Is it really stealing when the individuals who did the work for America voluntarily left Germany due to its foray into authoritarianism? Seems more like a windfall for a country with better human rights than a theft, to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...
To the extent that high value workers knew that they were treasure to be looted they might have decided that the US was a least worse option.
Yes, that lines up with von Braun's account of his motivations.
> 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 not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
I'm not particularly convinced by this man's praise of America and talk of Christianity, I think he was brown-nosing just a little bit... but it does seem clear he preferred America to the Soviets.
He really write that? That’s some chutzpah.
Also interesting is that the V-2 missile was called a “ vengeance weapon” [0] but Allied bombing of Germany hadn’t started when the V-2 started. [1]
On 22 December 1942, Adolf Hitler ordered the production of the A-4 as a "vengeance weapon", and the Peenemünde group developed it to target London.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_air_operations_during_...
See siblings comments about Mittelwerk, eg. Also Chabon's (fictional) novel Moonglow covers some of this history well.