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War-Crime Charges Haunt Scientist

By JOHN F. BURNS, Special to The New York Times

Published: Monday, August 6, 1990 http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/06/world/war-crime-charges-haunt-scientist.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

Whether Arthur L. Rudolph is a war criminal for persecuting laborers in Adolf Hitler's underground rocket factory or an old man unjustly wronged, there is an inescapable pathos about the situation that confronts him now, as he summons up his failing energies for his daily ordeal in a Toronto immigration court.

Mr. Rudolph, who is 83 years old, is one of the century's great rocket scientists, the man who managed the Saturn-5 rocket program that put American astronauts on the moon.

Each morning, he has been pulling on his white cloth cap and taking a taxi to a windowless room at the edge of Toronto's international airport. With a magnifying glass to help read court documents, he has been fighting a proxy battle with the United States Government, which drove him from the country in 1984. In an agreement with the United States Justice Department the previous year, Mr. Rudolph had said he was familiar with Government allegations that he participated in Nazi persecutions and surrendered his American citizenship.

Tales of Nazi Torture

Now, in front of Canadian immigration officials, Mr. Rudolph is being questioned about his actions 45 years ago, when he was operations director of the Mittelwerk rocket plant that produced V-2's, the missiles with which Hitler hoped to stave off defeat in World War II. The court has heard how Nazi overseers hanged laborers from cranes, and how thousands of other workers - among them Czechs, Frenchmen, Poles and Russians -died of malnutrition, lack of medical care and other forms of neglect.

Whether Mr. Rudolph was a knowing participant in the atrocities, as the Justice Department has alleged, or an unwilling bystander, as he has maintained at the Toronto hearing, the rocket scientist apparently has no intention of remaining in Canada, even if he defeats the Canadian Government's attempt to deport him. Rather, what he is seeking is a platform for airing the evidence in his case, with the real audience not so much the immigration adjudicator who will make a ruling on the issue in Canada, but American politicians and public opinion.

As part of his agreement with the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department division that seeks out suspected war criminals, Mr. Rudolph could not challenge the department's findings in United States courts or seek redress through legislative action. He was ''dumb, dumb, dumb'' for surrendering his rights, Mr. Rudolph said in an interview last month with The Huntsville Times, published in the Alabama city in which he worked on rockets from 1950 to 1969. He said he was especially disturbed over waiving his right to an attorney during questioning by the Office of Special Investigations that began in 1982.

After uprooting himself from his retirement in California in 1984, Mr. Rudolph settled in Hamburg, West Germany, in a rented condominimum where he set aside one room for what his wife, Martha, who is 84 years old, says has been his obsession since: the fight to clear his name. In July, the Rudolphs took a flight to Toronto, where they told immigration officials they were planning to vacation with their daughter, Marianne, a 53-year-old graphics artist who had taken leave from her job with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in San Jose, Calif.

Facing Deportation

Mr. Rudolph says that the Office of Special Investigations told him, when discussing the forfeiture of his American citizenship, that he could maintain contact with Americans by meeting them in Canada and Mexico. But when he landed here, he had been preceded by a letter from the Office of Special Investigations urging Canada not to admit him. After holding Mr. Rudolph for eight hours, the Canadians released him on a $430 bond and initiated deportation proceedings.

Now, Mr. Rudolph hopes that the publicity generated by the Toronto case will lend momentum to supporters in Congress, led by Representative James Traficant, Democrat of Ohio, who have been pressing for Congressional hearings into the case. Mr. Rudolph has said he was coerced into signing the agreement by a Government threat to strip him of his $50,000-a-year NASA pension, by warnings that other family members could lose their American citizenship, and by what he calls a fraudulent Government claim that it had a deposition identifying Mr. Rudolph as one of the Germans who had selected laborers for execution.

A First Account of Events

For Mr. Rudolph, the Toronto hearing has required the first public account of his experiences at Mittelwerk between 1943 and 1945. Asked at one session last week whether he enforced slave-labor conditions at the plant, Mr. Rudolph replied, ''Gosh, no.'' He said control of worker conditions, and of their punishments, rested with the Nazi security police, whose ''Death's Head'' battalions provided the Mittelwerk guards. He said that when he had had any influence over conditions for the 4,500 workers who assembled the V-2's, his chief concern had been ''that they were well treated so that they would do good work.''

He has also denied selecting the workers to be executed. The allegations were among those investigated by West German prosecutors who were alerted by the Office of Special Investigations after Mr. Rudolph returned to West Germany. One former Mittelwerk worker who was interviewed by Soviet state prosecutors for the Germans in 1986, Roman Maximovitch Korneyev, is quoted in documents before the Toronto hearing as saying, ''When Rudolph went through the workshops of the factory in the company of S.S. guards, it was clear that some prisoners were to be shot or hanged.''

But the German prosecutors ruled that Mr. Korneyev's account, and at least one other similar deposition by a former Mittelwerk worker, were unreliable, in part because of a lack of certainty that those making the allegations knew who Mr. Rudolph was. In other depositions read in the Toronto hearing, Mittelwerk laborers attested to Mr. Rudolph's ''kindness.'' In 1987, the German State Prosecutor's Office ruled that there was insufficient evidence to justify trying Mr. Rudolph under West Germany's tightly drawn war-crimes laws. Mr. Rudolph, who had been stateless, was granted West German citizenship.

A Public Hanging

Accounts of the hangings have provided some of the most dramatic moments in the Toronto hearing. According to evidence examined by the Germans, there were at least 253 hangings at Mittelwerk in a four-month period up to March 21, 1945. One hanging that month has been a focus of attention in the Toronto hearing, with Mr. Rudolph testifying that security police ordered him to shut down production and assemble other workers to watch the hanging of five or six workers from a beam attached to a crane arm along the assembly line.

The incident provided an opportunity for Mr. Rudolph to demonstrate the flair for detail that colleagues celebrated when he built Saturn rockets. Throughout the hearing, the rocket scientist has offered a matter-of-fact roll-call of names, dates and figures from his Mittelwerk years, correcting attorneys when they have erred. In the case of the March 1945 hanging, he told the hearing that it occurred at the entrance to Tunnel 41 at the plant. He arrived at the spot after the hangings had occurred, he said, and one of the executed men was still moving his knees.

Asked for his reaction, Mr. Rudolph replied: ''Disgust.''

Photo: Arthur L. Rudolph at an immigration hearing last week in a Toronto courtroom. (Canadian Press)