Speaking of secretaries:
Dorothea Schlidt, last of von Braun’s German rocket team, dies in Huntsville at 100 R.I.P. Fraulein Schlidt
Excerpt:
The last surviving member of Wernher von Braun’s German rocket team has died in Huntsville ending a living history that spanned from creation of the first rocket for war to the NASA Saturn V that put America first on the Moon.
Dorette “Dorothea” Schlidt, who was 100 years old when she died Monday, worked as von Braun’s secretary at the Peenemuende site where the V-2 rockets were designed and later assembled with forced labor from nearby concentration camps and launched at Antwerp and England.
There, she helped von Braun rescue key notes and papers about the rocket work after a 1943 bombing by British war planes.
Schlidt married Rudolf Schlidt, another member of the von Braun team code-named “Paperclip,” and she came to America after he and the other men of the team were brought to the United States to settle eventually in Huntsville. Later, those Germans formed - along with American engineers and tradesmen - the nucleus of the effort that launched America’s first satellite and landed the first humans on the Moon.
Their work was headquartered at Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal, a converted World War II chemical weapons factory where U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency led the team’s work in the 1950s that led to the first satellite launch. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created in 1960 to separate the military and non-military sides of the space race with the Soviet Union.
What a life she had. May she rest with God.