The film feature “WVB, rocket man for war and peace” was entertaining though undoubtedly biased. It focused on the man and his love for his science. It glossed over what was obvious: he was a very powerful man and very well at home in either nazi Germany, or cold war cum space race era United States. Equally entertaining was satirist singer Tom Lehrer’s tribute to the blue-blooded scientist. It’s worth pointing out that Lehrer is Jewish, from an affluent family, who studied at Harvard.
[…]
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down…”
“…that’s not my department,” says Werner von Braun.’
So what do you guys think? My own opinion is he was little more than a geek who had enough street smarts to parlay his talent where it was needed. I’m a bit at a lost on whether or not to pin responsibility on a back-room scientist/professional whose end work resulted in many deaths during war, and formed the spearhead of the cold war weapons race.
[…]
“In German, or English, I know how to count down…”
“But I’m learning CHINESE,” says Werner von Braun.’
[OP’s note: that last one’s obviously a joke, or was it?]
Lehrer is widely credited with inventing Jello shots, a boon to college students the world over. WVB got to do what he wanted to in life, build rockets. That he did it with slave labor that was starved to death and blow up hundreds isn’t really to his credit. I say let history forget him.
That’s kinda my opinion. Sorta like Leon Theremin with his electronic gizmos. I think he cared less about his helping the Motherland, that the fact that he had a cushy government job where he got to make all kinds of neat elctronic (spy) gadgets. Plus, Stalin probably made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Also ballistics expert Gerald Bull. I doubt that he really cared about helping Iraq. He just liked to big build guns.
What, if anything, did the documentary mention about Mittelbau-Dora, and why von Braun never went before any war crimes tribunal for what he did or did not know about it?
Then again, if the U.S. was willing to look the other way for the likes of Masaji Kitano, I shouldn’t be surprised that they’d do the same (allegedly) for von Braun.
Bear in mind two things:
-Von Braun KNEW that Germany would lose the war. His Peenemunde rocket factory was bombed by the British, and he knew that it was only a question of time before Germany would lose.
-Von Braun was being watched by the Gestapo, and by the SS. Any hint of disloyalty would be punished…harshly
So he had to make compromises to survive…would anyone else do anything different? Maybe, but the possibility of getting a bullet in the back of the head would change your way of thinking.
I wonder if it wasn’t sort of like one of those philosophlical conundrums where you can either not act, and have the train run into and kill 100 people, or act and have the train veer off and kill 10 people. If the rocket program had not been in place, who knows if there would not have been more Nazi emphasis on research of something more effective such as jet fighters or cheap and reliable main battle tanks. So perhaps by succeeding, WvB prevented those programs from receiving as much research as they needed, perhaps saving lives in the balance.
This holds true for other “denazified” German scientists like Von Braun scooped up in Operation Paperclip. The goal was to make sure their intellectual and scientific know-how ended up in the service of America and not the USSR or other unfriendlies. I’m sure the implied threat of “keep doing useful work for us and we’ll take the kindest view possible on your wartime activities and keep you out of Russian hands…” didn’t need to be said explicitly to them, either.
The third verse is a joke. The last one is a joke but it’s kind of the point of the song: von Braun liked making rockets and didn’t give a moment’s through to who used them, so he’d be just as happy making them for the Communist Chinese government as he was for the Americans and the Nazis. I don’t know much of anything about von Braun, but I think you’re excusing his own faults and responsibility for what he did - you described him as a very powerful man in one paragraph and just a backroom geek later on. Compare that to Einstein, who felt very guilty about his role in encouraging the U.S. to develop the atomic bomb to prevent the Nazis from doing the same (even though I think Einstein understood it was necessary and the lesser of the two evils). And I think you’re way off-base to inject Lehrer’s ethnic background into this.
I’ve shortened the quotes from the song in the OP (we ask that people not quote more than four or five lines from songs that are under copyright) and added a link to a site with the lyrics.
I believe that Einstein recommended not using nuclear weapons after the Germans were defeated and he learned that they were to be used on Japan.
But I digress.
Even the Gestapo wasn’t shooting every person in Germany who wasn’t working for them. The reality is that many Germans did refuse to work for the Nazi regime - and the only repercussions were they didn’t work for the Nazi regime. This was a point established at Wilhelm Keitel’s trial at Nuremberg when he claimed in his defense that he had had no choice except to carry out Hitler’s orders. The prosecution pointed to examples of other high-ranking German officers who had resigned without facing any significant consequences.
Read Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. It won’t spoon-feed you an answer but it might give you the information you need to decide for yourself.
