In the song “Werner von Braun”, Tom Lehrer makes some pointed remarks about the man who sent us to the moon:
*Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown
“Ha, Nazi schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun*
Now, when I was in elementary and high school (late 70s-1989), we were generally taught that von Braun had worked for the Nazis but was basically forced to do so, and that his work for the US was what basically jumpstarted our space programs.
Was there actually a great deal of suspicion about von Braun’s allegiances in the 50s-60s?
From what they were saying about von Braun when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, he was the hero of the US space program. Lehrer’s song was just an attempt to point out that some of the superficial elements of his life don’t look all that good. I don’t think the allegations in the song were ever taken seriously, even by Lehrer.
It’s hard to tell, at this remove. I wasn’t even alive when most of Lehrer’s discography was published, so I’m not really sure how close any of his more political songs were to his own or popular opinion. (I DO know that “Vatican Rag” plays off a very wide and popular anti-Vatican II wave among Catholics (some remnants of which are still extant))
The government certainly was suspicious of von Braun even though they had no compunctions about squeezing him and his fellow German refugees from every scrap of knowledge they had. One of the reasons that the Russians beat us into space and the Navy was given the first chance to send up a satellite is that von Braun’s team was never given full funding or full trust.
I’m a bit too young to know what public attitudes toward him was like first hand, but looking back it appears that official government propaganda was that he was a good guy, that he did have good p.r. as the face of many documentaries and books about space, but that those who didn’t buy into the official line were much more cynical. Germans were simply not well liked in the 1950s, much less ex-Nazis, whether they now worked for us or not.
Lehrer was a cult favorite, not a popular one. His views were certainly eastern intellectual elite, but I mean that in a good way.
Von Braun was definitely in the Nazi party since 1937, and possibly as early as 1932. He was also an SS officer. But these things were required for “his life’s work”, as he put it. It’s a complex issue, discussed at some length here:
Von Braun claimed that he was largely incapable of ameliorating the sufferings of the concentration camp inmates, and was threatened by the guards. He was himself arrestecd at one point. In principle, he could’ve stoped working on the project that was certainly causing destruction on the enemy. But why should he? He had counterparts in the Allies working on weapons of destruction for our side, too.
In what sense, allegiances to whom? Are you asking if the US suspected that he secretly wished to resurrect Nazi Germany, that he might “defect” to the Soviets or what? If you are simply asking if the US suspected he was an active Nazi, I believe the current conventional wisdom is that sure it knew, but chose not to care while he was useful.
I think all Lehrer was doing was suggesting that you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.
He was expressing the thought that no matter how much an ex-German might protest, wave his new flag or take an oath, the suspicion is always there that deep down inside is a German. And scratch a German, what do you get?
At least he did it with humor. Not unlike Mel Brooks.
