"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
Wernher Von Braun was one of NASA's founders and its first director. He was also previously an SS officer, nazi rocket scientist, and had approved the use of concentration camp victims as slave labor.
Come learn about 🖇️Operation Paperclip📎 in the comments.
Nazis ran to the Americans
lmao, fascist scum knew exactly what side their bread was buttered on.
The soviets raided the homes of nazis scientists in the middle of the night, made them work in gulags, and frequently trialed/executed them for war crimes as they were found to no longer be useful.
The americans let the nazi scientists run NASA, gave them honorary degrees, and had them star in propaganda films.
Wernher Von Braun received a dozen honourary doctorates, has two buildings named after him at the University of Alabama, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, is in the US Space & Rocket hall of fame, has a crater on the moon named after him, and a street in NY.
He was also a Major in the SS (SS-Sturmbannführer), developed a great many of the Nazi rocket missiles right up to the V-2 that obliterated swathes of civilians and buildings in London and elsewhere. Wernher also approved the use of slave labour from Nazi death camps to make his rockets, many of his victims died in great numbers due to the appalling conditions.
More people were killed making the V-2 rocket at the factory at Peenemünde than were killed by their bombardments (12,000 - 20,000 slave labour deaths compared to an approximated 9,000 deaths via V-2 rocket, which includes 2,754 London civilians). Von Braun admitted visiting the Mittelwerk factory at least a dozen times and being aware of the "repulsive" (his words) conditions the slave workers were kept in. He was aware that deaths were commonplace, and is noted as passing within inches of the dead and not so much as batting an eyelid.
He made no attempt to prevent any of these thousands upon thousands of deaths, though he was aware, and 'I didn't think I could do anything' has never been accepted as a defence for even the lowiest members of the SS, let alone a relatively high-ranking one.
'... also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof. Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his frequent stays at Dora. Even the aspect of corpses did not touch him: On a small area near the ambulance shed, inmates tortured to death by slave labor and the terror of the overseers were piling up daily. But, Prof. Wernher von Braun passed them so close that he was almost touching the corpses'
- Adam Cabala, former death camp inmate and holocaust survivor.
Other buildings named after von Braun in the world have since been renamed, in order to not glorify the name of this particular former SS officer. Yet now he's known for putting the US on the moon, rather than for being involved in the deaths of tens of thousands of allied civilians and slave workers. Quite the turnaround.
Here is an interesting and useful journal article entitled Wernher von Braun, the SS, and Concentration Camp Labor: Questions of Moral, Political, and Criminal Responsibility
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Related, Arthur Rudolph was chief engineer of the Peenemünde V-2 rocket factory. When a labour shortage hit in April 1943, he endorsed Hans Kammler's plans to use concentration camp prisoners as a slave labour workforce. He was brought over to the US as part of Operation Paperclip🖇️ , and in 1954 was still described as "a loyal member of the National Socialist German Labor Party (NSDAP), and is the type of person who would not stop at anything if it might further his ambitions. He had the reputation of being a person who, in his enthusiasm for the Nazi Regime, could be dangerous to a fellow employee who did not guard his language."
For his work in the US (having avoided the Dora War Crimes Trial and having thus escaped punishment for his involvement in the deaths of tens of thousands), he received an Honorary Doctor of Science, a Department of the Army Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.
He was highly glorified in the US - that is, until 1984, when, after investigations by the Office of Special Investigations related to the Dora War Crimes Trial which he managed to avoid, he agreed to relinquish his US citizenship rather than face trial for specific war crimes related to Mittelwerk. Since it was agreed that the only charges which hadn't passed the statute of limitations were those around 12,000 charges of murder, he chose to give up his citizenship rather than face trial and put his family through the ordeal.
He was left stateless and went to Germany, where he was eventually given West German citizenship. There were a couple of attempts to strip him of his NASA DSM, which were rejected. He is regarded as a war criminal, but was glorified by his new nation until the potential upcoming trial for war crimes became a...problem. For his help, the US gave him the option to make the problems just...go away, by relinquishing citizenship. Had he actually declared his full involvement back when he arrived in the US in '45, he'd potentially never have had to face these charges at all.
