exhibit beginning in 1990 was both a byproduct of an
ongoing historical reevaluation of the artifact, and also the
harbinger of the transformation of museum exhibits about
the missile in North America and Western Europe, even if
there is no evidence that it was a direct influence.
Overall, we hope here to convey our conviction that the
survival of an historical artifact can be a stimulus to histori-
cal re-evaluation, and that at any one time in history, its
interpretation is contingent upon norms and values of the
day. In such manner, artifacts and how they are interpreted
over time reflect changing societal and cultural values.6/j.endeavour.2011.08.003
Figure 1. The NASM V-2 at Park Ridge, Illinois, c. 1950.
Courtesy National Air and Space Museum Archives.
188 Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4The V-2 ballistic missile
The V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2 = Vengeance Weapon 2) was a
revolutionary technological device when Nazi Germany
deployed it to attack London, Paris, Antwerp and other
western European cities in fall 1944. Originally known to
its creators, the Germany Army engineering team led by
Dr. Wernher von Braun, as the Aggregat 4 or A-4, its rocket
thrust of 25 metric tons was two magnitudes larger than
anything that had been developed in any other country. Its
size was astonishing by the standards of the day: 14 m tall
and weighing at liftoff 12.9 metric tons fully fueled with
liquid oxygen and 75% alcohol. The V-2 could carry a one-
metric ton warhead with 750 kg of high explosive at least
270 km in 5 min. It impacted at a supersonic velocity of
over Mach 3, arriving before the sound of its fall. Yet this
terror weapon – deployed by Hitler to demoralize Allied
populations in the desperate hope that it could change the
course of the war – was so inaccurate that it could barely hit
a large urban area. It proved to be a very expensive and
wasteful way to deliver bombs on enemy cities and ulti-
mately had little impact on the Allied war effort [12,13].
Its true importance lay in its postwar influence on rocket
development, most notably in the Soviet Union and the
United States. The latter imported Wernher von Braun
and his key engineers, as well as parts and components for
a hundred missiles, ultimately launching over seventy of
them, primarily from the White Sands Proving Ground in
New Mexico. The majority were fired with instruments to
characterize the upper atmosphere and near space, as well
as to deploy the first exoatmospheric astronomical experi-
ments. The missile and its component technologies proved
influential on the development of American ballistic mis-
siles and space launch vehicles. In the USSR, the Red
Army also imported Germans and missiles, and copied
the missile as the R-1, the first ballistic missile in the
Soviet forces. It too proved to be a catalyst for missile and
launch vehicle development. An early commitment to the
technology by the Soviet government explains much of the
stunning surprises of 1957: the launch of the world’s first
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and first satellite,
Sputnik, fired into orbit by the same rocket, the R-7 [14,15].
In the aftermath of the war, the V-2 was remembered in
the West in two primary ways: as a milestone on the road to
space and as a military artifact of the V-weapons attack on
England (with the V-1, a Luftwaffe cruise missile unrelat-
ed to von Braun’s group). Thanks largely to the populari-
zation efforts of von Braun and his friend, the ex-German
science writer and early rocket experimenter Willy Ley
(ironically an anti-Nazi e´migre´), the space narrative be-
came the dominant one, especially after Sputnik. The ex-
Germans celebrated the first successful launch, on 3 Octo-
ber 1942 at Peenemu¨ nde rocket center on the Baltic, as the
first step on the road to space, and the V-2 as the first
human object to reach space, which indeed it was. Von
Braun and Ley’s past as space enthusiasts in the Weimar
Republic also became central to the V-2 narrative, while
the fact that von Braun had been a member of the Nazi
Party and SS, and that the missile had been manufactured
by concentration-camp workers under murderous condi-
tions, was on the other hand almost completely suppressed
(Ley probably knew little about this, as he left Germany inwww.sciencedirect.com1935). Not much was publicly available about those stories
until the 1960s in the Soviet bloc and the 1980s in the West.
As a result of the forced departure from the United States
in 1984 of one of von Braun’s key associates, Arthur
Rudolph, for his involvement in slave labor, scholarly
and public understanding of the missile was fundamental-
ly transformed, such that the V-2’s military and National
Socialist origins took center stage [16].
