Huntsville (USA) (AFP)

It is not difficult to find schnitzels, these German breaded cutlets, in Huntsville, Alabama, in the deep South of the United States.

Every fall, the local military base hosts an Oktoberfest. On Thursdays, the Space Museum organizes a beer garden. And Tuesday night, for a dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, the guests of the Space & Rocket Center munched on Bavarian bratwurst and pretzels.

Klaus Heimburg, Hans Hoelzer and Peter Grau did not get a ticket so it's on the other side of the car park, in a hotel, that they celebrated the birthday with dozens of those who are called here the "Second Generation Germans": The children of German engineers and scientists who, after developing the Nazi regime's V-2 rockets, invented the ones that took the Americans to the moon.

Their fathers, led by their chief, the engineer Wernher von Braun, surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war and were first transferred to El Paso, Texas in 1945, in Operation "Paperclip". The women followed then.

"There was a baby boom between 1948 and 1949," smiles Peter Grau, a former telecommunications executive himself born in 1949.

Then all migrated to Huntsville, then known as the "Watercress Capital". The army has created its missile development center. As in Germany, Von Braun remained the leader, and he became the first director of NASA's Marshall Space Center in 1960.

A very American life was beginning. A few details.

"I ate black bread, the Americans had white bread, I had Leberwurst, they had peanut butter," recalls Peter Grau, who lives in Dallas today. His father, Dieter, ran the quality laboratory.

Many German families lived in the same neighborhood, nicknamed "Sauerkraut hill". "We played cowboys and Indians in German," recalls Klaus Heimburg, son of Karl, director of testing. "I ran everywhere in lederhosen", traditional Bavarian leather breeches.

- Do not mix Nazis and Nasa -

Six decades later, the print of the Germans remains marked in Huntsville: they founded the symphony orchestra, the sports arena is called von Braun, as the astronomy club. The city has been transformed into an aerospace and technological hub.

The genius and charisma of the engineer, who popularized in magazines and American television from the 1950s the idea of ​​space travel, is not controversial.

But discussing the past with a reporter triggers an immediate tension.

About half of the von Braun team was a member of the Nazi party, according to historian Michael Neufeld, including von Braun himself, also recruited by the SS in 1940.

But their children all have the same answer: in Hitler's Germany, it was membership or front, even death.

"We are hyper sensitive because it was our fathers," says Klaus Heimburg. "They were not sociopaths (...) They were caught in the war".

He makes the count: they worked five years (more for some) for the German army ... and more than 25 years for the US Army and NASA.

At the same table, Hans Hoelzer is there, jovial, the same age. Von Braun's first daughter, Iris, was a comrade.

Von Braun knew about the slaves at Dora concentration camp, he said. But "he could not do anything about it," says Hans, who is an engineer, like so much of the second generation.

This defensive stance extends to the local Americans. NASA local historian Brian Odom, 41, calls it "the Huntsville School of History".

"People forget that this story is still very close," he says. The last of the von Braun team died last year. Children remain ubiquitous.

In the heart of the campus of NASA, sits the bust of von Braun. NASA has just moved it.

In the museum and activity center for children and tourists, next to the original office of von Braun was installed a V-2. This copy, according to University of Alabama Huntsville's history department chief, Stephen Waring, was made by Dora prisoners. But no plate accounts for it.

Here, says the historian, "history begins in 1945". "It's cultural, we do not want to bother our heroes and their families."

Mayor Tommy Battle recognizes that the subject is sensitive.

He goes back to the same point: thanks to the von Braun team, America went to the moon. "For the first time in history, Huntsville did something that no one else had ever done."

© 2019 AFP