NASA finally stopped honoring a Nazi scientist. Why did it take so long?
Kurt H. Debus was the first director of the Kennedy Space Center — and a former member of the SS
Former President John. F Kennedy tours Cape Canaveral with Kurt H. Debus, then director of the Launch Operations Center, on Sept. 11, 1962. Photo by NASA/Getty Images
Lev Golinkin May 8, 2025
For years, NASA pumped out materials celebrating Kurt H. Debus, the Kennedy Space Center’s first director.
Only one problem: Debus was a Nazi.
But after years of omitting or obscuring Debus’ Nazi past, it seems the American space agency has very quietly acknowledged that he may not be the best representative of its efforts: the KSC, in Merritt Island, Florida, has renamed the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Conference Facility to the Heroes and Legends Conference Facility.
According to an email from a KSC spokesperson, the venue’s new name “reflects that many people contributed throughout history to make the United States the world’s leader in space exploration and to increase humanity’s understanding of our planet and the universe beyond.”
As I reported in 2022, Debus’ official NASA bio then didn’t contain the words “Nazi” “Third Reich” or “SS.” It only vaguely alluded to him working at “the rocket research program at Peenemünde,” without explaining that that program operated in the service of Nazi Germany.
In his work at Peenemünde, Debus was an officer in the SS, the Nazi Party’s military wing, involved in constructing Germany’s V-2 rockets. The rockets were built through slave labor, with prisoners working under savage conditions; around 10,000 concentration camp prisoners were killed in the process.
Once finished, V-2 rockets were used to shell civilian areas in London and elsewhere. And Debus’ wartime activities extended even beyond that devastation. He once turned over a colleague to the Gestapo, the Third Reich’s secret police, for, as Annie Jacobsen wrote in a history of Nazi scientists after the war, “making anti-Nazi remarks” and for declining to greet Debus himself with a Nazi salute.
But instead of facing consequences, Debus became one of scores of ex-Nazi scientists scooped up by the U.S. government immediately after the end of World War II under a project named Operation Paperclip. Debus, one of Operation Paperclip’s stars, became an integral part of the burgeoning U.S. space program.
NASA’s evasiveness around his legacy continued as late as 2022, when KSC’s current director, Janet Petro, received the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award, which commemorates Florida’s achievements in aerospace. NASA’s press release on the occasion celebrated that “under Debus’ leadership, NASA successfully launched multiple flights under the Apollo Program — including the first manned lunar landing.” But it remained silent about his wartime past. (Although the Debus award isn’t given by NASA, the KSC hosted a display about it. A KSC spokesperson said that the award has been renamed.)
Now, finally, NASA’s Debus bio mentions his Nazi background. And the renaming of the Debus conference facility means that only one other Nazi scientist continues to be actively honored on U.S. soil: Wernher von Braun, the physics genius behind the V-2.
In 2021, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama — a Smithsonian affiliate that partners with NASA — removed a von Braun bust, days after the Forward sent in an inquiry about it. Several months later, the center took down a von Braun quotation prominently displayed over a visitor hall. The quote — “The rocket will free men from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity, which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven” — was grimly ironic, given the 10,000 prisoners killed while building von Braun’s rockets for the Nazis.
Yet an annual symposium and a research center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville are still named after von Braun, as is a performance venue owned by the city of Huntsville.
With the defeat of Nazism in World War II now eight decades in the past, the number of remaining survivors of the Holocaust, and the soldiers who rescued them and witnessed their plight, are rapidly diminishing. Soon, the WWII era will truly pass into history, with no eyewitnesses left to provide testimony — or to help combat the whitewashing of figures like Debus and von Braun.
Which means that acts like NASA stripping honors from Debus and finally coming to acknowledge his Nazi past have become even more important. Because without survivors here to tell us exactly what they experienced, efforts to warp history — by, say, churning out sanitized profiles of Nazis — will become all too easy.
And it’s not just the memory of the dead that’s at stake. The regression of the Holocaust into history is combined with a terrifying contemporary surge in antisemitism and neo-Nazism. It’s hard to point to historical warning signs of where far-right hatred can lead us if those signs are obscured.
NASA still has work to do. The University of Alabama in Huntsville is deeply dependent on partnering with the agency. NASA must exert pressure on the university to rename the von Braun center, and, as a primary participant in the von Braun symposium, stop attending unless it is renamed.
Just as importantly, the agency should acknowledge its debt to the Nazi prisoners who died while building Debus and von Braun’s V-2 rockets, and the civilians who were targeted and annihilated by those same weapons.
The battlefield combat of WWII ended long ago, but the war over WWII’s legacy is, unfortunately, very much ongoing. We need to win that war, too.