The Smithsonian’s V-2
In 1949, the U.S. Air Force (as the Army Air Forces were
renamed after receiving independence two years earlier)
formally transferred some 1366 enemy and Allied wartime
objects to the National Air Museum, including the shell of a
V-2 missile and an engine. This object, like most of the
others, was stored at a former Douglas Aircraft plant at
Park Ridge, Illinois (the later site of O’Hare Airport) and
was displayed there in its original camouflage colors
(Figure 1). The suite of V-2 objects were shipped from Park
Ridge by train in late November 1954, and trucked to the
museum’s storage facility in Suitland, Maryland, in Feb-
ruary 1955. The shell of the missile was formally acces-
sioned in 1960.
Once Congress appropriated the $40 million needed for
the new NASM building in 1972, the staff went all-out to
identify, collect and restore the major objects it hoped to
display. V-2 restoration commenced in 1974, requiring
some 2000 man-hours to complete. Part of it involved
identifying needed components and securing them from
other sources, notably the Marshall Space Flight Center of
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Royal Air Force
Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4 189Museum at Hendon, England. The latter provided a thrust
ring, graphite exhaust vanes, and other tail components to
complete the missile, whereas Marshall contributed anoth-
er V-2 and a launch stand [17].
In an annotated ‘Thematic Concept Script’ dated 2
January 1975, Frederick C. Durant III, Assistant Director
for Astronautics, and therefore the chief curatorial archi-
tect of the new space wing, noted that the V-2 was now
disassembled and that another was being shipped from
Huntsville. The best parts would be utilized in the ultimate
object. Little documentation has yet been located from the
restoration, which took place from 1974 through early
1976. It appears likely that the Park Ridge V-2 became
the fuselage of the final vehicle. With the restoration well
underway, on 11 December 1975 Durant wrote in haste to
the U.S. Army Ballistic Command at the Redstone Arse-
nal, also in Huntsville, asking to borrow the five-volume
‘Report on Operation Backfire (British test launchings of V-
2 missile at Cuxhaven, 1945)’. He needed it ‘urgently’ to
properly restore the V-2 [18].
Before joining the Smithsonian in 1964 as first head of
the Astronautics Department, Durant trained in chemical
engineering and became a Navy officer, a rocket engineer,
and a covert analyst of foreign rocket and space programs
for the Central Intelligence Agency. While at the latter, he
became president of the American Rocket Society in 1953
and of the International Astronautical Federation in 1955.
He was also a close personal friend of Wernher von Braun
after 1951. Durant oversaw a curatorial team led by Walter
H. Flint, a former range officer at Cape Canaveral. Their
1975 Thematic Unit Script for what was to be Space Hall,
one of the three large, main halls at NASM, flanked by
some twenty discrete exhibit spaces on two floors, envi-
sioned the V-2 standing at the entrance. ‘The atmosphere
of this gallery should retain or enhance the monumental
aspects of the major artifacts’, the narrative began. The
first of five units would be called ‘Guided Missiles and
Space Launch Vehicles’ in order to show that modern
launch technologies derive from guided missiles. Nazi
Germany would be depicted as ‘orders of magnitude’ more
advanced in rocketry and the ‘V-2 . . . embodied the greatest
sophistication of German World War II weapons placed in
mass production’. It concluded that ‘we cannot tell the story
of modern space flight without presenting the legacy’ of the
guided missile [18].
Graphic panels would be placed around the vertically
mounted V-2 depicting wartime scenes of testing and
launching German V-2s. There would be schematics de-
scribing the design of the missile, and a video of launch-
ings, both ‘successes and failures’, in living color, followed
by footage extrapolating the technology into a future in
space. Flint visualized the V-2 as the first stop of a walking
tour. Visitors would encounter it with American descen-
dents in the background, including a Jupiter C, Vanguard,
Scout, Minuteman III and a Poseidon C-3. Other German
missiles would hang overhead: a V-1, a Rheintochter, an Hs
298 and an X-4.
Durant well knew that they could not achieve either full
continuity or ‘precise chronological development’ in the
time and space available, but, he predicted, ‘by virtue of
the sheer size, strangeness, rarity and visual interest of thewww.sciencedirect.comartifacts, a strong impression will be made on the visitor’.
The artifacts would be the primary evidence and the labels
would be limited to describing what was being encoun-
tered. Any audio narrative would be linear and straight-
forward: the advance of the V-2 and everything based upon
it, highlighting the launch of captured missiles at White
Sands. The Thematic Concept Script of 2 January 1975
states that: ‘This area represents, then, the technological
basis upon which was developed postwar . . . concepts for
long-range ballistic missiles and the feasibility of launch-
ing artificial satellites’. The artifacts embodied the strong
message that the knowledge and practice acquired through
building ballistic missiles were those that stood behind
modern space launch vehicles. The labels would emphasize
‘the commonality of the technology’ ranging from rocket
propulsion to aerodynamics to inertial guidance and in-
strumentation [18].
