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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Von Braun was a Nazi spy

Von Braun and his team chose to surrender to the Americans because they saw America as a Christian nation where they might be forgiven and allowed to live normal lives, in contrast to the Soviet Union, where that would never be allowed. Before the end of the war von Braun was only nominally a Christian, but after coming to America he doubled down on Christianity and received the treatment he had predicted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Religious_co...

> spying

To whom do you think he was sending his coded messages? A secret nazi base under Antarctica? The fuhrer was dead, Germany was occupied and divided. Get real.

It turns out they weren't in a secret nazi base under Antarctica, they were on the Moon.

There's a documentary about it here: :)

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

> Von Braun was a Nazi spy

He came to the US after the war in Europe was over. Pretty difficult to spy on behalf of a political regime that no longer exists.

If he was spying for anyone - which I don’t think has ever been seriously alleged, let alone proven - it would’ve been the USSR.

Until the mid 60s it was the USSR that was leading the space race

That was not true when von Braun and his team chose to surrender to the Americans.

Approximately half the team went to the soviets, some defected even before the end of the war.

All kinds of spies in all kinds of projects existed in American history. SpaceX being a relatively new organization and the roles they hire are both not immune to this. For example, “Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II.” from Wikipedia.

GP didn’t claim spies don’t exist. They claimed spies for regimes that don’t exist don’t exist.

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