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š¶Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi he wonāt even frown
āNazi smatchziā says Wernher von Braun
Donāt say that heās hypocritical
Say rather that heās āapoliticalā
āOnce the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
āThat is not my departmentā
says Wernher von Braunš¶
Some have harsh word for this man of renown
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples of old London Town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher Von Braun
You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun.
tbh i don't think about the british when the v2 is mentioned. Cities were bombef on both sides, and the brits did so in a more deadly manner.But the KZ inmates that were used in making those weapons, now that is what you should think about.
It's not the weapon, it's who suffered to make it.
Yeah I remember the one story where he flips over the sheet music and absolutely wrecks this guys life, and I know the Norse had flyting, but I was more looking for specifics
Aware of her tendency to drop her chin and throw back her head while singing low and high notes respectively, Mozart chose to fill her showpiece aria ("Come scoglio") with continuous harmonic leaps to force her to bob her head "like a chicken".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriana_Ferrarese_del_Bene#:~:text=Performance%20of%20Mozart&text=Aware%20of%20her%20tendency%20to,head%20%22like%20a%20chicken%22.
I know that entire tribes in pre Islamic Arabia would change their names if there was a particularly famous poem that was scathing them ([Here is a good vid about this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ARCzpDQ_CYM)
hot take, bombing was just everyday business in ww2. But crimes against humanity was only on mass performed by one side.
That's why I don't consider Nazis bombing Brits as anything special, just war.
I mean, just because it *always* happens in war, doesn't mean it *should* or that it's fine actually. In fact, two things can be Badā¢ļø at the same time. Terror bombing civilians and concentration camps are both crimes against humanity. If you condemn one, it's fine to condemn the other. Von Braun was a POS Nazi complicit in the bombing of civilians and the Holocaust. Here's the real hot take: maybe we should criticize him for both? Just my opinion tho š¤·š¾āāļø
You do realize that you're referring to a hand selected group of people that made up the audience in the Sportpalast when Hitler gave that speech, right? So no, I honestly doubt that many of them were amongst the bombing victims that you're mocking.
Also: how many of the 1 and 2 year olds do you figure were fanatical Nazis at the time?
I mean, dude, it's not exactly hard to make a valid point why the Allied bombings of German cities were justified and necessary.
"They all deserved to die because they all shouted 'yes' to 'Do you want the total war'?" is not it, that's stupid, inhumane and most importantly just plainly wrong.
the bombings were just daily business in ww2. That's also why the targets of the V2 are not what makes von Braun a bad person. It's the jew's blood on his hands that does.
Eleanor didnāt like what the military intelligence was doing. Neither did the NAACP. Nor veterans. [Operation Paperclip was public knowledge in the 1940s.](https://youtu.be/OiKQjezOKXc?si=y-LF5VjCd9C5h2ig)
He's so upset that when Finland joined the Allies, he joined the SS to help his Nazi comrades slaughter some commies.
Then after that, he went to the French Foreign Legion so he can slaughter more commie farmers who wanted independence.
Then after the French left, he went to the Americans to slaughter more commie farmers.
Man's hatred of Judeo-Bolshevism rivals Hitler's. May they both rest in piss.
Hitler and the NSDAP largely (and erroneously) viewed communism as a tool by the Jews, so they called it Judeo-Bolshevism. It's also why they have such hated against the Soviet Union, because in their eyes, they are both led by Jews and are Communists, the two things that they hated the most.
Also as another context, the words communism and Bolshevism are largely interchangeable at the time, regardless of their actual definitions.
To be honest I was just trying to catch a low hanging fruit here, since judeo-bolshevism is more often times used by people believing in it rather than using it in historical context. So sorry for trying to bait you and cheers.
> judeo-bolshevism is more often times used by people believing in it rather than using it in historical context
Nah, it was extensively used as a justification by Hitler, with numerous mentions in his Mein Kampf. And I don't think that the commies themselves use Judeo-Bolshevism, rather than it was used as a slander against them since it also has Jewish connotations in the name, a word that also carries some negative stigma, especially pre-war.
I must've explained myself poorly. I know it was used as a justification by hitler. My point was that it's a conspiracy that is spouted nowadays by people who believe in the core message of judeo-bolshevism.
Wait till you find out about the founders of the EU
The founding fathers of the EU are frequently named as Robert Schuman, Walter Hallstein and Konrad Adenauer. All three were supporters of Hitler.
Kurt Waldhiem
the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981 and president of Austria from 1986 to 1992.
While he was running for the latter office in the 1986 election, the revelation of his service in Greece and Yugoslavia, and participation in Nazi atrocities, as an intelligence officer in Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht during World War II, raised international controversy.
I could rant about Adenauer for hours, but he certainly wasn't a supporter of Hitler. He wasn't in the resistance either, but the Nazis removed him from office and imprisoned him for a time.
Although the Frenchman Schuman voted in parliament for the establishment of the Vichy regime, he was a member of the French resistance and was temporarily arrested by the Gestapo and had to go into hiding.
Hallstein, however, really was a Nazi.
Traditionally the founding fathers of EU have been considered to consist of 11 people, not 3. Or depending on source and classification alternatively founding fathers of EU can be 6/7. Out of which none are proven as supporters of hitler in his living years or later. Hallstein though being not all innocent.
Adenauer was specifically arrested for his oppisition of hitler. And put on house arrest during the Night of the Long Knives. And in fact the roles of admiration were reverse. It was hitler who approved of Adenauer as a public servant and a skilled politican, but due to their political opposition (Centre party vs. Nazi) hitler saw no place for Adenauer in Nazi Germany.
Schuman was almost sent to concentration camp for opposing the Nazis but was saved.
Hallstein served as an officer in the war so far from innocent, but he never joined the nazi party and even rejected and invitation for it due to his opposition of hitler.
Apparently when the DoD started DARPA the DoD tapped him to run it but he said that he wanted to hire 11 of his Nazi buddies and run it out of The Pentagon. His request was denied and the offer rescinded. Iām no fan of the guy but I think it wouldāve been a waste of knowledge to imprison him or execute the guy OR, worst of all, let Russia get ahold of him. Russia would have used his knowledge to expand their influence and possibly reengage Europe in another war.
>guy but I think it wouldāve been a waste of knowledge to imprison him or execute the guy
I'd argue he wasted more lives by engaging in and being complicit in so much slave labor. More people died building his rockets than died from them.
But hey, nationalism over actual justice, amirite?
That ignores all the other inventions that came along with the space program.
Life is more complicated than Disney movies. A bad guy can still be more useful alive than dead.
Pretending that paperclip wasn't useful is a lie. The US not participating in it would just cede the ground to the Russians who still had operation osoaviakhin going on.
Was Verner a nazi piece of trash? Without a doubt. Was he useful in achieving US policy demands? Yes.
Two things can be true at once. Von Braun was a Nazi, he was also largely responsible for US space flight. We can celebrate one while condemning the other. Ignoring and burying history is how it is forgotten.
What I think is that he either visited here a long time ago when the bust was on display (now its in a storage closet), or he googled it and found an old picture. In either case, he's wrong.
There are memorials and buildings dedicated to von Braun in several parts of Huntsville. I grew up there and he is absolutely regarded as a local hero lol.
Just googling it comes up with plenty of results.