Durant sent the script to external reviewers including
Eugene Emme and G. Harry Stine. Emme, chief NASA
historian, referred the script to NASA Public Affairs. Stine,
widely known for his popular writing on space technology
themes and his promotion of model rocketry, had worked at
the White Sands Missile Range and later headed the
Range Operations Division of the Navy at Cape Canaveral.
Stine rejected the curatorial decision to tie ‘space to weap-
ons’ adding that the V-1, the Rheintochter, etc., were of
‘historic interest but NOT space related!’ The USAF Min-
uteman was also out of place as it was a ‘WEAPON not
space vehicle’. The V-2 was acceptable to Stine, apparently,
if it were to be repainted ‘either as first successful Peene-
mu¨ nde round or typical WSPG rocket sonde. I have paint
patterns’ [19].
A NASA Public Affairs officer responded very different-
ly. Alex Nagy, in an 8 April 1975 message to the head of his
office, John Donnelly, worried that the overall treatment
lacked historical context of any kind:
The one thing that bothers me most is the absence of
any perspective in the Space Hall regarding U.S. and
world conditions at the time all this was happening
. . . the thematic concept is presented as a scientific
and engineering development with no relation to
concurrent international and national political pres-
sures, and their development ought to be put into
proper context.
Nagy saw no mention of the social and political forces
behind the space race, most pointedly the missile gap ‘of
the early 1950s’ but most of all, ‘the competition between
the Army and a schizophrenic Navy on which would get the
IGY satellite launching assignment’. And what about the
Soviet Sputniks, the Senate hearings, NASA’s establish-
ment? ‘None of these things occurred in an orderly fashion,
based strictly on scientific merit or sound technological
planning’ [18].
Nagy’s boss at NASA’s Public Affairs did not strictly
back up his staff member’s opinions, but sent them on,
indicating that he would send the draft as well to NASA
leaders. Durant wrote back to Donnelly on 8 May thanking
him for Nagy’s comments, saying they were ‘useful and
appreciated.’ However, ‘As to the political story of inter-
service rivalry, world conditions, etc. some treatment may
Figure 2. This original drawing from the Smithsonian Institution Archives shows
the planned paint scheme for the 3 October 1942 vehicle, including the never-used
logo.
Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives.
Figure 3. The V-2 alone in Space Hall in 1979. The German V-1 cruise missile hangs
above the rocket and the nose of the Poseidon missile sticks out to the left.
Courtesy National Air and Space Museum Archives.
190 Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4be given in labels to set the scene. However, the story of
developing technology is usually given greater emphasis’
[18].
Indeed, little came of this appeal from NASA. NASM did
follow up Stine’s suggestion to repaint the V-2 in test colors
and not in its operational camouflage. Durant and Flint
queried their contacts among the former Germans. Gerd
W. de Beek and Konrad Dannenberg, among the American
members of von Braun’s diaspora who then worked in
Huntsville, provided insignia used on Peenemu¨ nde test
vehicles. The 3 October 1942 missile that made the first
successful flight featured a beautiful woman dressed only
in long black stockings and silver shoes, cradled in a
crescent moon and looking to the heavens (Figure 2). It
was to go on the repainted NASM V-2 but never did in the
rush to get everything ready for the opening. After the
opening, it was proposed again by Flint in November 1976
but was deleted without comment by Durant, presumably
because it was too risque´ for a family audience [18].1 Even
without that logo, the repainting of the rocket in the black-
and-white scheme of 3 October 1942 effectively erased the
military history of the vehicle and presented it as a space
artifact (Figure 3).
