Tomorrow is the 50th Anniversary of the moon landing. The Apollo 11 lander touched down on July 20, and the first moonwalk took place on July 21.
Because journalism in 2019 is fucking awful, a true coat hanger abortion dumpster fire of opinionated deceit, I have seen quite a number of opinions online about Werhner von Braun the Nazi and what that means about America.
Very few things in life are ever perfectly cut black and white, there is usually a lot of shades of gray.
War has a tendency to blur that even more.
Prior to the rise of the Nazi government, Germany and Austria were home to a substantial number of Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry and Physics. Any student of chemistry knows how many Germans contributed to that field in the early part of the 20th Century.
This history of research led to the Nazis having an amazing science and engineering program. Germany was a technology powerhouse. If it wasn’t, it would not have been able to fight a war on three fronts (East, West, and the Atlantic Ocean) so effectively for so long given its relatively small population.
Not just did the Germans have the first ballistic missiles, but they brought some of the best planes and tanks to the front, having the first jet-powered aircraft, and highly capable submarine technology.
The United States eventually caught up and surpassed Germany in most areas, but it took a concerted effort and we were late to the game.
When the war was nearing its end, a question arose in the highest ranks of the American government. What to do with all the German scientists and engineers that survived and the research and development that they did?
Practically speaking, there were three options.
1. They could be tried as Nazi collaborators and imprisoned or hung.
2. They could be left in Germany to be captured by the Soviets and put to work building the arsenal of communism.
3. They could be captured and put to work building the arsenal of freedom.
The United States government, after much deliberation, decided that the most prudent course of action was to capture these men and put them to work on our side.
The task of doing that became known as Operation Paperclip.
In a covert affair originally dubbed Operation Overcast but later renamed Operation Paperclip, roughly 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf during the Cold War. The program was run by the newly-formed Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), whose goal was to harness German intellectual resources to help develop America’s arsenal of rockets and other biological and chemical weapons, and to ensure such coveted information did not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union.
That knowledge was going to go to either us or the Soviets, and we weren’t going to let it fall into the hands of the Soviets.
Now if you thought that the CIA occasionally had a dirty Job, the JOIA was born out of doing a dirty job.
Although he officially sanctioned the operation, President Harry Truman forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members or active Nazi supporters. Nevertheless, officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner to the CIA—bypassed this directive by eliminating or whitewashing incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.
We were willing to look the other way until our necks cracked and our eyes strained to prevent critical scientific knowledge from going to the Soviets or dying on the gallows.
“One example was they had no idea that Hitler had created this whole arsenal of nerve agents,” Jacobsen says. “They had no idea that Hitler was working on a bubonic plague weapon. That is really where Paperclip began, which was suddenly the Pentagon realizing, ‘Wait a minute, we need these weapons for ourselves.’”
Wernher von Braun was perhaps the most famous ex-Nazi to serve a critical role in the United States building the arsenal of freedom, however, there were others who did everything from spacesuit design to developing counter agents to Soviet biological weapons.
I want to make this clear. I am not excusing the Nazis of anything. Many of the men who were captured in Operation Paperclip were responsible for developing some of the worst weapons and atrocities in Nazi Germany.
The issue is, in the late 1940’s what option was the lesser of the evils.
Our government decided that it was better to put former Nazis on the payroll and direct their efforts in the direction favorable to the United States, and peace and freedom than to let the Soviets have it and use it to commit the kind of atrocities that the Soviets had already proven they were capable of.
Imagine a world in which von Braun and others went to work in Moscow and the Soviet Union develops the technology to build a fleet of nuclear and chemical weapon tipped ICBMs by the 1950’s with no matching American deterrent. Where it was the Soviets that broke the sound barrier and developed the flying wing style stealth bomber.
Yes, these men were Nazis.
Might some of them, like von Braun have been redeemed by the good that came from the work they did under the purview of the United States government? Maybe.
What I do know, is that the post-WWII Cold War era was a different time and nothing, especially groundbreaking Nazi, science is ever straight forward in morality.
The fact that an ex-Nazi help put us on the moon and ran Marshall Space Flight Center doesn’t detract from the greatness of the Apollo missions.
The fact that we made a deal with the devil is part of the reason that we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and not the 50th anniversary of the strategic nuking of the United States by the Soviets this year.