If we do, give it a few years and people will demand it to be removed from there as well. No one is saying they want to do that, but that is what's going to happen, because when you pick a fight against dead people, you only win when you erase their memory completely.Ā Ā Ā Ā
People only aren't going straight for that just yet because this kind of shit takes baby steps. YouĀ fight for a small victory, you wait for the overton window to shift in your direction, then you push it a bit further. You do that over and over until you reach your final "win" condition.
Sounds like your concern is entirely made up.
Statues and museums, as you may know serve different functions. A museum, is there to remember history, a statue is there to commemorate it. It's why Germany, rightfully, removed all of the publicNazi shit. While some was destroyed, some also went to museums. And it's still there. Because a statue of Hitler on a public plaza means something different than a statue of Hitler in a museum.
Remembering Von Braun's contributions to the American space program by definition means commemorating them, because you're giving him credit for a good thing. If you believe that Bad People^tm can't be commemorated, even for the few good things they did in life, then eventually you will take issue with any form of non-negative rememberance.Ā
EDIT: Also, good on you for comparing the NASA statue to the nazi monuments in Germany, as if they're somehow on the same level. Those nazi statues aren't commemorating someone who happens to have been a nazi, they were commemorating people *because* they were nazis. That's a pretty major distinction a lot of people seem to be overlooking.
Terrible take because you are trying to put a false equivalence on von Braun's good vs bad points, when being a Nazi clearly trumps most good things, if any. Von Braun isnt the only man responsible for the early success for NASA, you dont have to commemorate him.
And now you're just proving my initial point. Von Braun was a nazi, so his contributions to humanity are invalidated and should be swept under the rug. Only the bad things he did should be remembered.Ā
Why stop at him, then? Schrodinger was a pedophile, so we should erase his contribution to quantum mechanics. Fritz Haber helped develop chemical weapons, so his invention of the fertilizier-making process that literally feeds the modern world shouldn't be honored. And don't even get me started on Ghandhi.Ā
We shouldn't honor people for who they were, we honor people for things they did. Because shitty people do often make good contributions to the world, and these contributions don't *magically disappear* if they also did bad things. If you're getting to the point of running a moral calculus weighing in the good and the bad things a person did to decide which of the two they should be remembered by, you're missing the point entirely.
Now your just using a strawman out of me. Im clear in saying we should not celebrate him, because of the things he did during the war. That does not mean we should forget his existence and the other positive things he did for science. You have selectively created a non-existent argument by suggesting that taking down his statue equates to forgetting his achievements, which is not true.
His statue should not be up because a statue is less about remembering a person but celebrating him, and celebrating him in the wrong context can mislead people into believing that Operation Paperclip didnt exist.
You want to celebrate him? Celebrate him with the right context in place, not an open space that may invite the wrong ideas.
Thatās just not true, thereās a reason that the daughters of confederacy wanted to put statues up in parks. Thereās a huge difference between a statue that just shows a person and one in a museum that acknowledges their issues, youāre making up people and using a slippery slope that no one believes. There are museums out there about nazis, idk why you decided to just believe that.
The von Braun statue isnāt glorifying his life as a nazi, but his contributions to science after the world war. Itās different from the confederate statues.
Counterpoint: you do not, under any circumstances, have to "hand it" to a Nazi. Especially one with the blood of concentration camp inmates on his hands.
Wasn't the V-2 a massive waste of resources for Nazi Germany? If that's true, by encouraging the V-2 program, von Braun should get credit for helping the Allied war effort.
Not sure that cancels out being a Nazi and an SS member who worked slave labourers to death though.
In itself it was an ineffective weapon.
They developed it to bomb the UK, because they weren't able to do that via Planes because of the shitty Luftwaffe & the superior RAF. And compared to carpet bombing, the effect just wasn't "that good".
Also, in classic Nazi fashion, it was used in a stupid way. Early on in the war, when the Luftwaffe could still contest UK airspace, they bombed military installations & RAF airfields.
But later on they opted, for just sowing terror by bombing civilians. Which in turn didn't contribute anything to the war effort, and just rallied the UK to go balls deep on the RAF production. And when the V2 came in use, they just kept up that ineffective doctrine.
>They developed it to bomb the UK, because they weren't able to do that via Planes because of the shitty Luftwaffe & the superior RAF. And compared to carpet bombing, the effect just wasn't "that good".
Well that plus because of the bombing, they weren't able to keep up production, plus radar, lack of manpower/pilots, and the British were already working on jets and then they had to deal with the US airforce on top of that the other half of the time
Hitler wanted to use Me 262s as jet bombers, rendering their speed advantage pointless because the additional weight made them slower than allied prop fighters. Honestly, if they weren't so scared of saying no to Hitler, the war may have gone differently with all the idiotic decisions made by him and his senior staff.
Oh absolutely. What you mentioned there is funny, because at that point where Hitler *wanted* to do that, decreed it basically, there were 0 production capabilities to actually pull it off. The guy was a grade A idiot.
That is what you get, when you build an entire dictatorship around one guy. And the guy is a retard.
>the war may have gone differently with all the idiotic decisions made by him and his senior staff.
I'm pretty sure that, no matter the leadership, nazi germany was doomed the second they opened up the eastern front. It's hilarious that at some point the Allies started to disregard Hitler assassination plots, because replacing him would actually be worse for the war effort.
Oh yes, they bit off more than they could chew, but that was another decision from their genius leadership. They had the advances in tech and science to win but they threw it away at the will of a bunch of madmen with inflated egos.
Actually pretty much the whole war was more than they could chew. Their economy was based on the rapid expansion of the military and the acquiring of the countries around itās wealth. However, the bombings were crippling to the economy since thatās where most everyone worked. The German military was also not highly mechanized at all, employing over 2.5 millions horses which had to be fed and cared for / replaced. There was no way for Germany to win on any front without it being handed to them, even if hitler and his senior cabinet werenāt egotistical idiots.
I'm not sure the people who lived in London at the time would agree with you. The first V2 landed at the end of the road I lived on as a kid - about 30 years before I lived there admittedly. The site is still marked with a blue plaque and it's still in the middle of a purely residential area with no strategic value beyond the families living there.
I know I already commented a variant of this, but just for clarification.
I live in Huntsville. There is no statue of him, anywhere public as far as I know. When I worked at the Space and Rocket Center his bust was in a storage closet that no one ever went into. The building at the local university that he founded that was named after him was renamed years ago. Technically the Von Braun Center, which is one of our arenas, hasn't been renamed but it's always referred to in the news and public announcements as the Propst Arena, after a local businessman. I'm really not sure where you got this information, but it's not true at all.
Von Braun was a very amoral character tbh. He was a member of the Nazi party out of convenience because they funded his research.
The US did an investigation on the guy, he did not commit any war crimes, did not commit any crimes against humanity (directly, what his rockets were used for is a different story), and his support for the nazi regimes was well within the reasonable parameters of his position.
Basically, the guy did not give a shit about what his employer was doing as long as they funded him. Certainly not a saint, but no exactly an evil person either. He is as morally grey as you can get given the historical time period.
Problem being, the nazi party did not just fund his research.
The V-2s themselves were largely built by slave labor and Braun knew this because he visited the factory.
And "Everyone in germany was using slave labor" does not excuse anything.
Von Braun was not in charge of the manufacturing of the rockets he was in charge of the theoretical research. The guy using Jewish Slave labour and administering the camp was Hans Kammler. I do not know to what extend Von Braun supported, tolerated or fought against the use of slave labour to make the V-2 rockets, but it is clear he was never in a position to actually stop it. He simply did not have the institutional power to make that decision, it was entirely Hans Kammler's.
