Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Low-ranking nazi researchers, doing experiments on human, were never put on trial AFAIK. This was more pervasive in Japan, where most scientists from unit 731 were given pardon, and held highly respectable positions well after the second WW (e.g. M. Kitano who worked in the green cross group).
I was recently horrified to learn that figures related to how long does it take to die underwater, at high altitute, etc... were known from nazi experiments.
Why didn't he have a choice ?
Answering your question: only von Braun could answer that. We can only guess that he might have been afraid to put his family to risk. If you read more about him you can find he was arrested by Nazis once. That might give some idea about fear atmosphere that he might have experienced.
It is easy to judge when you already know who was bad and who was good in WW2.
When you say 'he did not have much choice' I read that as 'he was forced to do this at gunpoint'. And even in that extreme case there are still choices, just not very many happy endings.
There are plenty of scientists that would do the most unethical things if it means they get to work on their pet project.
From that wikipedia article you quote there:
"We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured."
The hypocrisy in there is so thick it's almost comical.
If you compare his behavior to e.g. doctors in Japan (who often came from the most prestigious universities in Japan, and were quite brilliant), who personally willingly tortured, killed, infected people, including young children, I would say there is no comparison. Some of those people supposedly took part of the biological american program after the second WW (still mostly classified AFAIK), and Japan does not even recognize the crimes yet I believe.
[EDIT] One of the former member of Unit 731 used to tour in Japan (not sure if he still does) to explain the attrocities he commited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Yuasa. It is even more gruesome that what you could imagine from what you would usually know about nazi crimes.
Um, he was Technical Director at Peenemunde - which was an assembly line in a tunnel (ie a single room) and which had gallows beside the assembly line on which slave labours were hanged. Oh, and he joined the SS before the war because Himmler headhunted him and told him he would guarantee funding for his rocketry work.
More recent ones are:
Pedro Ramon : bombed Cuba's UN mission to US.
Guillermo Novo : car bombing in Washington DC of Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Leteller.
Luis Posada : bombed Cuban airliner in 1976.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. ... The Japanese defense counselor argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence.
Some former members of Unit 731 became part of the Japanese medical establishment. Dr. Masaji Kitano led Japan's largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others headed U.S.-backed medical schools or worked for the Japanese health ministry. Shiro Ishii moved to Maryland to work on bio-weapons research.