I researched this, because it seemed like a fascinating question and I had no idea of the answer, and I found an interesting book called German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie, by Monique Laney, which went into this question as it pertained to the NASA scientists working in Hunstville, Alabama (where Wernher von Braun led the team at Redstone Arsenal). It includes interviews with Jewish residents of Huntsville at the time that the German scientists moved in- not necessarily Jews who were working for NASA (as the book mentions, Jews had been subject to quotas in both college admissions and hiring in the interwar years, and so were underrepresented in engineering and science fields), but Jews who lived with the Germans who were working for NASA.

Some Jews definitely seem to have been discomfited by having new neighbors who were German and/or Nazi-affiliated. One anecdote by a woman from a long-standing, mostly assimilated Jewish family in Huntsville describes how her father, who had been involved in the attempted rescue of Holocaust victims, forbade her from dating the sons of the German scientists who lived in the area. A man discussed how his grandfather, who had been a refugee from Russia in the 1910s and whose family were killed in the Holocaust, used to go to the back of his office when he heard someone in a German accent come in and would have his son deal with those customers- but also says that this was based on the grandfather's personal experience of antisemitism from German POWs who had been kept near Huntsville during the war and with whom he had worked. There was, however, no open hostility directed at the Germans by the Jews- they were very careful to keep up a veneer of politeness.

It should be noted- there was not necessarily a direct correlation between this veiled anger and any actual Nazi affiliations on the part of the Germans. To a great extent, it was just as much a part at a general feeling of anger at the German nation as a whole on the part of American Jewry, the sense of collective blame for the horrors of the Holocaust. One son of one of the German scientists, who later married a Jew, described his "radar toward when a Jewish person’s back gets up when they hear that I’m German. . . . it’s sort of a palpable kind of chemistry going on" (123-124)- and this was in the 21st century! Imagine how much more intense those feelings of discomfort must have been among Jews only a decade removed from the Holocaust, but the anger was directed at Germans in general, not at the rocket scientists in particular.

This changed when a Huntsville scientist, Arthur Rudolph, was revealed in 1984 to have been in charge of a slave labor camp (most of the inmates of which were not Jewish) which produced V-2 rockets at Mittelbau-Dora. While Wernher von Braun had previously admitted that he'd known that slave labor was being used to produce rockets in Nazi Germany, he had claimed that the rocket scientists had no control over this and that it was entirely in the purview of the SS. It was then revealed that Rudolph had in fact directly chosen to utilize slave labor and supervised slaves in Dora, which led to Rudolph voluntarily giving up his US citizenship (as opposed to having it forcibly stripped from him) and leaving the country. This made it much clearer to the US public that von Braun had not been honest in his appraisal of the situation and that many of the German scientists brought to the US were almost certainly far more implicated in slave labor practices than had been previously assumed.

While by and large the German scientist community in Huntsville certainly stood behind Rudolph, a large number of the rest of the (white non-Jewish) population did as well, as they attributed the growth of Huntsville and the US space program in general to these scientists and thought of them as their neighbors. They often felt that the treatment which Rudolph had received was a disgraceful reflection on the US, which had used him for his skills and then discarded him, and that people must be able to be forgiven for their past mistakes, especially in a war. The Jewish population of Huntsville, however, did not doubt that Rudolph was guilty. One woman (the same one mentioned above as being not allowed to date German boys) said that while she'd never really put two and two together about the rocket scientists and the Holocaust, she didn't doubt his guilt Another woman who had personally met Rudolph socially had a hard time reconciling the idea of a user of Holocaust slave labor with the nice man she'd met but also was confident that he was guilty of the crime. Her husband made a striking statement- while many non-Jewish Huntsville residents were saying that the US had used Rudolph and then tossed him out when they were done with him, he said that Rudolph's crime was using prisoners and when he was done with them tossing them in the crematorium. Laney uses this comparison to point out the vast perception gap between Jewish and non-Jewish residents of Huntsville.

Some Jewish residents of Huntsville noted that while they had worked alongside the scientists and therefore pushed many of these thoughts (about potential Nazi collaboration on the part of their coworkers) away at the time (in the 50s and 60s), when the Rudolph story came out these thoughts resurfaced, and one described how since then she has never really stopped having negative thoughts about even the children of the scientists with whom she is now friends (including Rudolph's daughter). Jewish residents also were shocked and angered by antisemitism shown by many of their non-Jewish neighbors, as many of those defending Rudolph soon turned to conspiracy theories about "the Jews" being behind the whole setup and manufacturing a case. The case even brought outright Holocaust deniers like David Irving to town. They were also angered at the lack of any remorse expressed by their German neighbors for what had happened under their noses during WWII.