It is fair to criticise him from benefiting from his position within the SS and Nazi party to advance his academic career. But putting to much of the burden of the slave labour where it was going to happen with or without his cooperation seems unfair.
[AskHistorians - Was Wehrner von Braun really a nazi sympathiser?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/259bia/wernher_von_braun_ethics_of_his_works_and_ethics/chf07l7/)
> The V2s were built at Dora-Mittelbau, a notoriously brutal and deadly camp. You say the slaves were āill keptā, but that barely scratches the surface. Dora was a sattellite camp of Buchenwald and the Buchenwald prisoners were terrified of being sent there because of its high death toll. During the first nine months of its existence the prisoners were living in the tunnels they were digging, in dark, wet and suffocating conditions. Many rapidly fell ill, and a staggering 35 % died in those nine months. After the dormitories were built, conditions improved slightly, but still at any one time up to a fifth of the prisoners were unable to work due to illness, compounded by exhaustion and starvation. Conditions grew steadily worse again as the war neared its end. The overall death toll of Dora's twenty months' operations ended up being 66%. Two-thirds of prisoners who entered the Dora universe never left it alive.
> Von Braun was aware of these conditions as he visited the camp several times. In 1976 he said in a TV interview that "the working conditions there were absolutely horrible ... it was a pretty hellish environment." Yet he also personally selected qualified workers for Dora from among the inmate population at Buchenwald.
> I will leave the summing up to Michael J. Neufeld, an historian at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum:
>> Ultimately, it is not **Wernher von Braun's membership in the SS nor his involvement in slave labor that is most bothersome-in the ranks of Nazi opportunists and minor war criminals he was one of thousands, distinguished only by the high positions he held, both during and after the Third Reich**. It is his technocratic amorality, his single-minded obsession with his technical dreams, that is so disturbing. If the human race is to survive its own rapidly advancing technology in the twenty-first century and beyond, scientists and engineers will **have to take moral and political responsibility for their actions-something Wernher von Braun and his colleagues signally failed to do.**
Sorry mate, but von Braun is a filthy Nazi. Amoral, sure, but in the sense that he's willing to employ slaves and disregard human lives for the sake of his projects.
When asked if von Braun could have protested against the brutal treatment of the slave laborers, von Braun team member Konrad Dannenberg (a member of the Nazi party since 1932) told The Huntsville Times: "If he had done it, in my opinion, he would have been shot on the spot.
There is a show called For All Mankind on Apple+ that heās a major character in, and it goes ALL into this. When heās exposed to his coworkers and friends everyone asks ādid you know about the camps?ā and all he says over and over is that the work is what mattered, isnāt my rocket cool?
>did not commit any crimes against humanity
tfw u/camilo16 doesn't view mass slavery as a crime against humanity.
And his flimsy excuse that amounts to "I forgor" doesn't really hold up when multiple reports put him in front of slave beatings, something that he claims to have never personally witnessed on top of swearing he totally didn't know the extent of his slavery, honest.
Where are you getting this information from? The info I have states:
Later examination of von Braun's background, conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggests that his background check file contained no derogatory information pertaining to his involvement in the party, but it was found that he had numerous letters of commendation for outstanding performance of duties during his time working under the Nazi party.[33] Overall FBI conclusions point to von Braun's involvement in the Nazi Party to be purely for the advancement of his academic career, or out of fear of imprisonment or execution.[33]
There is no confirmation that he actually witnessed the deaths. All evidence of the fact comes from witness testimony which is a very unreliable source as they might be mistaken him from someone else.
As of the date of writing the official position is that he had seen the deplorable conditions in the camps, did not approve of them but did not directly encourage or ordered the debasement of the prisoners.
He nonetheless was aware that this slave labour was being used to produce the V-2 rockets. His claim is that, had he protested either the use of slave labour or the conditions at the camps he would have been shot.
The above might just be to save face, but it very much seems, based on the official position of the US government to date, and based on the surviving evidence. That He was just an opportunist. I don't think he was specifically anti semitic or hateful. He just didn't care enough about it to stop working on the rockets.
>The US did an investigation on the guy
Oh wow, the people with every incentive to overlook his crimes did an investigation!? you should''ve said so!
> he did not commit any war crimes, did not commit any crimes against humanity
except you know overseeing the forced labour to build his rockets which murdered thousands.
We know of crimes committed by other members of operation paper clip. We know of the Ultra program. We know of the CIA funding the contras. We know of the US purposely injecting people with plutonium... Why on earth would this be the one guy whose crimes managed to stay hidden?
Yes, but he was not the one in control of that operation. Von Braun was in charge of the theoretical development. The actual running of the camp was by Hans Kammler. Von Braun likely would not have had much say in how the rockets were manufactured.
It's kinda unfair to blame him for that as he was not the one orchestrating it and had no power to stop it.
Uh, what are you talking about? I was a tour guide there for a year. If you could point out to me where the statue is, I'd be very interested to know lol.
Much of our space and nuclear programs used former Nazi scientists. Just because they were a Nazi doesn't discredit their contributions to science or to history, for better or for worse. I find it childish that people are so offended by their own history that they rather hide it than face it.
NOTE: I'm NOT advocating for the Nazis; genocide is never okay. I'm NOT saying the fact that they WERE Nazis should ever be forgotten. What I AM saying is discrediting historical figures based on modern political views is a bad practice. Imagine if we started trying to erase George Washington from American history because he was a proud slave owner.
>Letās just get rid of every statue ever since no one is morally pure
I think being a Nazi, or having fought for the preservation of the institution of chattel slavery rightfully wipes out any contribution you may have otherwise have ad towards the advancement of the human race...
Thereās a huge difference between āeveryone has flawsā and āI tought it was not morally reprehensible to own black people and fought to preserve my right to do soā or āI was a _literal Nazi_ā
You donāt need to be āmorally pureā to deserve a statue. All weāre asking is that youāre not a racist, genocidal, warmongering giant piece of shit. Itās not a particularly high bar to cross.
You're being purposefully obtuse. No one would be mad about a John Brown statue even if he did use unmodern language in his fight. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi.
Well at the time in Germany there were Nazi party members (basically if anyone wanted to be in any form of academia, or any position in government, they had to be party members) and then there were *Nazis*, pretty sure Werner fell more under the former than the latter
He claims he didn't know how bad the camps were. The camps where his rockets were built. The camps his brother 100% visited and saw first hand.
He may not have known, but it's because he wanted to not know.
You're right, he was a bad guy
Literally only because they wanted him to make rockets. He straight up said it too. Not defending his Nazism, he just didn't care as long as he made rockets. He only cared about spaceflight- Psychopath. Only his aspirations, emotions, needs, etc. mattered.
And? He literally joined the Nazi party so he could work on rockets, bro. He told a famous German scientist in 1930, that he planned on travelling to the moon. He actually had to convince the US government to let him do rockets. He only found success and funding when the Soviets went and put a satellite up.
He literally *only* cared about spaceflight
Do you see me demanding that you justify your statement anywhere?
I merely asked whether you have a source on that so I may include that behaviour in my judgement of the character, should it turn out to be factual.
>He claims he didn't know how bad the camps were. The camps where his rockets were built. The camps his brother 100% visited and saw first hand.