Of course, that's just two nazis brought to the US via 📎Operation Paperclip🖇️. There were 1,600 other nazis given asylum by the United States, each of whom had their own story.
The US were not the only ones keen to help Nazis escape justice in exchange for services. The Catholic Church ran ratlines to South America for many of the very worst nazis who managed to escape punishment. If you were a top Nazi with a serious stockpile of stolen gold - well then hallelujah!
Von Braun joined the Nazi party in 1937, specifically the SS, Hitler's paramilitary force for political violence. He joined before the war broke out. Willingly. It was his choice.
The whole section on his Nazi involvement on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Involvement_with_the_Nazi_regime is absolutely disgusting. Just full on apologia and taking everything he said at face value after the war ended. The guy wasn't stupid, he knew damn well to distance himself from his Nazi involvement, but of course they're going to just parrot what he said without any kind of analysis. I know it's Wikipedia and redundant to be mentioning all this, but still.
The implications only get worse once you begin looking outside of the space race. High ranking nazis were placed into the UN, NATO, the EU commission, etc. Nazi industrialists got kickbacks.
I notice in popular culture whenever Operation Paperclip is brought up, the focus is limited to NASA. It always feels like a "limited hangout" kinda moment, since it's easy to rationalize nabbing a bunch of "nonviolent" "apolitical" scientists from the nazis and putting them in inherently" nonviolent" "apolitical" institutions like NASA.
After all you (the hypothetical American) get to say "The soviets did postwar brain drain on Germany too!" and dust your hands of it.
The real thing to look at is America's postwar political institutions. America created NATO in 1949, told the USSR they couldn't join in 1954 (declassified early 00s), and used the Monroe doctrine to inject tons of money into West Germany. West Germany's recovery was referred to as an "economic miracle" and attributed to capitalism, even though the American state was directly subsidizing them, while the USSR was recovering from ~20 million dead and the loss of 2/3 of their industrial capacity via the nazi land invasion. The nazi land invasion, by the way, operation barbarossa, being a direct goal of the USA/UK/French ignoring the rise of the nazis in the first place. Rising fascism was fostered and fed by the liberal democracies looking to put the hurt on Socialism. The USA immediately let West Germany into NATO in 1955, after telling the USSR no in 1954. This was obviously meant to ice out the communists and re-write history. Churchill's boys mopped up the Communists in Greece and rehabilitated the fascists there, too. This is the real reason the USSR created the Warsaw pact in 1955. It was not some vague "soviet aggression" against the "free world" of liberal democracy. It was a direct response to America rehabilitating the nazis less than 10 years after WW2. Less than 10 years after the holocaust. Chancellor Adenauer of Germany consciously pivoted from denazification to economic recovery. He ignored groups like the schnezz truppe and embraced the myth of the clean wehrmacht. The Americans paid reparations, you heard that right, reparations to nazi industrialists for their private property (i.e., slave labor camps and factories) destroyed by the allied bombing campaign. The USSR rebuilt on their own, even as the West was forming a deliberate European alliance against them, just after they had saved Europe. The fact that American industrialists were also working closely with nazis before WW2 should tell you everything. Many of the clandestine functions of the American fascist private sector before the war were outsourced to the CIA after the war, to make it less obvious.
The US also relied on Nazi propagandists and spies for help in shaping and kickstarting the Cold War.
https://irp.fas.org/world/germany/intro/gehlen.htm
The town of Huntsville, Alabama only exists because of 📎Operation Paperclip🖇️ and the number of nazis who migrated there.
On where the name came from:
“Army Intelligence officers reviewing the OMGUS security reports of certain scientists could discreetly attach a paperclip to the files of the more troublesome cases. Those files would not be presented to the State Department right away. Instead, those men would remain under military custody in America, most likely for a longer period of time than some of their fellows. As a result, the Nazi scientist program got a new code name.”
Excerpt From: Annie Jacobsen. “Operation Paperclip.”
Meanwhile the Soviets. "Straight to spaceship building technically-not-gulag."
