Nazis and the West, name a better duo
Von Braun was probably just a shitty opportunist who joined the SS cause it gave his rockets more funding(he did complain about the conditions in the V2 factories once, which got him a nice invitation to tea with the Gestapo). He went with America because they'd give him more rocket money. He should have been Gulag'd and forced to do Korolev's engine pressure sums for the next 40 years while a train of Jewish camp survivors endlessly spat in his face.
The others are committed Nazis who should have been walled immediately.
Oh don't say that he's hypocritical
Rather say he's apolitical
'So long as ze rockets go up who cares where ze come down'
'Thats not my department'
Says Wernher von Braun
Von Braun and most of the others were indeed quite opportunistic, but anyone who was SS was by definition a committed Nazi.
We'll never know the actual circumstances, but Von Braun's account was basically they came round with a signed request from Himmler and said "You can join the SS or we kick you off the rocket program and put you under surveillance as a potential dissident"
On the other hand we know he lied about wearing the uniform only once, and he was a member of the SS riding club for a short time some 7 years before which is not a good look.
He was also given a multitude of platforms with which to talk completely out of his ass about colonizing space and never be fact-checked. The 1950s were wild.
not really, von Braun was an actual engineer and not a reddit level dipshit
The USA was also a big fan of Japanese war criminals like Nobusuke Kishi who during his rule of machukuo killed so many people of overworking in the Mines, the japanese had to sent chinese slave labor to keep up production.
He is the maternal grandfather of Shinzo Abe, twice prime minister from 2006 to 2007 and 2012 to 2020.
:thinkin-lenin:
There's also Stanislau Stankewitsch, who was a Belarusian politician and Nazi collaborator who personally ordered the execution of over 6,000 jews, where babies were buried alive alongside their executed parents, in order to conserve ammunition.
After the war, he was employed by the CIA, worked for Radio Free Europe, and became vice president of the Belarusian People's Republic, an anti-Soviet government in exile.
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-y_8iHigC3Ms5TngF/page/n115/mode/2up (bottom of pg.117 and top of pg.118)
Oh, you mean the country which is now most responsible for holding the common currency together? Gonna file that one under "Funny Coincidences."
Dont forget Kurt Waldheim. A nazi intelligence officer who later became president of austria
It has some wholesome moments in it, such as:
I once saw DPs(displaced person) beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so.
Let me add some names to the list:
In West Germany, Konrad Adenauer became the first post-war Chancellor. He was an arch-conservative, ardent Catholic and pre-war mayor of Cologne as well as President of the Prussian State Council. Before the war he had called for a coalition government with the Nazis, and although never a member of that party himself, he was certainly no anti-fascist. His first post war government was packed with other right-wing and Catholic figures as well as high-ranking former Nazis.
Hans Globke was Adenauer’s personal advisor. He had been an active member of the Nazi party, and had served as chief legal advisor to the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, the section headed by Adolf Eichmann that was responsible for the administrative logistics of the Holocaust. It was he who co-wrote the official annotation explaining the implementation of the race laws which legalised the discrimination against the Jews.
West Germany’s second Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the man credited with the country’s post-war ‘economic miracle’ and dubbed the ‘father of the social market economy’ had previously occupied a leading position in the Nazi Reichsgruppe Industrie and the Institute for Industrial Research financed by the chemical conglomerate IG Farben that supplied Zyklon-B for the gas chambers.
Kurt Kiesinger, who followed Erhard as Chancellor in 1966, joined the Nazi Party in 1933, a few weeks after Hitler came to power. In 1940, he was employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ radio propaganda department, rising to become deputy head from 1943 to 1945 and was liaison officer with Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.
Heinrich Lübke, who became President of the Federal Republic in 1959, was another controversial figure. His signature (which he disputed) was found on the building plans for a concentration camp. He was involved in the setting up of an aircraft factory in an underground chamber and, under his direction, barracks were built to house concentration camp inmates who worked as slave labourers. Lübke was also involved in setting up the army research station at Peenemunde (where the V2 rockets were developed under Werner von Braun) as building director of the Schlemp Group. From 1943-45 he was responsible for the employment of concentration camp inmates as slave labour.
Hans Speidel, Commander-in-Chief of the allied ground forces in Central Europe from 1957 to 1963, served in the Nazi army’s French campaign of 1940 and became Chief of Staff of the military commander in France. In April 1944, Speidel was appointed Chief of Staff to Field Marshall Rommel.
Reinhard Gehlen, President of the BND, the West German secret service until 1968, had been chief of Hitler’s military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front. He had been officially released from American captivity in 1946 and flown back to Germany, where he began his intelligence work by setting up an organization of former German intelligence officers.
Source is the book "Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?"