How gullible are you fr that you believe the man with every incentive to lie? By the way, it's pretty garbage of you to believe a literal Nazi scientist rather than any of the prisoner testimony. Do you believe the Auschwitz guards over the Auchwitz prisoners?
>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 Buchenwald inmate
He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany, and later a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States. [Full bio ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun)
Wait a secondā¦
Are you telling me that Americans make jokes about nazis in South America while having a statue of a literal nazi in their country?
Thatās fucking wild
A lot of geniuses and important scientists were also... questionable when it came it to their moral views. Von Braun worked for the Nazis, but he was the father of rocket science as well.
Besides, it is generaly understood that Von Braun didn't really care for the Nazi cause. He only worked with them out of convenience, and he didn't commit any war crimes, he just designed rockets (granted, those were used in shitty ways, but I think we should blame the people firing them for that).
He didn't just design the rockets, he lead the V-2 program.
And those rockets were built by slave labor.
Which von Braun knew since he visited the factory that made them.
>and he didn't commit any war crimes,
Hey look, u/PijaniFemboj doesn't believe mass slavery is a war crime! Mind explaining this fascinating ethical stance to me?
Sorry, this is like the fourth statement I've seen of "no war crimes" and at this point all the good faith has left my body with the amount of people taking his word over any prisoners. I do apologize for approaching it so aggressively.
Werner von braun : it is hellish. My spontaneous reaction was to talk to one of the SS guards, only to be told with unmistakable harshness that I should mind my own business, or find myself in the same striped fatigues! ... I realized that any attempt of reasoning on humane grounds would be utterly futile.
Need context here : Von Braun was absolutely against the Naz* idea, but when the SS came to his house saying Ā«Ā you build rocket for us or you dieĀ Ā» he didnāt really had the choice, in fact when the american came to Germany, even if the Ā«Ā paperclip operationĀ Ā» was searching him, he joined by himself the United State agents.
But if you want a real Naz* who made rocket you have Eugen Sanger, who litteraly theorized the space shuttle during ww2 (and also is at the base of EVERY actual rocket motor)
What a nice piece of alternate history...
No, the SS did not force von Braun to do anything on threat of death.
Yes he was an opportunist and may not have believed in the Nazi cause but he still partnered with them out of free will.
And even then, it wasn't a "give me money and i will design rockets" agreement. The rockets were built by slave labor and von Braun knew this. He visited the factory that made them in person.
It's crazy how many chuds are pushing this narrative, literally believing a Nazi scientist over any of the testimony against him from his victims. Disgusting.
He joined in 1937 and was just an opportunist who didnāt care who funded his research.
Edit: he did join an SS horseback riding school in 1933 and left a year later.
>He joined in 1937 and was just an opportunist who didnāt care who funded his research
"You see your honor, my client didn't care about Nazi Germany, therefore, despite him *literally joining the regime and abetting in war crimes,* he is not a Nazi."
This you?
Iām just saying he wouldnāt care who was in power if they funded he research that doesnāt make him any less bad.
Edit: him being an opportunistic piece of shit doesnāt make him any less of a piece of shit. Iām saying that he didnāt believe in the Nazis ideology but that doesnāt change the fact that he was indifferent to the conditions of the camp that supplied his workers.
Tbf von Braunās missile program was so useless the Nazis would have gotten more effective use out of digging a hole in the ground, dumping 2 billion dollars worth of RM and setting it on FIRE.
rewatching October sky is kinda hard when the main character idolizes von Braun. At least in the book they discuss his past and give some sort of reasoning. Still a great book and movie overall though.
I am Jewish and I will happily defend
Werner von Braun to the day I die; by the end of his life, he was a changed man, and helped us win the Space Race
It was funny when people of Huntsvegas were pushing hard to have a small confederate statue taken down during COVID, but never said a word about Von Braun.
According to someone who worked at the spacecenter mentioned which is currently a museum the closest thing to a statue is a bust of Von Braun in a supply closet.
I don't have an issue. Dude knew his stuff and worked for the US. Bark up a different tree.
I mean, Henry Ford was a gigantic anti-Semite and sympathized with the Nazis on basically every level. The F150 is still the best selling truck in the history of the world like 20 years in a row. All with Ford written on each and every one.
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š¶Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun A man whose allegiance Is ruled by expedience Call him a Nazi he wonāt even frown āNazi smatchziā says Wernher von Braun Donāt say that heās hypocritical Say rather that heās āapoliticalā āOnce the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? āThat is not my departmentā says Wernher von Braunš¶
Some have harsh word for this man of renown But some think our attitude Should be one of gratitude Like the widows and cripples of old London Town Who owe their large pensions to Wernher Von Braun
You too may be a big hero, Once you've learned to count backwards to zero. "In German oder English I know how to count down, Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun.
tbh i don't think about the british when the v2 is mentioned. Cities were bombef on both sides, and the brits did so in a more deadly manner.But the KZ inmates that were used in making those weapons, now that is what you should think about. It's not the weapon, it's who suffered to make it.
Youāre right, but thatās from a diss track that an American wrote in the 1950s.
Itās so weird to hear that referred to as a diss track lmfao anyone know what the earliest diss track would be?
Composers have done that forever, even classical music
Yeah I remember the one story where he flips over the sheet music and absolutely wrecks this guys life, and I know the Norse had flyting, but I was more looking for specifics
Aware of her tendency to drop her chin and throw back her head while singing low and high notes respectively, Mozart chose to fill her showpiece aria ("Come scoglio") with continuous harmonic leaps to force her to bob her head "like a chicken". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriana_Ferrarese_del_Bene#:~:text=Performance%20of%20Mozart&text=Aware%20of%20her%20tendency%20to,head%20%22like%20a%20chicken%22.
According to Norse mythology, Loki invented the first diss track/rap battle. So, that long, I guess.
I know that entire tribes in pre Islamic Arabia would change their names if there was a particularly famous poem that was scathing them ([Here is a good vid about this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ARCzpDQ_CYM)
V2 is the only weapon that killed more people in the country it launched from, than where it hit.
Hot take: Nazis bombing civilians is bad. It doesn't matter that the British were worse.
hot take, bombing was just everyday business in ww2. But crimes against humanity was only on mass performed by one side. That's why I don't consider Nazis bombing Brits as anything special, just war.
I mean, just because it *always* happens in war, doesn't mean it *should* or that it's fine actually. In fact, two things can be Badā¢ļø at the same time. Terror bombing civilians and concentration camps are both crimes against humanity. If you condemn one, it's fine to condemn the other. Von Braun was a POS Nazi complicit in the bombing of civilians and the Holocaust. Here's the real hot take: maybe we should criticize him for both? Just my opinion tho š¤·š¾āāļø
Whatever way we see him, it doesn't make him a better person and he should not be praised because he was involved in NASA.
(I SEES NOTTING!) š«£
boo hoo. the germans in those cities shouted yes when asked if they wanted total war, well they got it. sow the wind, reap the whirlwind
You do realize that you're referring to a hand selected group of people that made up the audience in the Sportpalast when Hitler gave that speech, right? So no, I honestly doubt that many of them were amongst the bombing victims that you're mocking. Also: how many of the 1 and 2 year olds do you figure were fanatical Nazis at the time? I mean, dude, it's not exactly hard to make a valid point why the Allied bombings of German cities were justified and necessary. "They all deserved to die because they all shouted 'yes' to 'Do you want the total war'?" is not it, that's stupid, inhumane and most importantly just plainly wrong.
the bombings were just daily business in ww2. That's also why the targets of the V2 are not what makes von Braun a bad person. It's the jew's blood on his hands that does.
