Prisoners of the Moon

Synopsis

This is the story of Arthur Rudolph, one of over 100 Nazi V2 rocket engineers secretly brought to America in 1945 to work on the Cold War missile programme. He became a key figure in NASA's race into space; but in 1990 was arrested in Toronto on suspicion of being a war criminal. As well as dramatizing Arthur Rudolph's trial from previously unseen transcripts, this revelatory documentary draws upon archive footage, expert witness interviews and the testimony of Jean Michel, a slave labour survivor of the subterranean wartime V2 factory. This is the story of America's desperation to beat Russia to the moon at all costs, and of the decades-long journey to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of 20,000 slave laborers in the V2 rocket factory and its Concentration Camp.