The staff worked feverishly in the opening months of
1976, intent upon opening on 1 July all twenty galleries
and three major halls. Label scripts for Space Hall that
began appearing in the spring reinforced the technological
linkages and progress narrative. The main label for Space
Hall in the 14 May 1976 script proclaimed: ‘The modern
strategic missile systems that form the backbone of our1 ‘Concept Script Space Hall’, Flint and Robert Widder (designer), 21 November
1976.
www.sciencedirect.comnational defense also opened the way for mankind’s entry
into space’. The galleys of 27 May identified the V-2 as the
‘first long-range ballistic missile’ giving operational statis-
tics and specifications, but the emphasis was on how it
‘held the promise of much larger rockets which could fulfill
the dreams of pioneers of space flight’ [18].2
When the Museum opened, the V-2 stood alone. Cuts
due to lack of time removed the video, shortened labels and
reduced the number of images. One small case held the
main label and an image for the V-2 presentation. Nowhere
were Nagy’s concerns addressed. There were other adjust-
ments however. Even though NASM Director Michael
Collins and curator Richard Hallion were ‘not moved’ by
a plea from a reporter for The Jewish Week who insisted
that there was ‘no excuse to show off the swastika as a
symbol of German genius,’ records indicate that Flint and
Durant removed the swastikas ‘to avoid offensiveness’
[18].3
The National Air and Space Museum opened to the
public with much fanfare on 1 July 1976, and was linked
to the nation’s bicentennial celebrations by President Ger-
ald R. Ford, who presided at the ribbon-cutting. Over one
million visitors came in the first month, and NASM quickly
became the world’s most-visited museum. By the end of the
year, Flint had received many suggestions from ‘post-
opening studies and inspections’ by numerous individuals
and groups. Some desired a restoration of some of the
material left out in the press of opening, notably the2 ‘General Exhibits’, 14 and 27 May 1976.
3 ‘The Jewish Week’ and annotations, 17 June 1976.
Figure 4. The V-2, Viking and WAC Corporal as they appeared in the late 1980s. In
the background is the Skylab Orbital Workshop, and above is the V-1.
David DeVorkin photo.
Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4 191missing V-2 insignia and at least one label and image about
the 3 October 1942 launch.
Most criticism of Space Hall came, however, from solar
astronomers and NASA. By far the largest artifacts were
the giant back-up Skylab Orbital Workshop and its associ-
ated Multiple Docking Adapter. They occupied 40 percent
of the floor. The Workshop’s labels had images of astro-
nauts living and working in space, but there was little on
Skylab’s major scientific facility, the Apollo Telescope
Mount. Astronomers wanted some of the spectacular
images of the Sun it obtained to be displayed, while NASA
wanted attention to earth observations, biological experi-
ments and materials processing. According to a 21 Novem-
ber 1976 concept script, NASA also suggested a new unit,
‘Toward 2076’ that envisioned a lunar base with ‘hangar
complex, refinery, civic center, automated farm, living
units, lab and research centers’ [18].
In partial response, additional images and labels were
added to Skylab, and two curators, Tom Crouch and Walter
Dillon, planned for early 1978 a contextual exhibit kiosk
titled ‘Explorer I: A Twentieth Anniversary Retrospect’, in
an attempt to plot the technological and social course from
the V-2 to the Space Age. The V-2 was still the progenitor of
all large-scale rocketry, but now at least, explicitly, there
was an effort to state directly what it was designed to do:
‘deliver a 1-metric ton warhead on targets in allied cities’.
The small exhibit that appeared went on to plot out
Wernher von Braun’s own trajectory, ‘selling space flight’
and leading conceptual teams for the Army’s proposal for
an earth orbiting satellite during the International Geo-
physical Year. ‘Wernher von Braun, his eyes still on outer
space, pressed for authority to attempt a satellite launch’
[18].4
Space Hall stabilized for several years; the first major
change came in the spring of 1980 when the Poseidon C-3
submarine-launch ballistic missile and its associated ex-
hibit were transferred to the Navy Museum in Washing-
ton, D.C. The Poseidon had taken up a great deal of floor
space since it was displayed horizontally in sections [18].5
Whatever the reason for this major change, it opened up
the space considerably, reduced congestion, and made
short-term exhibits possible. By 1981, NASA had loaned
a Space Shuttle pallet, which neatly filled that space for
much of the year to symbolize the scale and payload
capability of NASA’s new post-Apollo focus.
More changes came slowly, and some further shrouded
the V-2’s historical context. In the early 1980s, the V-2 was
joined by two sounding rockets: a Viking from the U.S.
Navy’s postwar program, and by an Army WAC Corporal
from 1945. Both were removed from an adjacent gallery,
Satellites, which had been replaced by Looking at Earth.