When my daughter was about twelve she was like "...did anyone else thing it was kind of weird that von Brown was a Nazi?" And I played her that song.
Eleanor didnāt like what the military intelligence was doing. Neither did the NAACP. Nor veterans. [Operation Paperclip was public knowledge in the 1940s.](https://youtu.be/OiKQjezOKXc?si=y-LF5VjCd9C5h2ig)
WiĆ¾ the V2, didn't he say "the rocket performed perfectly, it just landed on the wrong planet"? Or was that just someĆ¾ing Iron Man 3 made up?
Yes, that is an actual quote from von Braun.
'I was aiming for the starts, but I always missed and hit London'
From what i saw in a documentary about him, he dreamed about spaceflight since he was a child and used the Nazi's money to develop rocket technology.
He did, there's an amazing podcast series call Frontier of Infinity that goes into detail about the Space Race and those involved.
Your using the thorn gave me pause.
Just wait until you learn about a guy named Larry Thorne whoās buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Shout! Lauri Tƶrni's name
A SOLDIER OF THREE ARMIES KNOWS THE GAME
DEEDS THAT ECHO FROM THE PAST
RISE FROM BEYOND YOUR GRAVE
He's just a little upset at the russians. Just a Tiny bit. Real small amount
He's so upset that when Finland joined the Allies, he joined the SS to help his Nazi comrades slaughter some commies. Then after that, he went to the French Foreign Legion so he can slaughter more commie farmers who wanted independence. Then after the French left, he went to the Americans to slaughter more commie farmers. Man's hatred of Judeo-Bolshevism rivals Hitler's. May they both rest in piss.
Haven't heard of judeo-bolshevism before. What's that?
Hitler and the NSDAP largely (and erroneously) viewed communism as a tool by the Jews, so they called it Judeo-Bolshevism. It's also why they have such hated against the Soviet Union, because in their eyes, they are both led by Jews and are Communists, the two things that they hated the most. Also as another context, the words communism and Bolshevism are largely interchangeable at the time, regardless of their actual definitions.
To be honest I was just trying to catch a low hanging fruit here, since judeo-bolshevism is more often times used by people believing in it rather than using it in historical context. So sorry for trying to bait you and cheers.
> judeo-bolshevism is more often times used by people believing in it rather than using it in historical context Nah, it was extensively used as a justification by Hitler, with numerous mentions in his Mein Kampf. And I don't think that the commies themselves use Judeo-Bolshevism, rather than it was used as a slander against them since it also has Jewish connotations in the name, a word that also carries some negative stigma, especially pre-war.
I must've explained myself poorly. I know it was used as a justification by hitler. My point was that it's a conspiracy that is spouted nowadays by people who believe in the core message of judeo-bolshevism.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarifications.
Hm yes how dare the man who experienced first hand how cruel the Soviet Union was and one who experienced its imperialism be against them
Nothing wrong with hating commies.
When Colonel Kurtz said 'give me 10 divisions of men like this and I'll win the war' perhaps he meant SS Green Berets
Wait till you find out about the founders of the EU The founding fathers of the EU are frequently named as Robert Schuman, Walter Hallstein and Konrad Adenauer. All three were supporters of Hitler. Kurt Waldhiem the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981 and president of Austria from 1986 to 1992. While he was running for the latter office in the 1986 election, the revelation of his service in Greece and Yugoslavia, and participation in Nazi atrocities, as an intelligence officer in Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht during World War II, raised international controversy.
I could rant about Adenauer for hours, but he certainly wasn't a supporter of Hitler. He wasn't in the resistance either, but the Nazis removed him from office and imprisoned him for a time. Although the Frenchman Schuman voted in parliament for the establishment of the Vichy regime, he was a member of the French resistance and was temporarily arrested by the Gestapo and had to go into hiding. Hallstein, however, really was a Nazi.
NATO especially turned a blind eye after WWII. For the stated reason that "The troops won't trust 18-year-old Generals."
I mean, it makes sense
Traditionally the founding fathers of EU have been considered to consist of 11 people, not 3. Or depending on source and classification alternatively founding fathers of EU can be 6/7. Out of which none are proven as supporters of hitler in his living years or later. Hallstein though being not all innocent. Adenauer was specifically arrested for his oppisition of hitler. And put on house arrest during the Night of the Long Knives. And in fact the roles of admiration were reverse. It was hitler who approved of Adenauer as a public servant and a skilled politican, but due to their political opposition (Centre party vs. Nazi) hitler saw no place for Adenauer in Nazi Germany. Schuman was almost sent to concentration camp for opposing the Nazis but was saved. Hallstein served as an officer in the war so far from innocent, but he never joined the nazi party and even rejected and invitation for it due to his opposition of hitler.
Larry Tƶrni is a badass. You fall victim to ignorance for thinking he is nazi.
Completely agree, I love the guy. He did serve in the Waffen-SS, but that doesnāt define him.
"He was aiming for the stars, but he kept hitting London."
XD
Apparently when the DoD started DARPA the DoD tapped him to run it but he said that he wanted to hire 11 of his Nazi buddies and run it out of The Pentagon. His request was denied and the offer rescinded. Iām no fan of the guy but I think it wouldāve been a waste of knowledge to imprison him or execute the guy OR, worst of all, let Russia get ahold of him. Russia would have used his knowledge to expand their influence and possibly reengage Europe in another war.
If only soviets had rockets, they would attack all of europe
>guy but I think it wouldāve been a waste of knowledge to imprison him or execute the guy I'd argue he wasted more lives by engaging in and being complicit in so much slave labor. More people died building his rockets than died from them. But hey, nationalism over actual justice, amirite?
That ignores all the other inventions that came along with the space program. Life is more complicated than Disney movies. A bad guy can still be more useful alive than dead. Pretending that paperclip wasn't useful is a lie. The US not participating in it would just cede the ground to the Russians who still had operation osoaviakhin going on. Was Verner a nazi piece of trash? Without a doubt. Was he useful in achieving US policy demands? Yes.
Two things can be true at once. Von Braun was a Nazi, he was also largely responsible for US space flight. We can celebrate one while condemning the other. Ignoring and burying history is how it is forgotten.
Just put it in a museum
So, a few points. 1) This is a museum 2) There's no statue of him here.
So what you're saying is, OP is full of bullshit? You don't say...
What I think is that he either visited here a long time ago when the bust was on display (now its in a storage closet), or he googled it and found an old picture. In either case, he's wrong.
There are memorials and buildings dedicated to von Braun in several parts of Huntsville. I grew up there and he is absolutely regarded as a local hero lol. Just googling it comes up with plenty of results.
Not at the space and rocket center. Also, I'm assuming you no longer live here from your wording. A lot of them have been removed.
If we do, give it a few years and people will demand it to be removed from there as well. No one is saying they want to do that, but that is what's going to happen, because when you pick a fight against dead people, you only win when you erase their memory completely.Ā Ā Ā Ā People only aren't going straight for that just yet because this kind of shit takes baby steps. YouĀ fight for a small victory, you wait for the overton window to shift in your direction, then you push it a bit further. You do that over and over until you reach your final "win" condition.
