The last living member of the German moon rocket team | Hacker News Reader

The last living member of the German moon rocket team

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Some points from a cynical aerospace engineering/web developer friend:

* Everyone who has been above low earth orbit was born before 1936.

* Everyone who has been above LEO was put there by Nazis.

I find your friend's cynicism... lacking.

Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Operation Paperclip was the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program in which more than 1,500 Germans[1] primarily scientists but also engineers and technicians, were brought to the United States from Nazi Germany for government employment starting in 1945 and increasing in the aftermath of World War II.[2] It was conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) and in the context of the burgeoning Cold War. One purpose of Operation Paperclip was to deny German scientific expertise and knowledge to the Soviet Union[2] and the United Kingdom,[3] as well as to inhibit post-war Germany from redeveloping its military research capabilities. A related course of action was taken by the US with regard to Japanese human experimenters employed from Unit 731. The Soviet Union had the somewhat similar yet much more limited Operation Osoaviakhim.[4]

Not sure what point you are trying to make? They brought over Nazi scientists and put them to work on rocketry for NASA.

What does it mean to be a nazi scientist? I would argue most of these people were pretty a-political and just happy that they got their science projects funded, so they were primarily german scientists that did their rocket science in germany during the nazi era and did not care about much else. That's a big difference to some political people like from gestapo or ss, which soaked up all of the ideology.

"What does it mean to be a nazi scientist?"

The FBI sure did a lot of background investigation on Von Braun. If you read the documents, [0] there is no doubt the FBI and the other agencies recognised Von Braun as a rocket scientist, Nazi party member and an SS Major (non-active & honourary) in the German Army. [1]

In 5/16/'61, a further background check was done on Von Braun by the FBI and passed on to the director.

There are lots of references to unsavoury connections such as the SS Horseback riding school (33-34), member of MDSAP (39-45) and working in German Army Ordinance (39-45). Met with Hitler twice and awarded the Iron Cross. Despite all this, the records continually note Von Braun to be a person who is 'loyal', 'discrete' and of high 'integrity'.

Von Braun was moved to the US under protective custody in '45 and as long as he kept his nose out of any political activity and wasn't a communist, he and his team was deemed useful to the US Missile and Space agencies. So yes, Von Braun was an opportunist at best, and a Nazi and a scientist.

Here's a re-union of his Peenemunde team at Marshall Space Flight Center in '87. [2]

[0] https://vault.fbi.gov/Wernher%20VonBraun/

[1] https://vault.fbi.gov/Wernher%20VonBraun/Wernher%20VonBraun%...

[2] https://archive.org/details/MSFC-8774200

The rocket guys saw the slave workers that died for their toys. They were not just apolitical.

I hope apolitical people today at least care about world wars and genocide.

I don't think those who did care were super-human and while I have no strong feelings about these scientists - particularly because the US did not wait a second to rehabilitate them and use them for its own good - I think everybody from that time has to blamed for not caring, because others were.

Technically, Werner von Braun was an SS Sturmbannführer, and while he does seem to have been more or less apolitical, he also seems to have been happy to use concentration camp labor to build V2s.

Well, technically, they put the scientists to work for Army Missile Command. (The Von Braun building on Redstone Arsenal is Army, not part of the Marshall Space Flight Ctr.)

After the NRL's Vanguard blew up, Von Braun &co used their Jupiter platform to put the US response to Sputnik in orbit---it was a weapons platform originally intended to be a ballistic missile platform.

They went to work for NASA later.

As a German I am not proud of these guys. They knew exactly that tens of thousands of slave workers were working on their toys under miserable circumstances.

I think the lesson is really a universal one: if you let your passion for your field overwhelm your moral judgement, the weakest and worst parts of your character will be immortalized along with your accomplishments.

There's obviously no karmic justice, but that's still something.

How many slaves make the clothes you wear and the cellphone you play games on?

Not to belittle the circumstances of workers in China and Bangladesh but they aren't kept with the explicit purpose of working them to death in 6 months like the plan was for concentration camp workers. this is a different level of evilness.

I have fond memories of the presentation von Tiesenhausen gave when I went to Space Camp back in 1990 (actually the version for high-schoolers called "Space Academy"). It was fascinating to hear about events that had seemed like long-ago history, when I read about them, from someone who had been there and been part of making it all happen.

I love going to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in Oregon because many of the volunteers there are folks who worked at NASA. Once I struck up a conversation with one of the Saturn V propulsion engineers - it's indeed fascinating to hear from the people who were actually there doing all this stuff.

"As an engineer, it doesn't make any difference what you do," he joked last week.

..reminds me of Tom Lehrer's take on Wernher von Braun [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

The context of that sentence is that it makes no difference whether you work on cargo ships or rockets.

Some rockets are cargo ships, some are not.

Once rockets go up, who cares where they come down. It's not my department, says Wernher von Braun

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