Standing next to the V-2, the similar-sized Viking, the
Navy’s effort to duplicate the V-2’s performance in the late
1940s, stood between it and the tiny WAC, which repre-
sented the American liquid-fuel rocketry contemporary to
the V-2. This physical arrangement effectively clouded the
fact that the V-2 represented a technological achievement
much beyond Allied capabilities in 1945 (Figure 4).4 ‘Explorer I: A Twentieth Anniversary Retrospect’, Walter Dillon and Tom Crouch,
17 November 1977.
5 Exhibit Unit Transfer, 16 April 1980.
www.sciencedirect.comIn 1979 a scientist and NASA administrator, Noel W.
Hinners, had become NASM Director. He reorganized and
expanded the curatorial ranks, displaced Durant and some
other veterans of the Museum, and reshaped the Astro-
nautics Department as Space Science and Exploration,
looking to expand and highlight the treatment of the space
sciences. Hinners’ return to NASA in 1982 meant that only
the beginnings of that goal were realized. In 1981 he did
hire two curators explicitly trained in the history of science
to take over the space-science bailiwick: one of the present
authors (David DeVorkin) and Allan Needell. DeVorkin
grew up with images of the V-2 symbolizing, in both fiction
and fact, the future of astronomy and spaceflight, thanks in
large part to the promotional efforts of Ley and von Braun.
DeVorkin found this spirit alive and well at NASM.
By the mid-1980s, as chair of the department, DeVorkin
set about to inject more space science into Space Hall,
focusing on the V-2. Not particularly concerned by its
presentation as another sounding rocket like its neighbors,
the Viking and WAC Corporal, he wanted to tell the story of
how the V-2 was used for scientific investigation. A concept
proposal in May 1985 focused entirely on V-2 science,
describing the types of experiments the Germans wanted
to conduct and ones that the Americans actually did con-
duct in solar physics, aeronomy, ionospheric physics and
cosmic-ray physics.
This treatment reflected a general research program
DeVorkin initiated in 1981 into the origins of the space
sciences, specifically an assessment of the reality of the
field as a discipline. This research goal soon revealed that
Figure 5. Two concentration-camp survivors in Nordhausen shortly after their
liberation by the U.S. Army on 11 April 1945.
U.S. Army photo.
192 Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4the field was less a coherent discipline, centered on intel-
lectual problem areas and specific questions, than it was a
field stimulated and defined by the vehicle itself. The very
existence of the V-2 and its potential for carrying scientific
instrumentation into realms heretofore completely inac-
cessible, coupled with the motives and priorities of military
patrons hoping to master the new technology and to
improve it, made for a compelling historical narrative,
but one not easily shoehorned into an exhibit.
Later concept scripts were informed by discussions with
the second author, Michael Neufeld, who came as a post-
doctoral fellow in 1988 and was hired as a curator in 1990,
as well as with colleagues attending an in-house history
seminar (notably Paul Forman, Michael Dennis and Allan
Needell), and with others at professional meetings. Those
scripts still included some of the science, but concentrated
more on the missile – who made it and why, the human cost
of its manufacture, its impact as a terror weapon, and the
aftermath of bringing it to the United States. At a Septem-
ber 1988 conference in Rome, DeVorkin presented a paper
on how science was coordinated on White Sands V-2 flights
by a panel of civilian scientists from military laboratories
and universities. Audience reaction, prompted by Forman,
questioned if this panel was acting as an agent of science.
Was it a panel convened for science, or for the operational
study of the V-2? This encounter and others later that year
made it clear that placing science in the forefront of the
rocket’s history was misleading. Indeed, good science was
done with the missile, but celebrating it as a vehicle for
science was every bit as misleading as calling Charles
Darwin’s HMS Beagle a scientific vessel. Neither was built
as a scientific instrument.
Two additional processes shaped the gradual rethinking
of the way NASM should present the V-2. The first was the
growing knowledge of the murderous character of the
missile’s production and of the Nazi compromises of its
makers, and the second was a deep reorganization of the
Museum itself.
The Rudolph watershed
As noted earlier, Arthur Rudolph’s return to Germany in
1984 fundamentally altered the understanding of the V-2’s
history, especially in the English-speaking world. When
the Justice Department revealed his renunciation of U.S.
citizenship under a voluntary agreement to avoid a proba-
ble denaturalization and deportation, it also released in-
formation about Rudolph’s early Nazi Party membership
and his role as production manager of the Mittelwerk
underground V-2 assembly plant. The adjacent Mittel-
bau-Dora concentration-camp had supplied its unskilled
and semiskilled labor; a large fraction of its twenty-thou-
sand-plus dead could be attributed to the rocket program
(Figure 5). The announcement provoked major stories in
newspapers around the world in October 1984.