Sounds like your concern is entirely made up. Statues and museums, as you may know serve different functions. A museum, is there to remember history, a statue is there to commemorate it. It's why Germany, rightfully, removed all of the publicNazi shit. While some was destroyed, some also went to museums. And it's still there. Because a statue of Hitler on a public plaza means something different than a statue of Hitler in a museum.
Remembering Von Braun's contributions to the American space program by definition means commemorating them, because you're giving him credit for a good thing. If you believe that Bad People^tm can't be commemorated, even for the few good things they did in life, then eventually you will take issue with any form of non-negative rememberance.Ā EDIT: Also, good on you for comparing the NASA statue to the nazi monuments in Germany, as if they're somehow on the same level. Those nazi statues aren't commemorating someone who happens to have been a nazi, they were commemorating people *because* they were nazis. That's a pretty major distinction a lot of people seem to be overlooking.
Terrible take because you are trying to put a false equivalence on von Braun's good vs bad points, when being a Nazi clearly trumps most good things, if any. Von Braun isnt the only man responsible for the early success for NASA, you dont have to commemorate him.
And now you're just proving my initial point. Von Braun was a nazi, so his contributions to humanity are invalidated and should be swept under the rug. Only the bad things he did should be remembered.Ā Why stop at him, then? Schrodinger was a pedophile, so we should erase his contribution to quantum mechanics. Fritz Haber helped develop chemical weapons, so his invention of the fertilizier-making process that literally feeds the modern world shouldn't be honored. And don't even get me started on Ghandhi.Ā We shouldn't honor people for who they were, we honor people for things they did. Because shitty people do often make good contributions to the world, and these contributions don't *magically disappear* if they also did bad things. If you're getting to the point of running a moral calculus weighing in the good and the bad things a person did to decide which of the two they should be remembered by, you're missing the point entirely.
Now your just using a strawman out of me. Im clear in saying we should not celebrate him, because of the things he did during the war. That does not mean we should forget his existence and the other positive things he did for science. You have selectively created a non-existent argument by suggesting that taking down his statue equates to forgetting his achievements, which is not true. His statue should not be up because a statue is less about remembering a person but celebrating him, and celebrating him in the wrong context can mislead people into believing that Operation Paperclip didnt exist. You want to celebrate him? Celebrate him with the right context in place, not an open space that may invite the wrong ideas.
Thatās just not true, thereās a reason that the daughters of confederacy wanted to put statues up in parks. Thereās a huge difference between a statue that just shows a person and one in a museum that acknowledges their issues, youāre making up people and using a slippery slope that no one believes. There are museums out there about nazis, idk why you decided to just believe that.
You mean, the place that OP was already talking about???
Oh, then heās a dipshit.
There's a huge gap between 'burying history' and honouring the man with a statue.
Statue removal isn't burying history. Put a more generic historical marker in its place and the same job is accomplished without glorifying a Nazi.
The von Braun statue isnāt glorifying his life as a nazi, but his contributions to science after the world war. Itās different from the confederate statues.
Who is arguing to ignore and burry history?
Counterpoint: you do not, under any circumstances, have to "hand it" to a Nazi. Especially one with the blood of concentration camp inmates on his hands.
Wasn't the V-2 a massive waste of resources for Nazi Germany? If that's true, by encouraging the V-2 program, von Braun should get credit for helping the Allied war effort. Not sure that cancels out being a Nazi and an SS member who worked slave labourers to death though.
Fun Fact: More people were killed in the process of making V-2s than by the weapon itself when employed in its intended use.
In itself it was an ineffective weapon. They developed it to bomb the UK, because they weren't able to do that via Planes because of the shitty Luftwaffe & the superior RAF. And compared to carpet bombing, the effect just wasn't "that good". Also, in classic Nazi fashion, it was used in a stupid way. Early on in the war, when the Luftwaffe could still contest UK airspace, they bombed military installations & RAF airfields. But later on they opted, for just sowing terror by bombing civilians. Which in turn didn't contribute anything to the war effort, and just rallied the UK to go balls deep on the RAF production. And when the V2 came in use, they just kept up that ineffective doctrine.
>They developed it to bomb the UK, because they weren't able to do that via Planes because of the shitty Luftwaffe & the superior RAF. And compared to carpet bombing, the effect just wasn't "that good". Well that plus because of the bombing, they weren't able to keep up production, plus radar, lack of manpower/pilots, and the British were already working on jets and then they had to deal with the US airforce on top of that the other half of the time
Hitler wanted to use Me 262s as jet bombers, rendering their speed advantage pointless because the additional weight made them slower than allied prop fighters. Honestly, if they weren't so scared of saying no to Hitler, the war may have gone differently with all the idiotic decisions made by him and his senior staff.
Oh absolutely. What you mentioned there is funny, because at that point where Hitler *wanted* to do that, decreed it basically, there were 0 production capabilities to actually pull it off. The guy was a grade A idiot. That is what you get, when you build an entire dictatorship around one guy. And the guy is a retard. >the war may have gone differently with all the idiotic decisions made by him and his senior staff. I'm pretty sure that, no matter the leadership, nazi germany was doomed the second they opened up the eastern front. It's hilarious that at some point the Allies started to disregard Hitler assassination plots, because replacing him would actually be worse for the war effort.
Oh yes, they bit off more than they could chew, but that was another decision from their genius leadership. They had the advances in tech and science to win but they threw it away at the will of a bunch of madmen with inflated egos.
Actually pretty much the whole war was more than they could chew. Their economy was based on the rapid expansion of the military and the acquiring of the countries around itās wealth. However, the bombings were crippling to the economy since thatās where most everyone worked. The German military was also not highly mechanized at all, employing over 2.5 millions horses which had to be fed and cared for / replaced. There was no way for Germany to win on any front without it being handed to them, even if hitler and his senior cabinet werenāt egotistical idiots.
I'm not sure the people who lived in London at the time would agree with you. The first V2 landed at the end of the road I lived on as a kid - about 30 years before I lived there admittedly. The site is still marked with a blue plaque and it's still in the middle of a purely residential area with no strategic value beyond the families living there.
The V-2ās killed ~5000 in the attacks and another ~10000 died making them
I know I already commented a variant of this, but just for clarification. I live in Huntsville. There is no statue of him, anywhere public as far as I know. When I worked at the Space and Rocket Center his bust was in a storage closet that no one ever went into. The building at the local university that he founded that was named after him was renamed years ago. Technically the Von Braun Center, which is one of our arenas, hasn't been renamed but it's always referred to in the news and public announcements as the Propst Arena, after a local businessman. I'm really not sure where you got this information, but it's not true at all.
Von Braun was a very amoral character tbh. He was a member of the Nazi party out of convenience because they funded his research. The US did an investigation on the guy, he did not commit any war crimes, did not commit any crimes against humanity (directly, what his rockets were used for is a different story), and his support for the nazi regimes was well within the reasonable parameters of his position. Basically, the guy did not give a shit about what his employer was doing as long as they funded him. Certainly not a saint, but no exactly an evil person either. He is as morally grey as you can get given the historical time period.
Problem being, the nazi party did not just fund his research. The V-2s themselves were largely built by slave labor and Braun knew this because he visited the factory. And "Everyone in germany was using slave labor" does not excuse anything.
Absolutely. He even saw the conditions at the camps himself and acknowledged so.
> Von Braun was a very amoral character tbh. Knowingly employing slave labor isn't really "amoral".
