Looking Out: Nazis On The Harbor

• By David Boeri
• Aug. 19, 2010

Just after World War II ended, U.S. soldiers smuggled the Third Reich’s top scientists and engineers to a Harbor Island fort — just a few miles from downtown Boston — to find out what they knew and what they could do for America in the Cold War. In this ninth installment of “Looking Out: A New View Of Boston Harbor,” WBUR looks at one of the last veterans who ran the secret camp.

Henry Kolm (Courtesy of the Kolm family)

The Kid And The Star

Henry Kolm had an interesting job as a 21-year-old.

He smuggled Nazi scientists into Boston Harbor.

He’d meet most of them off Nixes Mate, the smallest of the Harbor Islands — no more than gravel shoals — where a beacon warns ships coming into the harbor. Then, he and a Boston whaler captain named Corky would scoot them out to Long Island and a secret hotel fashioned from the barracks of the old Civil War derelict known as Fort Strong.

The prize get, the leader of the pack and the star of the show at Fort Strong was Wernher von Braun, Germany’s uber-engineer of rockets — most notoriously the V-2. Long after WWII ended, when the terror of those missiles was well back in history, satirist Tom Lehrer could sing:

“Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi he won’t even frown,
Nazi, Schmazi says Wernher von Braun.”

But the ridicule would only come later — only after Walt Disney made him famous, Time Magazine put him on the cover and one of his rockets put America’s first satellite in space.

And to think von Braun began his American career right here in Boston Harbor. And secretly at that.

“They all had to be smuggled into the country,” Henry Kolm said the last time we spoke.

Kolm was a newly minted American, working as a U.S. Army intelligence officer at the end of WWII. At a secret installation near Washington, D.C., (an operation code-named “P.O. Box 1142″) he’d had the job of interrogating Nazi prisoners, when he and a dozen others were assigned to Boston to set up “Project Paperclip.”

Fort Strong may be only a few miles from downtown as the crow flies, but Kolm and the Project Paperclip team covered its tracks so well that practically no one knew then and no one knows now that von Braun and the technology stars of the Third Reich were ever here.

A WWII-era postcard showing Long Island Head, Long Island Light, the lighthouse keeper's house and Fort Strong.

Rocket Man And The Americanization Of Hitler’s ‘Professor’

“We had a mess hall and the Germans gave each other lectures,” Kolm remembered. “They called this place where they stayed ‘the Haus der Deutschen Wissenschaft,’ the House of German Science.”

If it weren’t such a secret, they could have put up a marquee and called it “Wernher von Braun’s House of German Science.”

Kolm’s assignment was to repackage von Braun and his fellow engineers and scientists as Americans.

If von Braun’s second act as an American was spectacular, his first act as a native German had been outrageous and spectacular. An early enthusiast of rocketry and a dreamer of space travel, von Braun led the team (from the age of 25) that designed and manufactured the V-2 rockets that slammed into London and Antwerp at four times the speed of sound.

Toward the end of the war, von Braun and his team were knighted by the Third Reich. Hitler fondly dubbed him “the professor.” His V-2s were the world’s first ballistic missiles.

Full story HERE