The town of Vernon, in Eure, is the cradle of French aerospace. Following the Second World War, it welcomed German engineers, mostly former Nazis, to develop rocket engines. For a long time, the past of these men was kept silent. On the occasion of the National Day in memory of the victims and heroes of the deportation, an exhibition finally lifts the veil on their responsibility within the concentration camps.

Published on: 04/26/2026 - 1:27 p.m.

"The first French advances in the field of rockets are linked to a dark history". This phrase written on a sign in downtown Vernon constitutes a real turning point. For the first time, a permanent exhibition will allow this city, located in Eure, to look its past in the face. Inaugurated on Sunday April 26 on the occasion of National Day in memory of the victims and heroes of deportation, it finally highlights the dark side of the French conquest of space.

80 years ago, in May 1946, France chose this Normandy city to establish the LRBA, the ballistics and aerodynamic research laboratory. The objective? Allow France to develop its own civil and military launcher technology.

"Vernon was going to be one of the main contributors enabling France to become the third world power in the race to conquer space after the USA and the Soviet Union. It was here that the main propellants which equipped the Véronique rockets (from 1948 to 1974), then Vesta, then Viking, and Vulcain were developed. From the 1970s, the site developed the engines for the various Ariane projects", describes Laurent Thiery, historian at the Resistance Foundation.

Also readConquest of space: Ariane, 50 years in the service of Europe

“A brain hunt”

To achieve this success, the country, which was lagging considerably in this area after the Second World War, sought to employ German engineers. “At the end of 1945, General de Gaulle gave authorization to the intelligence services to recruit them directly on the territory of the Reich. Particularly in the French occupation zone, it was a matter of, through particularly attractive contracts, preventing these brains from being all recovered by the Americans or the Russians. It was a real brain hunt that was underway to find the main German players in missile and aeronautics development,” explains Laurent Thiery.

Attracted by the salaries, the opportunity to stay in Europe or escape capture by the Soviets, around 150 engineers and researchers were quickly recruited. Ninety of them were sent to Vernon where they settled in the heights of the city with their families in a place called by its inhabitants Buschdorf, the "village of the bush".

These men acquired their skills while serving the Third Reich. As the historian points out, "all participated in the development of rockets at the Peenemünde research site on the Baltic, where the main Nazi special weapons were developed for Hitler and in particular the A4-V2 rocket between 1937 and 1945." “It is still difficult to know whether these men were convinced Nazis, but by necessity the majority had joined the Nazi party,” he specifies.

Sadly, the Peenemünde site became one of the elements of the Nazi concentration camp system. From the spring, more than 2,500 deportees from Buchenwald, including 400 French, were sent to Peenemünde to work assembling the rockets. The V2s were also assembled between 1943 and 1945 in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, located in central Germany. More than 60,000 deportees, including 9,000 French people, were subjected to forced labor there.

Read alsoPeenemünde, cradle of the Nazi V2s and German nationalist stronghold

“The appalling mortality experienced by the deportees”

According to Laurent Thiery, director of the research program on deportees from the Mittelbau-Dora camp, these German scientists could therefore not have been unaware of the horrific production conditions in the Dora tunnels, in particular the engineer Karl-Heinz Bringer, recruited by France in 1946: "He confirmed having been there several times".

However, when questioned on this subject in 1986, the man who is considered the "father of the Ariane rocket", put the prisoners' experiences into perspective: "He declared that the conditions were those of classic workers and that, I quote 'the men who were in Dora could have lived to be a hundred years old' and that he himself had a particularly copious breakfast, etc. Particularly negationist remarks compared to the appalling mortality experienced by the deportees in this camp and estimated at nearly 20 000 dead, including more than 4,500 French,” insists the historian.

For decades, the contribution of these engineers to the Nazi death machine was therefore kept silent in France. This was also the case in the United States where Wernher von Braun, an engineer in the Dora concentration camp, became a protégé of the Americans after the war. Father of the Apollo project and the mission that took the first men to the Moon in July 1969, he saw his criminal career hidden by NASA.

“None of these men, neither in France nor in the United States, was worried or tried. Many obtained the highest recognition,” summarizes Laurent Thiery. "It was necessary to protect the integrity of these scientists in the context of the post-war period, national reconstruction and Franco-German rapprochement. Clearly, we are applying a 'reason of state' which takes precedence over the desire for justice and reparation for the victims.

A story that no longer passes

Decades later, this omission has persisted. In 2023, an exhibition was organized in Vernon on these German engineers. All were depicted as heroes of the conquest of space, without any mention of their role in the camps. An absence which aroused the anger of families of deportees. Since then, this version of the story has no longer been accepted. In 2025, the municipal council of Saint-Marcel, in Eure where Karl-Heinz Bringer died in 1998, chose to rename a street in the name of the German engineer after reading his negationist interview.

The work of historians has also made it possible to break the silence by providing access to archives linking some of these scientists to the crimes of Nazism. The publication in 2020 of the “Mittelbau-Dora Dictionary”, which highlights the journey of nearly 9,000 deportees from France, also contributed to this turnaround.

On Sunday, on the occasion of the inauguration of the exhibition, around ten families of prisoners sent to this camp will receive a numbered book which pays tribute to their relative. “It was fundamental to be able to involve descendants, in particular families from Eure because this moment of memorial shift is probably the best opportunity to pay tribute to the sacrifice of their parents,” believes Laurent Thiery, who supervised the creation of this work.

Also read: Mittelbau-Dora camp: a “paper monument” to rescue deportees from oblivion

Great-granddaughter of the deported Camille Maireau, Marjorie Prieux will be present in Vernon. Her great-grandfather, a resistance fighter arrested for having helped those resisting the STO, making false identity cards and helping the Eure maquis, lived through Dora's hell. His journey is recorded in the dictionary of which Marjorie Prieux will receive a copy: “We will show it to our entire family. We will be its spokespersons. It is a duty to remember. It is our family history in the great History”.

Repatriated to France in May 1945, Camille Maireau died six years later as a result of the mistreatment suffered during deportation, in Andelys, about twenty kilometers from Vernon where some of his former executioners were located. “It’s really meaningful, but today we are in peace time with Germany,” says the fifty-year-old.

This descendant of a deportee has no resentment. For her, this ceremony marks above all Franco-German friendship: "We unfortunately know that wars develop technological advances. Finally, German engineers made their knowledge available to the development of Ariane rockets. I think it is important to remember this on a historical level. But today, in these uncertain times, we must celebrate peace between our two countries."

Also read: When the Lutetia hotel in Paris welcomed survivors of concentration camps

A space campus

If the town hall of Vernon, of which Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is the first deputy, has finally become aware of this past, there is still some memory work to be done. Since 2019, the city's former military site has become a "space campus". MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of ArianeGroup, has notably installed a reusable mini-launcher factory there to compete in particular with the models produced by Elon Musk's SpaceX. A first flight is planned this year.

To display this X content (Twitter), it is necessary to authorize audience measurement and advertising cookies.

According to Laurent Thiery, the engineers who work on site today are not sufficiently aware of this history. “It is very sad that during their personal training the past of Nazi scientists and the story of Dora are not taught to them,” he notes. “Current space news encourages us all the more to set the ethical limits that science and political projects in this area should respect, hence the importance of recalling the history of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and the compromise of scientists in a criminal regime.”

Read alsoLiberation of the Nazi camps: how to retrace the journey of a deportee

Keywords associated with the article

The content you are trying to access does not exist or is no longer available.