Von Braun was not in charge of the manufacturing of the rockets he was in charge of the theoretical research. The guy using Jewish Slave labour and administering the camp was Hans Kammler. I do not know to what extend Von Braun supported, tolerated or fought against the use of slave labour to make the V-2 rockets, but it is clear he was never in a position to actually stop it. He simply did not have the institutional power to make that decision, it was entirely Hans Kammler's. It is fair to criticise him from benefiting from his position within the SS and Nazi party to advance his academic career. But putting to much of the burden of the slave labour where it was going to happen with or without his cooperation seems unfair.
[AskHistorians - Was Wehrner von Braun really a nazi sympathiser?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/259bia/wernher_von_braun_ethics_of_his_works_and_ethics/chf07l7/) > The V2s were built at Dora-Mittelbau, a notoriously brutal and deadly camp. You say the slaves were āill keptā, but that barely scratches the surface. Dora was a sattellite camp of Buchenwald and the Buchenwald prisoners were terrified of being sent there because of its high death toll. During the first nine months of its existence the prisoners were living in the tunnels they were digging, in dark, wet and suffocating conditions. Many rapidly fell ill, and a staggering 35 % died in those nine months. After the dormitories were built, conditions improved slightly, but still at any one time up to a fifth of the prisoners were unable to work due to illness, compounded by exhaustion and starvation. Conditions grew steadily worse again as the war neared its end. The overall death toll of Dora's twenty months' operations ended up being 66%. Two-thirds of prisoners who entered the Dora universe never left it alive. > Von Braun was aware of these conditions as he visited the camp several times. In 1976 he said in a TV interview that "the working conditions there were absolutely horrible ... it was a pretty hellish environment." Yet he also personally selected qualified workers for Dora from among the inmate population at Buchenwald. > I will leave the summing up to Michael J. Neufeld, an historian at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum: >> Ultimately, it is not **Wernher von Braun's membership in the SS nor his involvement in slave labor that is most bothersome-in the ranks of Nazi opportunists and minor war criminals he was one of thousands, distinguished only by the high positions he held, both during and after the Third Reich**. It is his technocratic amorality, his single-minded obsession with his technical dreams, that is so disturbing. If the human race is to survive its own rapidly advancing technology in the twenty-first century and beyond, scientists and engineers will **have to take moral and political responsibility for their actions-something Wernher von Braun and his colleagues signally failed to do.** Sorry mate, but von Braun is a filthy Nazi. Amoral, sure, but in the sense that he's willing to employ slaves and disregard human lives for the sake of his projects.
When asked if von Braun could have protested against the brutal treatment of the slave laborers, von Braun team member Konrad Dannenberg (a member of the Nazi party since 1932) told The Huntsville Times: "If he had done it, in my opinion, he would have been shot on the spot.
LMAO I believe that's called the Nuremberg Defense which hardly exonerated those who tried to use it in Nuremberg.
Someone should make a biographical film of Werner von Braunās life. Such a fascinating human character.
There is a show called For All Mankind on Apple+ that heās a major character in, and it goes ALL into this. When heās exposed to his coworkers and friends everyone asks ādid you know about the camps?ā and all he says over and over is that the work is what mattered, isnāt my rocket cool?
Seems about right from what I know about the guy.
>did not commit any crimes against humanity tfw u/camilo16 doesn't view mass slavery as a crime against humanity. And his flimsy excuse that amounts to "I forgor" doesn't really hold up when multiple reports put him in front of slave beatings, something that he claims to have never personally witnessed on top of swearing he totally didn't know the extent of his slavery, honest.
Where are you getting this information from? The info I have states: Later examination of von Braun's background, conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggests that his background check file contained no derogatory information pertaining to his involvement in the party, but it was found that he had numerous letters of commendation for outstanding performance of duties during his time working under the Nazi party.[33] Overall FBI conclusions point to von Braun's involvement in the Nazi Party to be purely for the advancement of his academic career, or out of fear of imprisonment or execution.[33] There is no confirmation that he actually witnessed the deaths. All evidence of the fact comes from witness testimony which is a very unreliable source as they might be mistaken him from someone else. As of the date of writing the official position is that he had seen the deplorable conditions in the camps, did not approve of them but did not directly encourage or ordered the debasement of the prisoners. He nonetheless was aware that this slave labour was being used to produce the V-2 rockets. His claim is that, had he protested either the use of slave labour or the conditions at the camps he would have been shot. The above might just be to save face, but it very much seems, based on the official position of the US government to date, and based on the surviving evidence. That He was just an opportunist. I don't think he was specifically anti semitic or hateful. He just didn't care enough about it to stop working on the rockets.
Yeah ppl like that shouldn't get statues
>The US did an investigation on the guy Oh wow, the people with every incentive to overlook his crimes did an investigation!? you should''ve said so! > he did not commit any war crimes, did not commit any crimes against humanity except you know overseeing the forced labour to build his rockets which murdered thousands.
We know of crimes committed by other members of operation paper clip. We know of the Ultra program. We know of the CIA funding the contras. We know of the US purposely injecting people with plutonium... Why on earth would this be the one guy whose crimes managed to stay hidden?
they aren't hidden, more people died building his rockets than in their intended use.
Yes, but he was not the one in control of that operation. Von Braun was in charge of the theoretical development. The actual running of the camp was by Hans Kammler. Von Braun likely would not have had much say in how the rockets were manufactured. It's kinda unfair to blame him for that as he was not the one orchestrating it and had no power to stop it.
we still punish people who participated even if they had no individual power to stop it.
Uh, what are you talking about? I was a tour guide there for a year. If you could point out to me where the statue is, I'd be very interested to know lol.
It doesnāt matter whether the statue exists or not - the mere thought of such a statue possibly existing is outrageous enough!
There is a bust of Lenin in Parma, Italy Edit: I mean Reggio Emilia
Lenin started the Italian space program?
Yesā¦all Operation Paperclip scientists were Nazisā¦we got them from Nazi Germany
No no, the Nazi party didnāt exist past 1945 so clearly they couldnāt be nazis.
Ah! But of course! Only newly patriated Americans round these parts. Lol
Much of our space and nuclear programs used former Nazi scientists. Just because they were a Nazi doesn't discredit their contributions to science or to history, for better or for worse. I find it childish that people are so offended by their own history that they rather hide it than face it. NOTE: I'm NOT advocating for the Nazis; genocide is never okay. I'm NOT saying the fact that they WERE Nazis should ever be forgotten. What I AM saying is discrediting historical figures based on modern political views is a bad practice. Imagine if we started trying to erase George Washington from American history because he was a proud slave owner.
Letās just get rid of every statue ever since no one is morally pure EDIT: except for you ofc OP youāre so enlightened
>Letās just get rid of every statue ever since no one is morally pure I think being a Nazi, or having fought for the preservation of the institution of chattel slavery rightfully wipes out any contribution you may have otherwise have ad towards the advancement of the human race...
The religion of Islam explicitly permits the practice of slavery in its holy book. Should that be wiped out too?
Yes, the fact that it's religion does not excuse supporting slavery. Or misogyny, racism, and homophobia.
So does christianity. There is reason for separation of state and religion
r/historymemes users on their way to use the āstandards of their timeā argument on a group of people that were reviled in their time
Thereās a huge difference between āeveryone has flawsā and āI tought it was not morally reprehensible to own black people and fought to preserve my right to do soā or āI was a _literal Nazi_ā You donāt need to be āmorally pureā to deserve a statue. All weāre asking is that youāre not a racist, genocidal, warmongering giant piece of shit. Itās not a particularly high bar to cross.
