Photos: Wernher von Braun, Space Pioneer Rememembered

[onehandle]

http://www.space.com/15000-photos-wernher-von-braun-space-pioneer.html

[Ian David]

1. Tom Lehrer - Wernher von Braun

[eridani]

6. Can anyone NOT think of Lehrer when von Braun is mentioned?

Not me.

[Lionel Mandrake]

10. LOL. Can anyone not think of ...

1. The Lone Ranger when this is played ...

2. 2001 A Space Odyssey when this is played ...

3. Mickey Mouse when this is played ...

[saras]

2. No comment that won't get deleted, probably for Godwin's Law - is "good riddance" impolite?

Anything he did for us, someone else could have done, while he could have gotten the appropriate death penalty for his war crimes.

But no, the fascists didn't lose the war, just the Nazis did.

[Lionel Mandrake]

3. What in your view were his war crimes?

Being a member of the SS?

Building rockets for Hitler?

Mistreating slave laborers?

Anything else?

[Shankapotomus]

4. LOL

"mistreating slave laborers" is a bit of a redundancy.

[Lionel Mandrake]

5. Here "mistreating slave laborers" is not as redundant as it sounds.

Like many industrialists, von Braun made use of slave labor supplied by the SS. He was not in charge of guarding the prisoners and had no control over their living conditions. In Raul Hilberg's terminology, von Braun was arguably a bystander, not a perpetrator.

If von Braun had not been sent to the USA under Operation Paperclip, he might have been tried at Nuremberg, but IMHO he would probably not have received a death sentence. He might have been acquitted, or he might have received a prison sentence, as, e.g., Albert Speer and Karl Dönitz did.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Are you sure?

From wikipedia:

Others claim von Braun engaged in brutal treatment or approved of it. Guy Morand, a French resistance fighter who was a prisoner in Dora, testified in 1995 that after an apparent sabotage attempt:

Without even listening to my explanations, {von Braun} ordered the Meister to have me given 25 strokes...Then, judging that the strokes weren't sufficiently hard, he ordered I be flogged more vigorously...von Braun made me translate that I deserved much more, that in fact I deserved to be hanged...I would say his cruelty, of which I was personally a victim, are, I would say, an eloquent testimony to his Nazi fanaticism.

Robert Cazabonne, another French prisoner, testified that von Braun stood by and watched as prisoners were hung by chains from hoists. Von Braun claimed he "never saw any kind of abuse or killing" and only "heard rumors...that some prisoners had been hanged in the underground galleries".

[Lionel Mandrake]

8. Nope.

It would have been an interesting case if von Braun had been tried at Nuremberg. I agree that his self-serving statements need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Wernher von Braun was fanatical about rocketry, not the Nazi party. He didn't care where the money came from, so long as it paid for his rockets. From this point of view, his career in America was a logical continuation of his career in Germany.

Tom Lehrer got it exactly right. I love that song, especially the quotations of "Deutschland über Alles" and "Ach du lieber Augustine" in the piano accompaniment.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. "Anybody else could have done" ? Like the Navy ?

Yes, we were doing *so* well without those meddlesome German rocket scientists.

[Lionel Mandrake]

11. Yep. Our Nazi rocket scientists were the cream of the crop.

The US Nazis could easily have beaten the Soviets, who got only the second raters and didn't even let them take charge of the Soviet rocket program. Sputnik was launched first because our Nazis worked with the Army, and Ike wanted the first US satellite to be launched by a bunch of civilians.

Project Vanguard got all of three feet off the ground before blowing up in the first US attempt to launch a satellite. This was, shall we say, a bit of an embarrassment for our side in the space race.