And that the people of the US were lied to in a massive PR campaign to justify not hanging them.

There are ongoing and, imho, increasingly common efforts to paint the Nazis as “not that bad.” Some of it is undoubtedly ignorance, but some of it is certainly not. Von Braun may not have been as ideologically entrenched as others, but there was no question about what team he was on before he tucked tail and ran away from the Russians.

I suspect the space race inspired a lot of youngsters to become space groupies with many like Homer ending up with NASA or jobs related to the space industry. I would say the drive is the unknown, the challenge and the ambition to succeed in a field that is untamed and full of not only exasperation but exhilaration.

http://www.homerhickam.com/index.shtml

The most resourceful.

Rommel refused to join the Nazi Party and, as a result, was shot. The Reich was nice enough to allow him to visit with his family on his last day, and then was taken from his house, into the back yard, and executed.

No, I believe that von Braun did the only thing he could.

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That was my original posting. Able to take a moment to review my history, I find that Romel was forced to take his own life.

Again, not a path von Braun would aspire to copy.

Yeah, I saw the biopic too. Recently, on TV.. It was a pretty slick piece of propaganda, designed to persuade the intended American audience he was an OK kind of guy.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t true, but it had Madison Ave written all over it.

My take on it all was that WvB didn’t particularly have anything to do with the Holocaust, he did little to stop it, and he certainly profited from it.

Personally, I don’t blame him for that. He had a professional reputation as a rocket man, and it was logical for him to be drafted into that effort. If I had been in his shoes, I doubt I would have stood on principle and refused to accept the position.

The film suggests he was coerced into joining the Party. I don’t know about that, but was he coerced into joining the SS too? And to eventually accept the rank of Colonel?

My point isn’t to open up a can of worms about a dead man who might have been an evil man before I was even born. I was just making a point about space groupies. They have their priorities, and they take them very seriously.

His decision to defect to the allies was strictly a practical one: he knew the West was less likely to enslave him, or kill him on the spot. By that stage in the war, all Germans knew perfectly well the kind of war the Wehrmacht had inflicted on the Slavs, and they were perfectly correct in believing their former victims were eager for a grim revenge. They also knew that slave labor, and worse, actually produced the weapons because the quality control problems created by worker sabotage in the production facilities must have been common knowledge at the R&D centers.

I am only working from hearsay, as all historians inevitably must, but my take on it is Von Braun was just an ordinary man, not a monster, who found himself in a position to commandeer the resources of a government at war to further his own private dreams. In fact, he managed to do it twice. His obvious engineering and managerial talents aside, that dream and his ability to exploit the obsession of militarists and ideologues to develop the ultimate weapon was his contribution to mankind’s exploration of space. If there had been no von Braun, there still would have been Nazis, but space might have been delayed for a generation.

You have to forgive Tom for his bitterness, but he wasn’t just a mathematician,

he was Jewish, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio

Von Braun is invariably depicted in American documentaries as interested in rocketry only as a tool to get to orbit, the Moon or Mars. The Nazis perverted his interest into making weapons, and he had to make the compromise in order to continue his research.

In the German film von Braun is shown as exulting in the successes of the V2s. Their successes as weapons was stressed, and none of them talked about rocketry as anything else.

It’s clear the US citizenry was deceived when it was told that von Braun and the hundreds of other German engineers did not use slave labor or used only a minimal number who were treated well. That was and is a blatant lie.

The pioneer travels into the wilderness because he has little choice. He’s at the end of his tether at home, he’s desperate, he’s ready to take any risk, even the unknown, rather than endure his dead-end position in the old country. He’s the indentured servant.

The question of space is which of these two opposing groups is most likely to want to go–or to be able to go.

The need to explore has been stifled. Space is the only frontier available and at this point we can only dream.

I have no doubt that I would have moved West when there was a western frontier. I detest the rules and regulations of polite society.

As for the German rocket program, I believe that Wernher von Braun and others had their eyes on the stars but they knew what they were doing. I am pretty sure I would have been all in as well.

There are lots of slippery slopes when you are working for the military, especially in a time of total war.