Half a year later the investigative journalist Linda Hunt
published ‘US Coverup of Nazi Scientists’ in the Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists [20]. She provided new evidence on
the SS membership of Wernher von Braun, as well as the
Nazi records of several of his key associates. Von Braun’s
value to the United States as leading rocket engineer in the
ballistic missile and space races, and that of his team, hadwww.sciencedirect.commotivated the U.S. government to keep damaging infor-
mation about the former Germans classified. The media
were not only kept in the dark, they also were complicit in
ignoring new revelations about von Braun and Mittelbau-
Dora that began leaking out in the 1960s as the result of a
targeted campaign by East Germany, protests by camp
survivors in France, and a war-crimes trial in West
Germany. Von Braun’s reputation as a heroic space vision-
ary, notably after the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969,
as well as his personal friendships with members of the
press, had made him nearly untouchable. That began to
fade in the seventies, as the Moon landings receded, and as
a rising consciousness of the Holocaust changed public
attitudes. Von Braun died in 1977 before the storm really
broke. The Rudolph revelations stripped away his remain-
ing aura and provoked an outpouring, first of investigative
journalism, and later of scholarship, on the V-2, Mittelbau-
Dora and von Braun [13].
How then to recontextualize the V-2 at NASM?
Rudolph, one of von Braun’s senior men, was the project
manager of the Saturn V launch vehicle that took the
United States to the Moon. In 1969 he received one of
NASA’s highest honors for this achievement. As DeVorkin
rewrote the script how could he ignore the Third Reich
dimension of the his story, and that of his colleagues and
von Braun as they designed the V-2? But clearly such a
revision would have been impossible at the Museum in the
1970s, so closely tied was it to von Braun personally, and so
wedded was it to the space narrative, nor for that matter
was it possible for much of the 1980s.
The Harwit era
In late 1986 the direction of the Museum again changed
abruptly when Director Walter Boyne was forced out. In
the ensuing deep reevaluation, the respected Cornell Uni-
versity astronomer Martin O. Harwit was named to take
the lead. He arrived in August 1987. During an interview
with staff in the selection process, Harwit bluntly observed:
‘I do not see anything about Dresden’ in the Museum’s
treatment of aerial bombing in World War II.
Figure 6. The scene in Antwerp, Belgium, shortly after a V-2 strike on 27 November
1944. The Germans fired more missiles at Antwerp than London in order to disrupt
Allied use of the port.
U.S. Army photo.
Figure 7. The second and third sides of the V-2 exhibit that opened in 1990.
David DeVorkin photo.
Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4 193Harwit, a childhood Czech refugee from the Nazis and a
scientific witness to H-bomb tests in the Pacific, brought
his history to Washington, D.C. Primarily active in infra-
red astronomy from rockets and satellites, he was a strong
contributor to NASA’s Great Observatories series, and had
fostered critical historical thinking among astronomers
and historians alike, notably with his 1981 monograph
Cosmic Discovery. Harwit wholly supported, and in fact
urged, a rethinking of NASM’s exhibits, invigorating a
climate of change.
In 1988–1989, the Museum’s budget allowed for small
exhibit changes without recourse to fundraising (this is
scarcely possible now). DeVorkin got some eight meters of
existing railing space around three sides of the V-2 to tell
the story. He ended up taking out the science done with
captured missiles and treating that subject in a monograph
published in 1992 [14]. The scripts he wrote, in consulta-
tion with Neufeld and others, focused on the missile’s
specifications and capabilities, manufacture in the Mittel-
werk, military performance, capture by U.S. Army units,
and testing at White Sands. Wartime effectiveness was
illustrated by a scatter diagram of impact points in Eng-
land, lending credence to the fact that it was an indiscrim-
inate terror weapon. A photo of sick and dying Mittelbau-
Dora camp prisoners, and one of a bombing scene in
Antwerp with a noticeably mangled body (the first picture
of war dead in the Museum), lent depth (Figure 6). Von
Braun’s role was illustrated in two images, first advising
Wehrmacht officers, and then U.S. Army Ordnance offi-
cers. Now the V-2 symbolized not only the future of space
travel, but also its origins in a militaristic fascist state, its
impact on World War II and the Cold War, and its role in
launching missile programs in the United States.
