Rocket Team's Outcast!

This article is a Historical Essay Written and submitted by [[Grady Woodard]].

Grady’s Space Chronicles

Rocket Team’s Outcast!

Shortly after the conversion from ABMA to NASA in Huntsville, Alabama, one of the German Rocket Team members was left behind and was not transferred from the Army Missile Command, Research and Development Directorate. What happened to this rocket scientists? Dr. von Braun’s Rocket Team had always kept together and protected itself through trying times in keeping their secrets, some times were life threaten!

One day I was asked by my Laboratory Deputy Director, Werner Kuers, to help an old friend of his on the Army side. He needed an engine turbo pump to rig for a power test apparatus. I made contact with his friend and he sent an Army truck for me. I went to my secret stock (my finds at the junk yard) and found a turbo pump from a Jupiter S-3D engine. We made delivery to the Army Quonset Huts.

Mr. Otto Heinrich Hirschler met us with about eight men in front of an Quonset Hut, to help unload the turbo pump. They had no forklift, but did have some forklift flats. The pump’s weight was about 545 pounds. The truck was backed up to the sidewalk in front of the Physics Lab. All the help couldn’t lift the pump to the ground and the waiting cart. Hirschler told them to place some forklift flats to form steps behind the truck They tried and failed again, he told them to move away! “Hold on, this will take a physics plan,“ Hirschler said. He did some study and some looking and adjusted some flats. In a masterful display of controlled physics, Otto Hirschler rolled the pump off onto the steps and using his hand, bounced it like a basketball down the flats onto the cart by himself. Everyone clapped their hands and took the pump inside the Lab.

Hirschler told me a story, while waiting for a fork lift that didn’t come, about why he was not picked to transfer with the Rocket Team to MSFC. He said, “I was blocked by your Lab Director, Hans Maus. He had it in for me since we were in Britain.” He added, “We were taking showers and I popped him on the behind with a towel and he chased me around awhile. He didn’t liked me ever since!” Otto Hirschler would have been an asset to the Mercury and Apollo Programs.

An electronics expert, Otto Hirschler helped build the complex controls of rockets, that later propelled an American astronauts to the moon. Mr. Hirschler was one of the 118 German V-2 rocket engineers rounded up by the Allied authorities at the end of World War II and brought to the United States. Led by Dr. Wernher von Braun, they worked for the United States Army Missile Command in Huntsville.

But like most of the others before, he later was transferred to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's flight center in Huntsville. There he contributed to the unmanned and manned moon flights of the 1960's and 1970's. Mr. Hirschler was the last of the German scientists in 1970, to lose his MSFC job due to a reduction in force.

In Germany, Hirschler was teamed with Dr. Helmut Hoelzer, a specialist in calculating rocket trajectories and built a flight simulator well before the development of computers capable of such complicated estimations. Hoelzer later was the Director of MSFC’s Computation Laboratory. They devised an electronic system that simulated the flight of a rocket, taking into account gravity, thrust and other aerodynamic forces without actually launching anything.

Otto Hirschler was born in Darmstadt, Germany, and studied electrical engineering in Germany before joining Dr. von Braun's research and development team in the 1930's. The group eventually moved to Peenemunde, a small fishing village on the Baltic that became a launching pad for Germany's V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks on Britain during the war. Hirschler died in Huntsville, Alabama.

Mr. Hirschler, 87, was survived by a daughter, Elke Hodgin of Merritt Island, Florida; five sons, Gunther, of Atlanta, and Wolf, John, Ed and Hartmut, all of Huntsville; five grandchildren; and five great-grandsons. His wife, Ilse, died in 1989.

Outcast Otto Heinrich Hirschler, Rocket engineer, was born on December 14, 1913. He died February 2, 2001. Member of the German Rocket Team in the United States after World War ll. He was a German expert in guided missiles during World War ll. With the German rocket team, he arrived in America under Project Paperclip on November 16, 1945 aboard the SS Argentina from La Havre. Fluent in English prior to arrival in the United States. As of January 1947, was working at Fort Bliss, Texas. Worked his entire life with the rocket team, at Fort Bliss, White Stands, and then at Huntsville.