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... As opposed to a Nazi running the US space program, which this guy saw the day of.
Well you're not wrong. He'd have to be pretty into it though to know all that at the time. It wasn't hidden but it wasn't promoted either, for obvious reasons.
From what I'm finding about him, the only reason he really joined in with the nazi party was to be able to make rockets and do aerospace engineering. It's not the best look but it's not like he was also a psychopath strong desire to kill Jewish people.
He also oversaw slave labor as part of his job, and he was well aware that the rockets were terror bombing civilians in England.
More prisoners died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by them in attacks.
I'm not gonna defend his actions. But also, they choice there's would've been to abandon rocketry and become an armed rebel....or keep your good position while trying to ignore all the nasty shit that goes into it.
I'm not excusing his behaviour, but from a rational, realistic, perspective how many of us would really be up for throwing everything away, risking everyone you love and know, etc etc.
If everyone would've been against the nazis, they wouldn't have gotten that powerful to begin with.
"Since we're stuck in here, you might as well answer my question about the French resistance..."
Again not defending or excusing nazi fucks. Just pointing out hindsight is 2020
Oh yeah. I absolutely think that the US did the right thing with Von Braun with Paperclip, including his naturalized citizenship and the eventual National Medal of Science, that was well-earned.
I just think we should absolutely not white wash the history at the same time. People are complex entities who are capable of both evil and good.
Problem is he pretended he was apolitical and that he didn't know after the fact
When a simple "yeah they'd have fucking killed me had I tried escaping" would have been a lot less self-incriminating than "idc, me like rockets :)"
There was always defecting. He was a respected rocket scientist
Von Braun famous quotes,
"We were aiming for ze stars, but unfortunately sometimes hit London."
"When ze rockets go up, who cares where zey come down? Zat's not my department,"
Ok but he did knowingly benefit from aiding genocide. And not in a “halfway across the world” way, in a “used concentration camp labor” way
Which honestly would have been fine (relatively) given the situation had he fucking addressed it after the fact
"Yes, Jewish slaves built my rockets before being killed. Had I not helped, I'd have been one of them" is all he needed to say, it's a very easy to understand position
"I'm apolitical" is what he said instead
Verner was a fucking Nazi, only a guilty man would say that shit
Yeah. The bar isn’t at Schindler, it should’ve been, but it’s definitely above apolitical
The V2 assembly site was located right next to a concentration camp, and they used slave labor from that concentration camp to build the rockets.
Do we know for certain that he believed in the ideals of the Nazi party? No. Did he ever try to fight the system in even the smallest way? Also no.
The best you can say for him is that he was indifferent to the suffering of the slaves being used to assemble the rockets, and willing to allow the rockets to be used to attack London.
In the "Nazi bar" analogy, he's a Nazi who goes to the Nazi bar wearing a Nazi uniform, and the best you can hope for is that he's going for the beer and not because he likes hanging out with the other Nazis.
I agree the nazi bar analogy is still valid in this case, dude was part of the nazi party and benefitted from the atrocities.
The unfortunate reality of WW2 is that a lot of our modern understanding of a lot of fields of science come from the horrors conducted by all nations, we learned extensive amounts of what is medically possible from the cruel unforgivable experiments done on people by the Nazis in concentration camps and by the truly horrific experikents by Unit 731. The breakthroughs in manufacturing to ramp up war production. We went from planes made of balsa and canvas to fighters and bombers made of metal carrying payloads never before possible. The harnessing of the atom by US scientists for atomic weapons. We literally wiped previously inhabited islands in the pacific off the face of the map in nuclear testing, we chose the worst possible domestic location for nuclear testing that carried radiation across the whole nation, that Kodak picked up on the testing in Rochester NY.
I'm not saying this to excuse what the Nazis did, they were clearly far far worse with their scientific experimentation.