As an internal Museum initiative, the new exhibition
opened without fanfare in late 1990 (Figure 7). Reaction to
the changes was generally positive. Daniel Greenberg,
editor of Science & Government Report, ran a full page
review, and the Washington Post excerpted it for its ‘op-ed’
page. It also appeared in other papers. Greenberg had been
pleasantly surprised when, visiting the museum for otherwww.sciencedirect.comreasons, he happened on the new unannounced exhibit,
reporting that: ‘Truth in labeling has achieved a rare
breakthrough in an exhibit of military technology . . . where
traditional practice has called for bland, antiseptic explan-
atory material on some of the most horrifying instruments
of war’ [21].
The only negative reaction came from the NASM docent
corps, volunteers who carry out public tours of the building.
The staff educator coordinating the docents reported seri-
ous discomfort and claims of distortion. Accordingly,
DeVorkin contacted docent leaders and asked for a meet-
ing. Some were sad that the V-2 had been relabeled a
missile and not a sounding rocket, but the docents in fact
did not object to the new treatment overall. It was the staff
member who was disturbed, worried that showing body
parts on a bombed-out Antwerp street was unsuitable for
families.
The labeling and imagery underwent some revision in
1996–1997 when the Viking was removed and placed in the
‘Missile Pit’ – a hole in the floor that allowed especially tall
rockets (Jupiter-C, Vanguard, Minuteman, and Scout) to
sit at the parking garage level and just fit under the glass
ceiling of Space Hall. This move allowed the juxtaposition
of the WAC Corporal with the V-2 alone as a comparison of
the states of U.S. and German rocket technology in 1945.
The move came about as the result of a complete revision of
the Hall. Industrialist and former presidential candidate
Ross Perot purchased many Soviet space objects at a late
1993 auction and offered to loan them to NASM if they
could be exhibited there. He subsequently donated funds
for the new exhibit in Space Hall called Space Race. It put
Soviet and American space artifacts side-by-side, but also
allowed for a larger refashioning of the exhibitry around
the Missile Pit in the gallery’s center, telling the full story
of the ballistic-missile arms race and how it led to the space
race. The existing V-2 exhibit was easily incorporated into
that narrative. The changes required for Space Race
allowed the fourth side of the V-2 to be used to tell a fuller
story about the WAC Corporal, but also meant that the
third side of the original V-2 panels had to be given up for a
main label for the whole exhibit. The V-2 story was con-
densed to two sides, but no major content was lost, so that
the narrative was fundamentally the same as before.
194 Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4Two years before Space Race opened in May 1997,
Martin Harwit had himself been forced out as a result
of the 1994–1995 battle over the exhibit about the Enola
Gay, the B-29 bomber that had dropped the first atomic
weapon on Hiroshima [7,8]. The huge national controversy
provoked by draft scripts for an exhibition that never
opened (a last-minute replacement display was substitut-
ed) produced a major chilling effect on NASM’s ability to
mount exhibitions about war, or any controversial sub-
jects. It seems possible that at least some aspects of the V-2
exhibit, notably the Antwerp photo, would have faced
internal resistance if the missile’s reinterpretation had
been initiated in the later 1990s. Nonetheless, the funda-
mental revelations about the V-2 and its Nazi past were no
longer controversial in most quarters (although a hard
core of von Braun fans and Rudolph supporters were
unmollified), and thus there was no pressure to change
the labels. In contrast, post-Enola Gay attacks by critics
forced cuts in the ending of NASM’s 1991 World War I
exhibit, which had been implicitly critical of strategic
bombing.
For more than a decade after 1997, the V-2 labels
remained unaltered, although that is about to change
again as a redesign of Space Race will allow the combined
V-2/WAC Corporal exhibit to expand to all four sides of the
enclosure. This time the second author, Neufeld, is using
that extra space to include new color pictures of the work-
ing conditions at the Mittelwerk and a longer treatment of
how the Soviet Union also captured and absorbed V-2
technology. The recontextualization goes on, but the fun-
damental interpretation has not changed since DeVorkin’s
original 1990 exhibit.
Revising V-2 exhibitions elsewhere
Space does not allow us to elaborate on the reinterpreta-
tion of the missile in other museums, but a brief compara-
tive survey is useful. To the knowledge of the current
authors, no other museum in Western Europe or the
United States overhauled its treatment of the V-2 before
1990, but there also is no evidence that the NASM exhibit
exerted much influence afterward. However, the revela-
tions about the Mittelwerk and the Nazi records of von
Braun, Rudolph and others, combined with the end of the
Cold War, compelled several museums to revise their
labels, and profoundly shaped the exhibitions of two new
museums created after 1990.
