Braxton Taylor
When the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, journalist Suzanne Rico was at the anchor desk of KCBS in Los Angeles. As she reported the news of American Tomahawk missiles rocketing toward Iraqi targets, it didn’t occur to her that she had a deep, personal connection to the development of those weapons.
Rico’s grandfather was Robert Lusser, the engineer who developed the first-ever cruise missile — except he didn’t build it for the United States, but Nazi Germany. The V1 Flying Bomb, as it became known, was a weapon meant to terrify civilians during World War II and cow the Allies into making a separate peace. It had the opposite effect, sparking more bombing raids from across the English Channel in an attempt to end the threat.
Read Next: The Unbelievable Way Allied Pilots ‘Rammed’ Nazi Cruise Missiles Out of the Sky
Rico spent her decades-long career reporting on some of the most important stories of our time, but she had no idea that her most in-depth investigation would be into her own family history. Her mother’s dying wish meant Rico would confront her family’s Nazi ties, a journey that would take her halfway around the world and 80 years into the past.
With the help of her German-speaking sister, her elderly aunts and a trove of documents, historians and survivors, Rico dove headfirst into her family’s secrets. Along the way, she recorded these critical conversations and her visceral reactions to what she found. Rico has compiled these recordings into a compelling new narrative podcast produced by actor Jon Cryer (“Two and a Half Men”) and releasing exclusively on the podcast network Wondery+: “The Man Who Calculated Death.”
Military.com sat down with Rico and Cryer to talk about her family, the show and how the story of her mother’s life began with one of history’s most complicated — and consequential — figures.
As a small token of appreciation on Veterans Day, Wondery+ is offering a special 50% discount on a six-month subscription for all veterans and active military members. That means you’ll get access to all episodes of “The Man Who Calculated Death” and more exclusive series and content in an ad-free listening experience at half the regular price of a Wondery+ subscription. To redeem the offer, visit www.wondery.fm/veteransday50 and enter the code “VETERANSDAY50” under the coupon code section during checkout.
How much of your grandfather’s full story did you know before you started trying to finish this memoir?
Suzanne Rico: “Very little. As you probably know, many people who have been through something like a world war, they don’t like to talk about it, right? They just wanted to move on. And that’s how my mom was. So it wasn’t that she was completely closed-mouth about it, but it just wasn’t something that she wanted to talk about. So we would ask her, ‘Mom, mom, who is this guy?’ This picture hanging on her wall? And she would say, ‘Oh, that’s your grandfather. He was a genius.’ Well, when you’re 5 or 6 or 7, you’re like, ‘OK, whatever.’
“We knew these little bits and pieces that we were never able to braid together into any sort of realistic narrative. Her affect was always, when she spoke about him, a little dour, a little gloomy. We got the idea that it wasn’t a good subject to bring up, her father specifically.
“She would tell us stories of the war that weren’t about her father, but instead about her mother’s death and about the burning of her city in 1943. She would tell it like a fairy tale. She would be like, ‘And then the bombs came down, and I remember the window shattering into a million colorful pieces.’ We would be spellbound with it, but we thought it was a fairy tale, so we never asked anything more about it.”
Jon Cryer: “Actually, the reason that this whole project came about was, Suzanne knew that I was a big fan of the space program and had studied it a lot. She said, ‘Oh, my grandfather worked on the early aspects of the space program.’ I was like, ‘Oh, wow.’ Then she sort of let slip, ‘Oh, yeah, and before that, he worked for Hitler. But anyway …’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry, Suzanne, you’re going to have to back up a little. What happened here?’
“We got into the conversation, and she knew parts of her family’s story, the things that she refers to as the sort of fairy tales that she grew up with, were already these amazing spellbinding stories. Is that when you started to look deeper into it, or had you already been looking before that?”
Did you know that he had worked on the V1?
Rico: “I can tell you, absolutely, with 100% certainty, that before my mom died and kicked off this quest by her request that my sister and I finish her memoir, I had never said to anyone, ‘My grandfather created the wonder weapon for Adolf Hitler in World War II.’