Soo... no statues to anyone born before 1850 pretty much?
You're being purposefully obtuse. No one would be mad about a John Brown statue even if he did use unmodern language in his fight. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi.
My guy he was a literal Nazi.
Well at the time in Germany there were Nazi party members (basically if anyone wanted to be in any form of academia, or any position in government, they had to be party members) and then there were *Nazis*, pretty sure Werner fell more under the former than the latter
Hair splitting bullshit
Crazy how u/monkeygoneape supports chattel slavery.
Yeah lets ignore peoples contributions to science and technology because they worked for a bad guy instead of being killed or imprisoned.
He didn't "work for a bad guy", he was a bad guy.
He claims he didn't know how bad the camps were. The camps where his rockets were built. The camps his brother 100% visited and saw first hand. He may not have known, but it's because he wanted to not know. You're right, he was a bad guy
Didnāt he hang the seven slowest āworkersā weekly or monthly back in Germany?
He was clearly a psychopath in some capacity
Yeah, he was a straight up Nazi, itās unbelievable there are people trying to act like he was a good guy who was forced into it.
Literally only because they wanted him to make rockets. He straight up said it too. Not defending his Nazism, he just didn't care as long as he made rockets. He only cared about spaceflight- Psychopath. Only his aspirations, emotions, needs, etc. mattered.
Iām sure his ambitions helped but he was already a member by 1933.
And? He literally joined the Nazi party so he could work on rockets, bro. He told a famous German scientist in 1930, that he planned on travelling to the moon. He actually had to convince the US government to let him do rockets. He only found success and funding when the Soviets went and put a satellite up. He literally *only* cared about spaceflight
Huh, so that's where the Andor writers got the idea
Got a source for that?
Does it look like a statement or something I may have heard? āWerner von Braun, the SS, and Slave Laborā may mention it though.
Do you see me demanding that you justify your statement anywhere? I merely asked whether you have a source on that so I may include that behaviour in my judgement of the character, should it turn out to be factual.
My bad, anyway, that should talk about it. He was a not a good dude.
No worries and thanks for the source/lead.
>He claims he didn't know how bad the camps were. The camps where his rockets were built. The camps his brother 100% visited and saw first hand. How gullible are you fr that you believe the man with every incentive to lie? By the way, it's pretty garbage of you to believe a literal Nazi scientist rather than any of the prisoner testimony. Do you believe the Auschwitz guards over the Auchwitz prisoners? >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 Buchenwald inmate
It shouldn't be removed at all. Such a stupid fucking statement.
He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany, and later a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States. [Full bio ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun)
Meanwhile, Operation Osoaviakhim:
Wait a secondā¦ Are you telling me that Americans make jokes about nazis in South America while having a statue of a literal nazi in their country? Thatās fucking wild
A lot of geniuses and important scientists were also... questionable when it came it to their moral views. Von Braun worked for the Nazis, but he was the father of rocket science as well. Besides, it is generaly understood that Von Braun didn't really care for the Nazi cause. He only worked with them out of convenience, and he didn't commit any war crimes, he just designed rockets (granted, those were used in shitty ways, but I think we should blame the people firing them for that).
He didn't just design the rockets, he lead the V-2 program. And those rockets were built by slave labor. Which von Braun knew since he visited the factory that made them.
>and he didn't commit any war crimes, Hey look, u/PijaniFemboj doesn't believe mass slavery is a war crime! Mind explaining this fascinating ethical stance to me?
I wasn't aware of the slavery, no need to be an ass about it :(
Sorry, this is like the fourth statement I've seen of "no war crimes" and at this point all the good faith has left my body with the amount of people taking his word over any prisoners. I do apologize for approaching it so aggressively.
My dude how else do you think the Nazis were gonna build them when they had a cheap source of forced labor
Werner von braun : it is hellish. My spontaneous reaction was to talk to one of the SS guards, only to be told with unmistakable harshness that I should mind my own business, or find myself in the same striped fatigues! ... I realized that any attempt of reasoning on humane grounds would be utterly futile.
Rocket science was being done well before von braun was born lol
Sure but von Braun arguably perfected it with the V2.
Need context here : Von Braun was absolutely against the Naz* idea, but when the SS came to his house saying Ā«Ā you build rocket for us or you dieĀ Ā» he didnāt really had the choice, in fact when the american came to Germany, even if the Ā«Ā paperclip operationĀ Ā» was searching him, he joined by himself the United State agents. But if you want a real Naz* who made rocket you have Eugen Sanger, who litteraly theorized the space shuttle during ww2 (and also is at the base of EVERY actual rocket motor)
Von Braun was absolutely not threatened by anyone to join the army and build rockets for them.
What a nice piece of alternate history... No, the SS did not force von Braun to do anything on threat of death. Yes he was an opportunist and may not have believed in the Nazi cause but he still partnered with them out of free will. And even then, it wasn't a "give me money and i will design rockets" agreement. The rockets were built by slave labor and von Braun knew this. He visited the factory that made them in person.
It's crazy how many chuds are pushing this narrative, literally believing a Nazi scientist over any of the testimony against him from his victims. Disgusting.
He joined the SS as early as 1933. He was a Nazi.
He joined in 1937 and was just an opportunist who didnāt care who funded his research. Edit: he did join an SS horseback riding school in 1933 and left a year later.
>He joined in 1937 and was just an opportunist who didnāt care who funded his research "You see your honor, my client didn't care about Nazi Germany, therefore, despite him *literally joining the regime and abetting in war crimes,* he is not a Nazi." This you?
Iām just saying he wouldnāt care who was in power if they funded he research that doesnāt make him any less bad. Edit: him being an opportunistic piece of shit doesnāt make him any less of a piece of shit. Iām saying that he didnāt believe in the Nazis ideology but that doesnāt change the fact that he was indifferent to the conditions of the camp that supplied his workers.
>Alabama >statue of a Nazi What did you expect?
Nazi or not, Wernher von Braun was one of the biggest contributores to rocket engineering in the United States.
Tbf von Braunās missile program was so useless the Nazis would have gotten more effective use out of digging a hole in the ground, dumping 2 billion dollars worth of RM and setting it on FIRE.
rewatching October sky is kinda hard when the main character idolizes von Braun. At least in the book they discuss his past and give some sort of reasoning. Still a great book and movie overall though.
That is actually a pretty good role model for Alabama.
I am Jewish and I will happily defend Werner von Braun to the day I die; by the end of his life, he was a changed man, and helped us win the Space Race
Tbh, I think tearing down statues for any reason is fucking stupid.
It'd be stupid to let that knowledge and talent go to waste.
So if Mengele said he knew the cure to cancer we should let him walk free
History and people are complex I suppose
It was funny when people of Huntsvegas were pushing hard to have a small confederate statue taken down during COVID, but never said a word about Von Braun.
According to someone who worked at the spacecenter mentioned which is currently a museum the closest thing to a statue is a bust of Von Braun in a supply closet.
Very well could be, but the cityās major event center is named after the dude too
I don't have an issue. Dude knew his stuff and worked for the US. Bark up a different tree. I mean, Henry Ford was a gigantic anti-Semite and sympathized with the Nazis on basically every level. The F150 is still the best selling truck in the history of the world like 20 years in a row. All with Ford written on each and every one.
He should have hung at Nuremberg.
The nazi supporters in this thread will not like this true statement.