NASA has officially removed the name of Dr. Kurt Heinrich Debus — a former Nazi SS officer and rocket engineer — from its facilities and materials, signaling a long-overdue reckoning with the agency’s controversial historical ties to the Third Reich.

Debus, who served as the first director of Kennedy Space Center, played a pivotal role in America’s space race, helping to lead the Apollo program and the effort that put a man on the moon. But before his celebrated American tenure, Debus was a staunch Nazi and an SS officer who oversaw launch operations for Hitler’s V-2 rocket program — a weapons initiative that relied on forced labor from concentration camp prisoners and targeted civilian populations across Europe.

Despite his deeply troubling past, Debus had long remained an honored figure within NASA. A conference hall at the Kennedy Space Center bore his name for decades, and an annual “Debus Award” recognized contributions to aerospace excellence in Florida. Until recently, NASA’s official biography of Debus omitted all mention of his Nazi affiliations, referring vaguely to his work on a “rocket research program at Peenemünde.”

In reality, Peenemünde was the core of Nazi Germany’s V-2 missile operations, where an estimated 10,000 enslaved laborers — many from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp — perished under brutal conditions. Historians note that Debus, who held the rank of Sturmbannführer (major) in the SS, was not only complicit but actively loyal to the Nazi regime. Records show he once reported a colleague to the Gestapo for failing to give the required Nazi salute.

Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, Debus was among the many Nazi-linked scientists recruited to the United States under Operation Paperclip — a secret government program aimed at leveraging Nazi expertise to outpace the Soviet Union in aerospace and defense technologies. Despite protests from Jewish organizations and elements within the U.S. government, Debus was granted American citizenship and allowed to ascend to senior positions within NASA.

His Nazi past remained largely unaddressed until recent years, when growing public awareness and critical media reports accused NASA of whitewashing Debus’s biography. In response, the space agency quietly renamed the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Conference Facility to the Heroes and Legends Conference Facility and updated his online biography to reflect his Nazi affiliations. The Debus Award has also been retired, and his name has been scrubbed from visitor materials and official events.

A NASA spokesperson said the new conference center name “reflects the contributions of many throughout history who helped establish the United States as a global leader in space exploration,” but did not directly mention the reasons behind the change.

While Debus’s name has been erased from most official records, one major figure with similar ties remains visibly honored: Wernher von Braun. Like Debus, von Braun was a key player in the V-2 program and a former SS officer. Though a statue of von Braun was removed in 2021 from the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, multiple institutions in partnership with NASA — including symposiums and research facilities — still carry his name.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)