“I knew that he was a scientist, an engineer, but did I know it was the V1? I don’t even know that I paid attention in history class enough to know that there was a V1.”
Cryer: “I remember the first time you mentioned that it was actually the V1 that your grandfather worked on, and my jaw dropped because I’m also a World War II nerd, and I was like, ‘You understand the enormous impact that had on the war for Britain?’ They were still picking up old V1s for decades after that. It was such a part of the national identity of the UK, of how they withstood that bombing. That was the moment I realized your family was a huge part of the narrative of the last 100 years.”
When did Jon (Cryer) get involved with the project?
Cryer: “It was my wife’s idea, Lisa Joyner. We talked about, is there a film project here? Because the story of this family is so epic, from surviving World War II through to working on the space program. I thought about how it comes from the darkest period of humanity arguably, to its greatest achievement.
“So we were trying to wrap our heads around how Suzanne can tell this story. And then Suzanne mentioned that she had been interviewing a lot of her family members and interviewing people in Germany with a GoPro. So she had all this fantastic audio on it. So my wife Lisa said, ‘Oh, wait, we could make a podcast of this.’”
Rico: “My mom died in 2013. I was so grief-stricken and so broken that I couldn’t even look at her memoir. I couldn’t open it. I couldn’t see a picture of her, nothing. Finally, in 2016, I decided, OK, this is enough: I need to at least look at it. When I looked at it, I realized how much I didn’t know. That was the first dawning that, ‘Wow, there are so many holes here.’ Even after I had read the memoir.
“I grabbed my older sister and I said, ‘We have to go to Germany and we have to follow their path through Germany, and we need to see these landmarks. We need to understand what happened in Peenemünde, at the Army research base where they were shooting these early missiles off. We have to go to the farmhouse where my grandmother was killed under mysterious circumstances. We have to go to the first house that my grandfather ever designed and built, where my mom was born.
“So we did that, and like Jon said, I rolled all of these voice memos and GoPro videos. I had an archive that would make your hair stand on end because it’s …”
Cryer: “It’s huge.”
Rico: “I came back and guess what I did with it? Nothing. It was so overwhelming, I didn’t even know where to start. Fast-forward to COVID. COVID hits, the world locks down, and I’m sitting there with everybody else going, ‘What am I going to do to keep from going crazy, worrying about how the world is going to end?’
“One day, I started at the beginning and I pulled up the very first voice memo and I started transcribing it, and I worked my way through that giant archive over about a two-month span of time. As I was going, I kept thinking, ‘Oh my God, I have a podcast. It’s shot, it’s done, it’s all here.’ The sound was remarkably good.
“It’s all on a GoPro or an iPhone with no microphone, no nothing. I was just rolling on everything. Luckily enough, when my mom got sick, because I am a journalist and reporter, my instinct was just to roll everything on her. So whenever I was with her, I just put my phone on voice memo and I just put it down on the bedside next to us, and then I would forget about it.
“When I started listening to that, when I finally could emotionally, I realized that I had gotten her last request on tape and she had asked … I had no idea that I had that on the tape. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ That’s when I went to Lisa, and I said, ‘You’re not going to believe it.’ I sent her some clips of it, and she was like, ‘Wow.’”
Did you have any inkling that it would require all of your journalistic skills to really get to the bottom of this story?
Rico: “When my mom died, obviously her story died with her. That is the most difficult part of trying to finish someone else’s memoir, that you can’t go back to them and say, oh, by the way, when you were talking about Kassel or Hamburg, which one did you mean? Because I’m confused. Forget it.
“I almost quit the project then, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it. There’s no way to do this.’ Then a light bulb went off, and I was like, ‘Her sisters, my tantes, my German aunties who were older than my mom, who were older than she was in the war, and their memories are incredible.’ I went to them, and I said, ‘Look, will you help guide me into the past?’ They were all in and, by the way, both pack rats. So they had everything … If I wanted a love letter from my grandfather, they would go and find a love letter. If I wanted his CIA file, they would go find the file.
