"ZE ROCKETS GO UP! WHO CARES VERE ZEY COME DOWN! ZATS NOT MY DEPARTMENT"
- Werner Von Braun
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Some might say he's hypocritical
He'll just say he's apolitical
That's clever. Yours?
Haha no, I wish. The person I'm replying to and I are both referencing a song by the ever-brilliant Tom Lehrer
Was literally about to ask if they were song lyrics, they read exactly like them.
Actual quote from Von Braun:
The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet
Yeah he built the V2s, but it does generally seem like he was happier when he could use his talents for good rather than evil.
We did this with all sorts of fucking Nazis. We were far too kind and should have hung a fuck of a lot more of them.
Same thing goes for the fucking slavers after their failed rebellion.
Would you like to have a guillotine as birthday present?
Killing Nazis and slavers is justice. The fact that Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis outlived Lincoln is a travesty.
Or we could try to be more civilized.
It's easy for someone who isn't a victim of a capital or war crime to say, that the death penalty should be ostracized.
That makes my respect for Robert Badinter even greater:
His father was captured in the 1943 Rue Sainte-Catherine Roundup and deported with other Jews to the Sobibor extermination camp, where he was murdered shortly thereafter.
...
Robert Badinter (French pronunciation: [ʁɔbɛʁ badɛ̃tɛʁ]; 30 March 1928 – 9 February 2024) was a French lawyer, politician, and author who enacted the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981.
I know this is a polarising topic. So I don't expect you to agree with me on this. The other way around... same. So let's just look at it as exchange of point of views. You show me your heroes, I show you mine.
Germany never underwent denazification
denazification
Not an exact match but good enough: Hagen Rether about spinal cord racism
Sorry, I'm not able to find a good English transcription. Basically what he says is:
Fear of the foreign, the fear of the others outside of our group is imprinted into our reptile brain. It may have been an evolutionary advantage back then to keep your tribe together and your gene pool alive. And it's still in all of us.
If you act on this, you just show a lack of culture and education. It's normal to know that fear/ that impulse but then the thought: Wait a moment, that's my spinal cord talking, I should use my neo cortex has to show up. It's important to take that step.
Killing like that is an emotional response. We should strive to be better than that, and them
No, it is a response to make the world a better place. By allowing slaver officers to live, despite what our laws said, we allowed them to spin the lost cause narrative and take away all the hard won rights that freedmen achieved. We still suffer as a society from that horrible oversight. Think about how things would be different if black people had political and economic rights for the past 150 years.
The same can be said about allowing nazi and Japanese war criminals to live. In many instances, they also took back power and continued to do damage to our world.
They should have all died like Mussolini.
Fitting since the US's treatment of native Americans is what inspired the nazis
Like taking in a student.
There was actually a song talking shit about von Braun. I'm not sure which year it was form
Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer 1965
It's not just the scientists. Check out Erich von Manstein. NATO commanders routinely attended the birthdays of this Wehrmacht general, and behind the scenes he was the unofficial commander of the WestGerman military for years.
Did those scientists have much choice about joining the Nazi party? And, once in the US, didn't some of them contribute significantly to the NASA space program? Why the hate then?
Some were party leaders...
Which ones?
If you would like to read more about this, here are some articles:
- https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/5/3/wernher-von-braun-historys-most-controversial-figure
- https://time.com/5627637/nasa-nazi-von-braun/
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/1433245
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Backfire_(World_War_II)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germans_relocated_to_the_US_via_the_Operation_Paperclip
- https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gzkgta/nazi_and_jewish_scientists_at_nasa/fthzz6r/
- https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DAYAAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false <- This one is particularly interesting.
It's controversial. A lot of old science comes from abhorrent backgrounds. Life consists of various shades of grey. A lot of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" happened during the following Cold War.
Possibly something to consider as well is that a) under virtually no circumstance would these people ever have to face trial, because rocket scientists are a valuable commodity, and b) the US/USSR were already nudging themselves into the Cold War before the Germans surrendered. If the USA didn't nab these scientists, the USSR certainly would have. I see it was mentioned in the reddit post you linked as well. Another thing to consider, is it would be much easier for the US to keep tabs on these people if they were brought to the US and employed in government jobs than if they went to the USSR, or Argentina like many other Nazi officials.
That last link talks about some particular unsavory ones who were later investigated by the US too. Nothing happened of course.
Yeah the Wikipedia article states that, but their sources don't check out. 'Any further documentation on this?
Links above.
And even if they were, what harm did this cause while working for NASA?
The US deliberately hid their involvement in some absolutely horrendous crimes - von Brown oversaw a facility where tens of thousands of people were murdered - so they were not prosecuted for war crimes. There were plenty of people in the US who could have replicated the work, but they were so worried about the Soviets that they let some truly monstrous people go totally unpunished to get ahead
Links above.
Of course the LW user is running defence for literal nazis.
It's "great" seeing people trying to defend these nazis in the comments
Space shuttle crashes into London
NASA guy: woops, sorry, force of habit.
Wait til you see where the Gestapo went.
Hihi
A lot of those nazi scientists were defectors and saboteurs, for example Walter Dornberger, a Nazi General, was directly implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler with a bomb briefcase referred to as "Operation Valkyrie", but sadly only managed to singe his pants and rupture his eardrum.
Some of these men were good people, directly opposed to the evil that gripped Germany.
That aside, though, the list of names of Nazi recruitments from Operation Paperclip is very long, and I'm sure many of them were very bad people.