I’ve been enjoying the 4 part web pod cast by Bill Whittle _Apollo 11: What W Saw_. There is an entire 10 minute section on this issue. And it matches some of the history I’ve been reading.
During the time frame in question, every “good German” had a copy of _Mein Kampf_ (My Struggle). They owned a copy not because they were “good Nazi’s” but because it was one of the ways you stayed alive.
von Braun had many opportunities to join the Nazi party and declined, over and over again. He rejected becoming a member for as long as it was safe for him to do so. When he finally became a member it was pretty much after all the gung-ho german’s had already joined and long before anybody knew about The Final Solution.
In addition, even though he was a member of the Nazi party and the SS, the part of the SS he was in was not part of the Waffen-SS but instead was a member of the Allgemeine SS. As part of this group he spent most of his time designing ballistic missiles (V2). Over 5000 V2s were build and they killed somewhat over 2000 people.
Regardless of all of the above, the V2 was built by slave labor (Jews) and the death rate of the slave labor was much higher than the death rate of the Londoners being bombed by the V2.
The point is, that you can’t use a broad brush in painting history. Yes, von Braun was a Nazi. History suggests that he joined under duress. History suggests that he didn’t know about the death camps though it was highly likely that he did know about the slave labor.
After WWII, he worked hard to “redeem” himself.
In the end, I would suggest that von Braun wasn’t evil nor was he good. He was so involved in rockets that he just didn’t care who or what was providing him with the opportunity to build and fly rockets. As such he turned a blind eye to the suffering of the slaves building his V2s and when the US gave him a chance to build rockets for us, he didn’t blink as he turned his back on Germany.
Another lesson, especially important with the resurgence of socialism and the ‘Squad’, is that Germany was the best place for Jews to live in the word in the years just prior to the rise of the National Socialists. The rabbis of that era lamented about the high rate of intermarriage, Jews were accepted in the society- much like America today. But ‘it can’t happen here’ trope is not even murmured here; the “Squad” can’t even a beer hall…..
Along with what Therefore related above, I have also heard that it was not healthy to be a scientist of any sort in Nazi Germany, and not be a member of the party; if you’re not using your scientific mind for the Party, then just who were you using it for, hmmm?
This comes from some of the “old guys” at the places where I’ve worked, who were 1st or 2nd-generation students of some of those Paperclip alums.
I’m very conflicted on this and have been for many years. We cannot excuse, under any criteria, the war crimes these scientists working for the SS committed. SS-Sturmbannführer (Major, his final rank in 1943) Werner von Braun used slave labor at Peenemünde, for God’s sake! And he was one of hundreds of compromised scientists! I would have greatly preferred our country to punish these men, even if just a loud and public rebuke and condemnation of their past, and then put them to work for us. It’s not a pretty solution, but one that at least has a minimal moral and ethical component of TRUTH. The more I learn about what the Germans did, the less I’m willing to excuse any of them.
It is easy to condemn people from the past while you sit in the comfort of a future that was only made possible by the very people you are judging. There are some truly evil things that were done by this country, but it is easier to say that in hindsight.
– It was once US law that people of Chinese descent could not vote or own property. Their testimony was not admissible in court.
– You only have to look at how the Irish were treated by the Know Nothing party to see how things were. Jews were no better off.
So what do we do? Honor the accomplishments of the men who built America? Or do we disavow what they built and judge them by the standards of a people who were not yet even born?
If you are looking for the people of the past to be pure and perfect, you will find little there to be proud of.
And it might be good to keep in mind that we will also be judged by the future.
We did the same after the fall of the Soviet Union, giving citizenship to physicists, biologists, and their families, to keep them from working from various failed and hostile states around the world.
Let’s not forget that we sided with the USSR to first destroy Nazi Germany. The Soviets were murderous communists. It was political expediency and it helped save American lives. My moral outrage meter is not moving drastically that we did not execute a couple of Nazi scientists.
You want to moan about a lack of justice? How about the 60 million dead babies at the hands of the butchers at Planned Parenthood. That is pretty morally sick.
Braden, as I said, I’m conflicted about it. I know in the end it was the right decision to make, but it still feels dirty. And yes, we did ally with the USSR, and that stills feels dirty, too. Necessary, but dirty. And I agree with you that the Nazis are pikers in comparison of the numbers to the butchers of Planned Parenthood, the intellectual descendants of the Nazis via Margaret Sanger.
“There is no morality in geopolitics.”