“They had so much archival material, so they were my guides into the past. I feel like in the podcast, and Jon will agree with me on this, any time they open their mouths, it’s riveting.”
At what point did you realize this story was much bigger than just finishing your mother’s memoir?
Rico: “When I realized how much she hadn’t told us about him. My mom, I think very deliberately, stuck to her childhood memories. She obviously has memories about her dad, but she doesn’t go into questions of generational guilt. She doesn’t go into questions of responsibility. She doesn’t go into questions of what kind of a Nazi her father was, because there were varying degrees, as we all know. She didn’t ask those questions, because I don’t think she was able to. I don’t think that she was able to shine that light on her family, her parents.
“So I felt like that was all on me to ask the really hard questions and do the best I could to get inside the mind of a dead man, and figure out where he was coming from. I really tried to put myself in his shoes at the time.”
What did it feel like when you uncovered a new source, met a new person, found that perfect document or someone you needed to talk to pick up the phone?
Rico: “You know, the experts were easier to find, although not easy. You can find a historian to talk to you, but finding somebody who is a historian and an expert on [the] World War II aeronautical industry is not as easy to find.
“So those people I had to dig a little bit for and find the right people and make sure that they spoke English, because a lot of them are in Germany. The harder ones were the regular people that were involved in the story. You have to track down a lot of elderly people sometimes, and then there is a language barrier.
“When I go to the farmhouse where my grandmother died, I’m talking to the farmer who lives there, whose father was in the war at the time when my grandmother and my mother lived there. He was away at the war, but when he came back, he heard all the stories, and that was his farm that had all those craters on it, and that was his farmhouse that was now imploded and needed to be rebuilt.
“So talking to his son about his childhood memories, and it was so interesting because he had heard so many of the same stories, except for an ocean apart from me. What he heard about from his father was almost the same description my mom gave. It was hard, but it was so fulfilling once you got somebody. It was like … I cried. I would cry.
“These people I reached out to, when they confirmed who they were and what they knew, I would start to weep … I get a little bit weepy about it now, because it was reaching out through time and through darkness and finding a hand on the other side, and they were so welcoming to me, even though our stories are on the other side of history. They shared their story with me and between them and me, I think we made a whole story. My story would not have been complete without them.”
Cryer: “Suzanne had a lot of choices to make as a writer and as a producer on this. She always made the remarkable choice of going to meet these people, meeting them face to face, talking to them. These days, it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s just have a Zoom.’ But you can hear the difference in terms of how she would make these incredible efforts to go meet these people where they are, that gives the whole thing this incredible vibrancy and depth.”
Rico: “There’s been times along this whole process where I feel my mom pulling miracles for me. During COVID, when I was looking into this mystery of how and why the farmhouse was bombed. I don’t know how many historians I contacted, and some were helpful, but nobody had the time to just drop everything and help me figure it out, except for this one guy who is the chief historian of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
“Matt Dietz is a total history geek and a former fighter pilot. When I told him that my grandfather was the designer of the Bf 109 warplane, he was like, ‘Whoa, I’m all in.’ So I got him hooked with that, and then I asked if he thought he could find some files for me. He did, but it was like reading Greek or Arabic or Chinese, those files. It makes no sense to the layperson. It took a long, long time, but we found it, he became my decoder ring and he stuck by me every step of the way. In fact, he still sticks by me.”
What was the biggest surprise for you along the way?
Rico: “Well there’s a lot of mosts. The first was when I did find my expert in the aeronautical industry of World War II Germany. He was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I know your grandfather very well. In fact, I have a whole file of paperwork on him.’ There was always this legend in our family that he was under some sort of house arrest at some point. I had heard this story from my aunts, but they didn’t really know why.
“Then he [the expert] tells me, ‘Oh, yeah, he was brought up on war crimes charges by the Nazis for allegedly building faulty planes.’ The Nazis came after my grandfather and put him under house arrest. I uncovered this whole web of deceit and lies that weaves its way up to the highest echelons of the Nazi regime. He got himself caught between two of the highest people in the Luftwaffe, and he almost paid with his life. Back in those days, if you were convicted of treason, staatsfeind it’s called, being an enemy of the state … If you are convicted of being a staatsfeind, you were lucky if you went to a concentration camp.”
Cryer: “It was fascinating to me that the terror state went both ways. It absolutely went between the people they oppressed publicly, but it also was absolutely internal. Like the ‘Night of the Long Knives,’ that kind of authoritarian state rules through terror, and it hits everybody.”
Rico: “My grandfather, their plan for him was for him to be a scapegoat, they wanted to get rid of him because his patron was on the outs with Hitler and [Hermann] Göring. So if your patron goes on the outs, you’ve got nobody protecting you. So they said, ‘Well, we’ll use him.’ And I explained all of this in the podcast, but that I never expected.
“I knew that my grandfather had joined the Nazi Party. I knew that he made the Bf 109 warplane; he designed that. I knew that he now had this big part in the V1, but never did I expect that he was going to be a target of the Reich, the Nazis. That blew me away.”
Did you encounter any resistance to your efforts, people who want to leave the past in the past?
Rico: “It still makes me nervous in the middle of the night; I wake up thinking about it. I have a family. I have a big, wide and loving family, and they are all grand-nephews and nieces and grandsons and granddaughters and, in some cases, daughters and sons of this man, Robert Lusser, who created a wonder weapon.
“I try to make it very clear that I’m telling my story. At this point, it is no longer just my mother’s story or just my grandfather’s story. This is my synthesis of all the information that I’ve been able to take in. And I’m telling it; it’s my perspective. You can’t not put your own perspective on this. Even as I tried to tell it as honestly and truthfully and factually as possible, when you’re talking about 80 years in the past, you have to make some interpretations. So I worry about that.
“One thing that I tried to do very deliberately in this podcast and in this story, is, I try not to judge. I try not to condemn, and I try not to redeem. I didn’t start out trying to redeem my grandfather, but I also didn’t want to condemn him right out of the gate. So people sometimes think that these things are black and white. Black and white, good and evil. If he was an evil guy, it would’ve been a much easier story to tell. But it’s not. There are so many shades of gray and complexities, and he’s a super complex character.
“I had to always try to bring him to life in a way that wasn’t black and white. And I hope I did a good job, and I feel my mom watching me for sure.”
What was your thought process as you went to present this information in the show, as you went to present the whole truth?
Rico: “It still bothers me. Boy, do I wish he’d made different choices. But again, armchair quarterbacking from the 2020s is imperfect, right? Because you have to say, well, he had five children. He was an aeronautical engineer and a pilot, and he came up in the ’20s and ’30s, and then the next thing you knew in 1934, he’s making warplanes. That was the pivot. Before that, he was a young father and poet, and …”
Cryer: “He was a celebrity.”
Rico: “He was a pilot everybody loved and he had no problems. Life was beautiful. All of a sudden, he’s making warplanes for a burgeoning Luftwaffe that’s not even legit in the eyes of the world. That was something that I had to be careful of, this armchair quarterbacking.
“The other thing that was really, really difficult and remains difficult to this day is the uncovering of the true cost of what he did. So you can say the Bf 109 shot down X amount of Allied airplanes, you can say they shot 20,000 missiles in that doodlebug summer, 8,000 of them hit somewhere in England, and depending on what source, between 6,000 and 10,000 people died. Those are the stats. And you can look at those, and you can say, ‘OK, it was war.’
“Then I started digging deeper, and I uncovered this whole side of that weapon that I did not know about — and that was the slave labor, the concentration camp labor that assembled those weapons. I think that was probably the deepest and darkest place that I got to, when my sister and I were walking the tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp and realizing that 20,000 people died associated with that concentration camp, and associated with building both the V1 and the V2.
“All I wanted to do was run away. I did not want to be where I was in this freezing tunnel that has been cleaned up. It’s dark; it’s freezing. There’s condensation dripping from the ceiling, and the whispers of the dead are saying, ‘No, you have to stay, and you have to face this.’ So I still have a lot of … I’m not going to call it guilt, because I don’t feel guilty. I was born in 1965. I wasn’t alive in World War II, but boy, do I feel a heavy responsibility to tell the story that I’m telling and to tell Oskar Jacobs’ story, who is the concentration camp survivor who built my grandfather’s bombs at the age of 14, and make sure that nobody ever forgets about that.”
Cryer: “I think another thing that I find invaluable about the story is that it’s the story of a family, in many respects a normal, loving family. How they would slowly normalize authoritarianism and eventually abet it in horrible ways. I think it’s interesting because at the current political moment that we are in America, you notice all of the political sides are worried about dissent, authoritarianism, all of it, and this is a story of a family going through that. I think really understanding how human beings cope with how things gradually change in a society is really invaluable.”
Jon, you are a celebrity; as you listen to this, how does it make you feel? Can you even come close to putting yourself in the shoes of someone like Robert Lusser?
Cryer: “I’ll never have an entirely empathetic bond, because this is a guy who designed planes he flew himself, when they just invented planes. This is a guy who said, ‘You know what? I’m going to design a machine that I could be killed in at any moment, and I will fly it. I will fly that machine.’ There is no part of me that would say, ‘You know what? I trust myself enough to design a plane that I could fly.’ There’s no part of me that could do that.
“But I understand the brilliance of his inventions and the fact that it made him a celebrity. Remember, this is the day of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart and flyers who were the biggest celebrities on Earth. They were the tech giants of their time. I can see how that sort of ‘master of the universe’ feeling that you get from it can decide how you see the world for a while.
“So I feel he had a passion. He had a thing that he knew how to do. He had a thing that made him who he was, was his identity. He just had to find any way he could keep doing that, no matter how awful the circumstances became around him. And by the way, interestingly, one thing I feel like is often lost in historical epics is, nobody has a perfect information set. He was only aware of what he was aware of.
“We can find reports of the atrocities and Kristallnacht and all that stuff. But again, we don’t know what information he actually had. So I hesitate to judge a person in that kind of situation. And it was interesting, because there’s still more stories to tell because Robert Lusser changes, his life changes, his circumstances change, and you get to see if given a second chance, who he would become. It’s a really fascinating journey, because his next chapter is remarkable as well.”
How does your heart and mind reconcile the man, the engineer, the brilliant scientist with what he created in World War II?
Rico: “Well, I find his rationale that he gives in his own words, I find it hollow. I find saying that, ‘Well, I was an inventor. We were inventing; we created things. That was my job. I wasn’t a Nazi, I was a patriot.’ OK, I get why he’s saying it, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to own it, right? I think I would’ve been more respectful if he had just said, ‘Look, I was in the game.’ He was in that game, and he knew what side his bread was buttered on. He was getting a paycheck from companies that were doing direct business with the Luftwaffe and the Third Reich.
“So he knew. Now again, he had five children; he was an aeronautical engineer. What else was he going to do? But I feel like his explanation of that, ‘Oh, I was just a scientist, and I was just creating.’ That maybe somehow that redeems you or gets you off, I don’t think that is true. And that bothers me very much. Because I do have it in his own words. He gave a speech about the creation of the V1, and he said, ‘You can say we were all a bunch of fanatic Nazis, but we were patriots and we were creating.’
“In that way, I’m uncomfortable with his rationale, but in another way, I’ve come to understand him as a human being. He was kind of a jerk sometimes as a man. He was not a faithful husband. I don’t know how many men in the 1930s were faithful husbands. It was a different time. I really can’t go back and second-guess him too much for that. Do I wish he’d treated my grandmother better? Certainly I do.
“But he fought for his family, and he provided for his family. In the post-war years, which were the hardest years for my family. After the war, they had a terrible, terrible time. He fought to keep his motherless little family that he had never parented before, he fought to keep them together. He fought to come up with ideas and inventions that he could make money and buy food on the black market so that they could stay alive.
