The institutions that whitewash the Nazi past of men whose names grace Harvard and Stanford programs, part of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and multiple locations in Huntsville, Ala., typically do so via deception by omission — erasing history by leaving out or sidelining inconvenient facts. How did the United States go from fighting the evil of Nazism to lauding ex-Nazis? It began with the end of the wartime honeymoon between Moscow and the West. With Germany divided and defeated, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union quickly became America’s biggest enemy. Washington needed technology to compete with the Kremlin and a solvent West...