This is an excerpt on LaRouche from Linda Hunt's rare book on Project Paperclip called Secret Agenda. The following occurred when Paperclip rocket scientist Arthur Rudolph was being investigated by the Office of Special Investigations in the early to mid-1980s. I just copied the whole section since it was not very big. Note that Fusion magazine was LaRouche's science and technology magazine that was succeeded by 21st Century Science and Technology.
This was used as a source for the Nazi-links chapter in Dennis King's book on LaRouche, "Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism." That can be read here: http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/fascism10.htm That book shows its class biases by treating Henry Kissinger with kid gloves though.
The LaRouche organization is another part of the alliance forged in response to the Rudolph case. The perennial presidential candidate's shadowy network has been described by the CIA as a "violence oriented" cult. The inner workings of a myriad of illegal money-funneling fronts and publications generally went unreported in the establishment press until hundreds of police raided LaRouche's Leesburg, Virginia, estate in 1986. In November 1988 LaRouche was convicted in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, of conspiracy to obstruct justice, mail fraud, and income tax evasion. According to the fifty-two-page indictment in that case, LaRouche personally instructed members to "use `any means short of thievery and thuggery' to meet fund-raising quotas." But even his conviction for these crimes has not stopped LaRouche: in September 1990 he decided to run for Congress while still serving time in a federal penitentiary.
The LaRouche group's virulent Nazi-style anti-Semitism also has been well documented. As the Anti-Defamation League's Irwin Suall put it, LaRouche is a "small time Hitler." The LaRouche group's idolatry of defense-related research, along with its smoke screen of wild allegations of anti- LaRouche conspiracies involving the Queen of England, the KGB, and even President Bush, make them a logical vessel for paranoia about the OSI's Nazi-hunting activities.
LaRouche has long-standing ties with the Nazi scientists brought to the United States under Paperclip. One was Krafft Ehricke, a longtime member of the Fusion Energy Foundation and author of articles for Fusion magazine. Ehricke, who died in 1984, had been a tank commander in the Wehrmacht and an engineer at Peenemunde before working for the U.S. Army under Paperclip. Later Ehricke went to Bell Aircraft, where his old Peenemunde chief Walter Dornberger was vice president, and then joined the Convair division of General Dynamics, which built the Atlas missile. Another scientist with LaRouche ties was Konrad Dannenberg, who had been a rocket propulsion section chief at Peenemunde and was part of the original German rocket team brought to the United States in 1945. There is also rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth, who was brought to Huntsville under Paperclip in 1955. Oberth, it will be remembered, also smuggled his art treasures out of West Germany when he came here.
Both Dannenberg and Oberth contributed to an anti-OSI rally held at LaRouche's heavily guarded estate in July 1985. The rally was held under the guise of being a tribute to Ehricke, with 450 military officers and scientists from West Germany and other countries in attendance. In his keynote address LaRouche claimed that the OSI was carrying out a "KGB-run witch-hunt" against German scientists and accused the Justice Department unit of commiting "treason." That rhetoric was followed by Dannenberg's speech on the "lessons" of Peenemunde and the reading of a message from Oberth that evoked the mystique of Nazi science.
Dannenberg said he was "borne into this LaRouche affair" when he was asked to honor Ehricke at the rally. "I have since that time had only very very loose contacts with them," he said. "I do not agree and go along with his [LaRouche's] basic concept" or the aspects of LaRouche's operations that have been in the news lately. "So in a way I have dissociated myself from the group. On the other hand, of course, I certainly appreciate that the group . . . supports Rudolph quite a bit. I think they are doing a good job in that area."
One highlight of the anti-OSI rally was a taped speech by retired Major General John B. Medaris, Rudolph's old commander at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. In his speech, Medaris accused the OSI of waging an unconstitutional campaign of "guilt by association" against German scientists. The old Germans just "sit there now not knowing when somebody's going to put them on the pillory for things of no consequence," Medaris said.
Another featured speaker was the man who-apart from LaRouche himself-cuts perhaps the oddest figure in the whole spectrum of Rudolph's defenders. Friedwardt Winterberg, mentioned earlier as a high-priced candidate for Paperclip in 1959, is a German-born nuclear physicist at Nevada's Desert Research Institute in Reno. In his speech at the LaRouche rally Winterberg touched on a facet of LaRouche's KGB-East German conspiracy theories by claiming that the OSI's evidence against Rudolph had come from Communist East Germany.
Winterberg's ties to LaRouche go back to at least 1980, when Fusion magazine published a controversial article by Winterberg that explained how a hydrogen bomb is detonated. A year later the Fusion Energy Foundation published Winterberg's book The Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices. Winterberg also writes for yet another LaRouche outlet, the International Journal of Fusion Energy, which bills itself as welcoming scientists whose articles are banned in established scientific journals "because of the ideological prejudice of journal referees."