The Story

The story

1st July 1990, Toronto Airport: an 83 year-old man is arrested for war crimes. Twenty-one years earlier Arthur Rudolph had been the much-honoured linchpin of the first moon landing. 

In the year of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, this feature documentary tells the story of the only former Nazi to be stripped of his American citizenship and deported. When he tried to return, his Immigration Tribunal revealed much about the Germans who lead the moon shot, their wartime records, the cover-up that brought them to America, why it took forty years to investigate them, and why none of them were brought to trial.

The film uses archive footage – including original interviews with Rudolph - revelatory witness interviews and courtroom dramatization to narrate this episode of untold history.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“This is an important case. Anyone who thinks that this is just buried in the past, never to be repeated, is just not paying attention.” Eli Rosenbaum, Chief War Crimes Prosecutor of the United States of America.

We don’t want to rain on the Apollo 11 parade – those astronauts were heroes – but there are other kinds of heroism, stories of great human endurance connected with the development of rockets and these stories also deserve to be told.” Johnny Gogan, Director

“Prisoners of the Moon brings to life the story of Nazi scientist Arthur Rudolph, who played a key role in NASA’s historic 1969 moon landing.”
Donald Clarke, Irish Times, March, 2019

“Prisoners of the Moon is a compelling documentary, a unique and chilling take on the history of the Apollo 11 moon landing."Bo Stehmeier, President of Red Arrow Studios International.

Prisoners of the Moon in IMdB

Interview with Cathy Belton on Virgin One

Film Ireland podcast interview with Johnny Gogan and Nick Snow

Jonny Gogan and Cathy Belton on the Ray D'Arcy Show, RTE

Interview with Nick Snow co-producer and co-writer



Our Story


The world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 2019 and there are many films and programmes rightly celebrating this unique human achievement. 

But there is a dark story behind the success, and it is revealed in Prisoners of the Moon.“Did the man who built the Saturn V moon rocket help work 20,000 slave labourers to death in WWII?” is the question this remarkable film sets out to answer.
  
A courtroom drama, based on previously unseen transcripts, depicts the tribunal of Arthur Rudolph, the project director of Saturn V who had retired with NASA’s top medals in 1969, but in 1983 was the only one of the many German moon-shot engineers deported for his wartime actions as a manager of slave labourers in the V2 rocket factory.

Alongside the drama – with a cast lead by Jim Norton as Rudolph (Straw Dogs, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Water for Elephants, The Return of Mary Poppins) - the film includes never before heard testimony from those involved, including the United States Chief War Crimes Prosecutor, and a V2 slave labour camp survivor.

As well as assessing Rudolph’s guilt, the film asks why, and how, the US military defied a Presidential Order to bring Nazi engineers to the US in 1945 and then went to great lengths to cover up their past?

“We don’t want to rain on the Apollo 11 parade – those astronauts were heroes - but there are other kinds of heroism, stories of great human endurance connected with the development of rocket technology and these stories also deserve to be told alongside all the celebrations.” Johnny Gogan, director.

“My grandfather was seconded into the British post war intellectual reparations mission and so when I reported on some commercial rocket launches, I was taken by the story that the American’s equivalent had recruited V2 chief Wernher Von Braun and his team to work on Cold War missiles. Many of them later became leaders of NASA’s moon shot.

I learned that Arthur Rudolph became the only US citizen ever deported for war crimes, making a plea bargain in 1983. He came to regret the deal and in 1990 planned a publicity stunt, crossing back into the States from Canada. He was arrested and put in front of an Immigration Tribunal. What the case reveals about Rudolph, the cynicism of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ and the dangers of technological development in a moral vacuum, is at the heart of our film.” Nick Snow, writer and co-producer.

Share by: