NASA Director Wernher Von Braun was a Nazi?

Tom Lehrer classic:

OP, are you Dora Dumfucke, ingenue?

He was apolitical, like Nancy Perlosi.

All the scientists in Germany were either Nazis or dead. They had no other choices.

Also, he wasn't a "Nasa Director". . He just designed our hugely successful rocket engines.

Like the V5, the J2 and the Homosexual Orbiter.

The U.S. recruited a lot of Nazi scientists and engineers after WWII. It was called Project Paperclip.

They were afraid that if we didn’t recruit them and give them citizenship, Russia would.

R6, I thank God every day that we got to the moon before the commies did.

OP you say this "fucking disgusting".

Can you think of some other, more recent, issues over which we can self-flagellate?

R1 I'm a Tom Lehrer worshiper. Thanks for posting that.

In other news, we hear that Queen Anne has died, and that Mr &Mrs Lincoln may soon be enjoying an evening at the theatre.

No shit Sherlock!

R7, can you tell us why?

Lots of Nazi scientists were brought over to the USA. How do you think we became a superpower in such a short time? They helped make the US successful so you can live like a spoiled crybaby.

Captain America: the Winter Soldier was basically a documentary.

And Albert Einstein wrote to the US pleading with the government to build an atomic bomb which it did and eventually killed over 200,000 innocent people. Now that's what I call disgusting.

Operation Paperclip, dumb-dumb OP!

'I just send it up, who knows where it comes down. That's not my department', says Werner von Braun.

Young Werner was handsome. No pictures in uniform?

At the end of WWII, there was a race to find all the key German scientists. Both sides of the Cold War wanted them.

Yes, he was a Nazi. The US harbored many of them. The government gave a free pass to many of the smart ones so we could use their experience

R13 Absurd Nazi apologist.

Yes, and Nancy Reagan was an admitted thespian!

Maybe he just liked the leather trench coats.

the alternate history series "for All Mankind" went into this scenario

The von Brauns were neighbors & social acquaintances of my great aunt and uncle in Huntsville, Al. back in the 50s & 60s. I remember them defending the von Brauns any time someone in the family made any snide comments about them, saying that von Braun was not the type of man some people portrayed him as.

[quote] And Albert Einstein wrote to the US pleading with the government to build an atomic bomb which it did and eventually killed over 200,000 innocent people.

Einstein don’t got nothing on me. I’m getting there. 160,000 and counting.

[quote] Yes, and Nancy Reagan was an admitted thespian!

I thought she just dabbled a bit in college.

Thank god they had the foresight to collect all of those scientists.

Ex-Nazi immigrant scientists parodied in DR. STRANGELOVE (64).

Huntsville, AL, eh? I bet the sight of this got him all hot and bothered on the regular

Ehhh...Nazi, schmazi.

I live in Northeast Alabama not that far from Huntsville and I have noticed that many people including some local TV anchors have anglicized the pronunciation of his name.

The majority of the times I’ve heard his name pronounced it comes out “Warner Van Brown”

Read the history of bringing loads of Nazi scientists to America. It may have been a good thing.

Jeez people, take it easy on OP. It may be ancient history, but at least its a break from fucking Richard Madden and Froylan Gutierrez (Part 2,749) or the usual daily 30 threads on the Golden Girls. Really kind-of nice to have something not completely insipid and mind-numbing once in a while. Thanks OP!

R32 Please consider getting out of Alabama occasionally, before you become one of "them"

Were you high during 20th Cen history? Writing poems in your Trapper Keeper about the cute boy in the third row?

Read Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," OP. The novel is a brilliant indictment of all this.

Handsome, but a slimmer face would have been even better. Great profile pic, however.

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They still think quite highly of von Braun in Huntsville. Their Civic Center is named the von Braun Center.

[quote]And Albert Einstein wrote to the US pleading with the government to build an atomic bomb which it did and eventually killed over 200,000 innocent people. Now that's what I call disgusting.

And the reason he wrote that letter, you sad fool, was because Germans Otto Haan and Lise Meitner successfully split the atom for the first time in 1939. Einstein, along with a group of other top physicists, immediately realized the grave implications of this. If Germany pursued this research to its ultimate conclusion they will produce atomic bombs and one could only imagine what the Nazis would do with them (and with ballistic missiles to carry them).

With the backing of these physicists Einstein wrote the letter to Roosevelt which convinced him to fund the Manhattan project. He had nothing to do with the deaths of anyone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since the principle of nuclear fission was already well understood by physicists. In any event the 200,000 people who died were a drop in the bucket compared to the many thousands more who'd already been killed by conventional bombs, or the millions who would have perished in a U.S. invasion of Japan had they not surrendered.

America’s first “flight to the moon”.

He’s a Nazi, yet some of you cunts are drooling over him like he’s a teen idol on the cover of Tiger Beat...

This is why I hate us.

Some people asked what prompted this random thread. I just finished the Netflix docuseries The Devil Next Door about the 1980s-2000s trials of John Demjanjuk, the likely Nazi extermination camp guard, suspected of being the notorious Ivan the Terrible. In the last episode, one of the talking heads and a former US congresswoman both spoke about the US government's ability to 'look the other way' when some confirmed Nazis had exploitable intellectual and scientific capital and they specifically cited Wernher Von Braun whom, I must admit, I'd never heard of before. I'm a child of the 80s and early 90s, raised in the UK, but have lived most of my life in the US. Anyway, I thought it was very interesting.

R43, he was a Nazi to keep working a scientist (probably). Plus, he wasn't a Nazi after the war.

R35 I go to Atlanta three or four times a year

R18 Yuck. He looks a bit like Bill Clinton there.

Yes R20. We snapped them up before our enemies could!

von Braun became an American citizen and eventually became an Evangelical Christian (aka Holy Roller).

[quote]von Braun became an American citizen and eventually became an Evangelical Christian (aka Holy Roller).

I guess being a Nazi wasn't hardcore enough for him.

A note on Huntsville, AL...it actually has been an area of high tech development and companies for many years, mostly government type outfits.

Post WWII Germany was happy hunting grounds for USA and UK (and Russia for that matter), all looking for German talent, machinery, equipment, etc... Patents, scientists, blueprints, airplanes, factories..... all of it packed up and sent to America or Great Britain.

For their part German military, officers, high level Nazis, anyone with any sort of remote value surrendered (or tried to), if not threw themselves at either the British or Americans; anything to avoid being captured by the Russians.

It was that way with Von Braun; the Americans knew who he was and what he had done for Germany during the war, but other practical matters were at stake.

[quote]the US government's ability to 'look the other way' when some confirmed Nazis had exploitable intellectual and scientific capital

You would have preferred his intellectual and scientific capital to go elsewhere? To which of our enemies (and now that we have Trump, keep in mind that everyone is our enemy... except Putin)?

Not trying to single you out, OP, but this has been common knowledge since the end of WWII. The question you should be asking is what we did with all of the knowledge and expertise, particularly when it comes to murky ethical matters like using the research Mengele did on (mostly Jewish) victims, and the oft-quoted moral quandary of "you have a dying patient, and you know that Nazi research found a cure or therapy, but the research was conducted outside of acceptable standards. Is it ever appropriate or ethical to use information gained at this expense?".

There's always more to the story, but in the end, FDR did the right (and practical) thing by bringing scientists and other professionals to the US after the war. To the victor go the spoils.

Complaining about the Nazis is the last thing we need to be doing in the US, considering we have our own home grown Nazi party running the show in Washington right now, from Orange Hitler on down.

This story is dealt with (in a fictionalized way) in the recent City of Angels-Penny Dreadful. There's a storyline about a young student at Caltech who's being recruited by Nazis in the US to help them develop the V-2. WVB is mentioned several times.

“Specimen?!”

“Space man.”

How could anyone not know that about Von Braun? That's the most famous thing about him—definitely how I learned about him in the first place.

He used slave labor in Nazi Germany. The US turned a blind eye. I first came across this unedifying story years ago when I visited the Smithsonian where they displayed a model of one of his rockets used in WW2 against our allies.

The recent Amazon Prime series Hunters was fiction that was based on the fact that the US recruited Nazis into their space and defense program and downplayed or hidden their past to avoid outrage from American citizens. The US sacrificed over 400,000 men to fight Nazis and our government and military welcome them with open arms.

The US only recruited certain German scientists. von Braun and many of the other scientists did the work they did because they knew if they refused they would be imprisoned or more likely executed. I don't believe any of the scientists the US brought over had any history of committing crimes at the level that would have made them war criminals subject to the Nuremberg trials. If von Braun used slave labor it was probably because that's the only labor he was provided and it's not like he had the power to release them.

My father worked with von Braun while he was in the military at the White Sands Proving Ground where they tested the rockets/missiles. Also after he retired and worked on the space program at the Cape he frequently was at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville where they developed the missiles/rockets. I was a child and I don’t remember him ever speaking of von Braun. I have no idea if my dad ever knew von Braun before his interactions with the rockets/missiles/space programs but my dad did work in military intelligence at the end of the war in Germany. I wish I had asked him about these things.

Funnily enough I went to law school with von Braun’s daughter. She was interested in banking and financial law and I think that’s what she ended up doing. Her parents lived in Alexandria, Va after von Braun came to work at NASA headquarters and she told me her dad had died of stomach cancer some years earlier. I don’t remember discussing her dad but I think I mentioned to her my dad worked on the space program both in Tx/NM and at Redstone.

This seems petty and cruel of me but at the time I remember thinking it was good that he probably died in pain. I realize he joined the party as expected so he could keep working as a scientist on what he thought were important and career making projects but he did use slave labor under horrendous conditions from the Dora work camp at the new location where they moved the rocket program after the RAF discovered and bombed Peenemunde, the Baltic site of the original rocket work. How the Brits learned about Peenemunde and attacked it is a fascinating story. I imagine his defense would have been that he had no choice. I could see him being tried as a war criminal for indiscriminate bombing on civilian targets - which is what the V1s and the V2s did.

The stupid Russians had their own contingent of German scientists (I guess those who couldn’t reach the allies first to surrender) but the head of their space program was jealous of them and even though he wasn’t very schooled or expert in rockets he refused to listen to them or use their expertise. They eventually got sent back to Germany.

The von Braun house in Huntsville was a great MCM house. It went on the market not that long ago and it had very few changes to it since their family lived there. I loved it.

I imagine he's still a Nazi OP.

Here's the old listing.

How far back are the SJWs going to go? They lack as much of an ability to think critically as the Trumptards. Life is not black and white. Learn that or shut the fuck up.

R63, yea, that's it. Thanks. Maybe "love" was a strong word. LOL. I think I like it cause it reminded me of one of my childhood homes. There were older pics of the office when he used it. But that was considered an impressive house for those times. At least in my world.

R64 The SJWs love taking offence so they delve back into history to find something so they can continue their scolding. They go back 100 and 200 years. The Irish gripe over situations from 300 years ago. Columbus was 500 years ago.

Von Braun was also arrested by Reichsführer-SS Himmler, who considered him politically unreliable and uncooperative.

[quote] MCM house

What?

Mid-century modern, R68.

Nazi, Schmazi, as long as I get my theme park built.

And I suppose it’s an open secret that Eva and I retired to Argentina after the war.

Negative, R71. He changed his name to Franz Schtickelmeyer and taught high school world history in St. Olaf, MN.

R61 - how interesting! Also, If R63 is the house that you're talking about, I wouldn't call it MCM -- it may have been constructed in the mid-century, but I don't see any trademark design cues of a MCM architecture there.

He was also an SS officer.

[quote] He was also an SS officer.

He was a special scientist, not like that Fauci fraud!

Von Braun: I agree with those who say we could launch a pod.

Lyndon Johnson : A pot?

Von Braun: A POD, a, uh, capsule. Now, we would be in full control of zis pod. It vill go up like a cannonball, and come down like, uh, a cannonball, splashing down into ze water, the ocean, vith a parachute to spare the life of the specimen inside.

Lyndon Johnson : Spaceman?

Von Braun: SPE-CI-MEN.

Lyndon Johnson : Well, what kind of spe-ci-men?

Von Braun: A tough one. Responsive to orders. I had in mind a jimp.

Lyndon Johnson : JIMP? Well what the hell is a jimp?

Von Braun: A jimp. A-a-a jimpanzee, Senator. An ape.

Like many other Nazis, German military and others right down to civilians extend of what exactly they knew, when they knew, and or how involved they were in war crimes is largely only known to themselves and their maker.

Herr Von Braun as with many other Nazis told various stories, omitted information when suited, recalled things only when pushed... Then there is the old standby "I was just following orders.....".

One thing we must never forget when discussing this is...

That things were better under the Kaiser.

Well I phoned my congressman who said quote

I'd like to help you son but you're too jimp to vote

r41 Rutherford split the atom, and regretted it for the rest of his life.

No R80, Rutherford used a split screen experiment to demonstrate that photons can behave like a particle and a wave. And I’m pretty sure he had no regrets.

I read a biography written about von Braun and he was a fascinating person. His family had aristocratic roots in Germany.

He dreamed of flying to the moon at a very young age and started working on his dreams as a boy. His classmates thought he was odd and obsessed.

Was he a nazi, absolutely he had to tow the line to keep working on his rockets which he was his obsession, except he wanted to go to the moon and hitler wanted to take out people using rockets.

There is a picture of him at a rally wearing an SS uniform which was the rank given to a scientist in his capacity, it was not because he wanted to be an SS officer.

He had a girlfriend of questionable lineage which earned him some distrust among the nazis. She was rumored to Jewish.

Von Braun ended up marrying his cousin.

OP, you're too late to start up a witch hunt to get Wernher Von Braun.

But you could join this one at Portland

[quote] Well I phoned my congressman who said quote . . . I'd like to help you son but you're too jimp to vote

LOL! You're good. Looking for a cure for those summertime blues.

[quote]A note on Huntsville, AL...it actually has been an area of high tech development and companies for many years, mostly government type outfits.

The FBI is building a presence in Huntsville.