In Germany, a major influence was the country’s reuni-
fication, which made the ruins of the Peenemu¨ nde rocket
center and the Mittelwerk/Mittelbau-Dora complex now
accessible to Westerners, also compelling the creation of
new museums to treat those subjects (only a small camp
memorial existed at Mittelbau-Dora in the Communist
period; Peenemu¨ nde had been on a closed military base).
A new exhibition and public access to parts of the tunnels
was unveiled at Mittelbau-Dora in 1995, for the fiftieth
anniversary of liberation. And after a long national and
regional controversy, a professional and critical exhibition
opened at Peenemu¨ nde in 2000, replacing a locally initiat-
ed museum that had been apologist in character [22].
Meanwhile, the Museum fu¨ r Verkehr und Technik (Muse-
um for Transportation and Technology) in Berlin, nowwww.sciencedirect.comcalled the Deutsches Technikmuseum, was active in assist-
ing the Mittelbau-Dora memorial and in reshaping its own
presentation of V-2 history.
In northeastern France, near Calais, a never-completed
V-2 storage and launch bunker opened in 1998 as La
Coupole, a multilingual museum devoted to the V-weap-
ons, World War II and the history of the German occupa-
tion. The museum forged a close relationship with one of
the French Dora survivors’ associations, and presented a
critical view of its V-2, which it had restored after receiving
a damaged shell from NASM (the one from NASA Marshall
that had been used as a source for spare parts for the
restoration of NASM’s vehicle). That relationship led to an
important exhibition, Images de Dora, which combined
prisoner art and artifacts with startling new color photos
of the underground plant that had been discovered in 1999.
It opened at La Coupole in 1999 and in a German version at
the Deutsches Museum in Munich in 2001 [23].
A modified version of Images de Dora, combined with a
travelling exhibit from Mittelbau-Dora, eventually
appeared at the University of Alabama Huntsville in
2010 (in marked contrast to the U.S. Space and Rocket
Center in the same city, Marshall’s visitor center, which
studiously avoids the Nazi question). Long before that, the
Kansas Cosmosphere, a regional space museum closely
aligned with NASM, had completely reshaped the ‘German
Room’ around its V-2 to take account of the new informa-
tion. Clearly, many of the same forces that had acted upon
NASM also compelled other museums to recontextualize
their presentations of V-2 history.
Conclusions
We have traced the transformation of NASM’s presenta-
tion of the V-2 from a technological progenitor to a new
form of military technology, manufactured in haste and
desperation under morally corrupt conditions. We have
tried to argue that its initial display was not exactly wrong,
but certainly quite incomplete. And we do not want to
suggest that it is now complete. As Brooke Hindle pointed
out so long ago, and others like Willard Boyd after him,
historical recontextualizing of artifacts will never cease.
The very existence of this object reminds us that it repre-
sents a history, and it is our duty and the duty of those who
follow to constantly reexamine that history in the light of
new knowledge, new evidence, and new perspectives. In
the thirty-five years since NASM opened its new building,
one signal issue has emerged that characterizes the trans-
formative treatment of the V-2 over the years: we have
come finally to accept the fact that the museum, as a
medium of expression, represents the specific ‘times and
spaces’ of a self-aware staff, in the words of Roger Silver-
stone, and that, moreover, there is an emotional and
psychological impact that influences not only how the
object is displayed, but how it is received [24,25]. We hope
that the V-2 will continually remind us to act accordingly,
responding carefully and prudently, to continually strive to
obtain further knowledge about the object and the history
it represents, shedding light on the norms and values of our
era as we reinterpret the past.
The artifact itself, the Smithsonian’s V-2, has over this
time remained inert, mute testimony only to the fact that
Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 4 195its parts were somehow created. Its various parts were, to
be sure, built in the hellish tunnels of the Mittelwerk, but
its embodiment is a reconstruction, and indeed, remains
something of a cover-up. From the beginning, those who
created the NASM object for display, following the sensi-
bilities of their day, obscured its operational status and
ignored the human cost. Repainting the object, reassem-
bling the object from widely scattered parts, bowing to a
form of correctness, this object is a construction, yet it
carries the same symbolic power of Hindle’s ‘True Cross’
[11] in that, inevitably, it will continue to ‘buttress myths’
and will act as a constant reminder to historians that our
job is never done.
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