“I have a lot of respect for that, because he could have just been like, ‘I’m out; see you later. Good luck.’ And the kids would’ve gone to orphanages, and that would’ve been the end of that. But there are stories in my family of when my Aunt Heidi had polio, that she was in the hospital where they put her in quarantine. He would go to her window every night after work to say hello through the window. That, to me, is a redeeming quality, so those are the kind of stories that I sort of hold onto, in hopes that there was light in him. And I think there was.”
Has this changed your view of wars and the men and women who fight them?
Rico: “I’ve always had a tremendous amount of respect for the people that go and fight for our freedom, for us, who are lucky enough to get to stay at home. So I don’t think it’s changed. If anything, it has elevated my respect and understanding for what they faced. I’m never going to jump out of a disabled plane over the Alps in freezing conditions. I’m never going to be shot at, I hope, on the ground, as I’m retreating or coming up the beach at Normandy.
“World War II, to me, before this podcast was a story in a book. It was a history story in a book. And now I feel like it’s not that. This is the closest I’m ever going to come to being a soldier, to being an airman, to being a little girl in a farmhouse where the bombs are dropping. So this, to me, was like walking through a portal. At the end of the day, I have taken on a little bit of all of the stories and absorbed them, and now they’re mine.
“I have two uncles who died in the line of duty, one in World War II and one in Vietnam. So my heart goes out to all of the people that serve our country and serve me. They serve me. They make it possible for me to live in a country where I don’t have to worry about bombs falling. So if anything, it just made me appreciate them all that much more.”
Cryer: “I know for me, hearing their stories and becoming close to them in such a different way, it brought home the cost of war. When I was a kid, we heard the war stories that veterans would relate, their stories of heroism. And I realized that’s trauma. That’s all trauma. I want to have a great military so that we never have to use it. That is what I wish for everybody who’s in the military, that they get to be wonderful at what they do and never have to actually do it.”
How does it feel to not only fulfill your mother’s memoir request, but also have something so amazing to share with people through the podcast?
Rico: “Amazing and scary. It feels really amazing sometimes and really scary other times. That’s another thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night. Say Jon puts out a movie; he puts out ‘Pretty in Pink.’ Well, people might criticize his acting. They might criticize the movie, but they’re not criticizing his family, or they’re not saying, ‘You’re an idiot because you believe that your grandfather had redeeming qualities.’
“So there’s a whole other level of entertainment, which is what this is, putting it out there and you’re thinking, ‘What’s coming? Are people going to love it? Are they going to hate it? Are they going to think I’m awful? Are they going to think that I’m a Nazi?’ All of these things keep me up.
“At the same time, it needs to fly and it needs to go, and I need to kick it out of the nest. And I’m excited that it’s going. I hope people will take it in the spirit in which it’s intended, which was to be a very thoughtful, deep, well-researched, well-reported, even-handed story about a family that was doing the best it could in very difficult circumstances. I don’t know what’s going to happen, and it feels really, really, really personal to me, whether people like it or not.”
Jon, what do you say to her in the middle of the night when she’s worried about the show’s reception?
Cryer: “I will say she made something beautiful. To allow yourself that kind of vulnerability and put something out into the world that is terrifying and beautiful and will be something that will hopefully inspire people and inspire empathy in people. That’s why we get into this business. That’s why we do what we do.
“The first time I had a few movies out in the ’80s, I remember waiting in line to see a different movie, and I heard some people talking and they said, ‘Oh, there’s a new Jon Cryer movie out.’ Then another person said, ‘Oh, I hate Jon Cryer.’ And it was this special emphasis on the word hate. My blood ran cold for a moment, but then I thought, ‘You know what? This is who we are. We put stuff out in the world, and we have no control over how the world takes it. It’s a blessing and a curse to just have the opportunity to do that at all.’ So I’m just always grateful for the blessing.”
Rico: “Most important to me, this, to me, is a love story to my mother. At the very root of it, when I dig down as deeply as I can into why I put so many years of my life into it, this is my ode to my mom, and it’s my way of keeping her alive. It’s my way of doing the justice that I could to her story. It’s really important that she be proud of that. I hope that she’s proud of me.”
“The Man Who Calculated Death” from Wondery premieres on Nov. 6, 2024, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Wondery+.
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