Possibly worth also including just how controversial Wernher von Braun is.
Von Braun is a highly controversial figure widely seen as escaping justice for his Nazi war crimes due to the Americans' desire to beat the Soviets in the Cold War
Von Braun is a highly controversial figure widely seen as escaping justice for his Nazi war crimes due to the Americans' desire to beat the Soviets in the Cold War
Edit: This is an honest question, I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. It certainly doesn't seem like a clear-cut "he was an objectively evil man but we looked the other way" based on the Wikipedia article. It could very well be his account, which from a brief skim seems reasonable, is accurate?
He was the Nazis' best rocket engineer, responsible for, among other things, the V2s that devastated much of London. By the standards of the Nuremberg trials, he probably should have been tried and convicted. But he was never even accused, because the US wanted his rocket expertise--by the time of the Nuremberg trials, he was already working for the US Army.
The US bombed German civilians and Japanese civilians in mass numbers.
I still don't see what that has to do with the original comment that mentioned him. If we're talking about him in depth, absolutely mention it and dig into it. I guess the thing I'm having trouble reconciling in my head is the need to, upon a passing reference to someone orthogonal to the main point, say it's "worth including" that they're a controversial figure. The controversy seems irrelevant to me. It seems to border on virtue signaling, this need to say "oh by the way, Nazis are bad" when that (objective fact) has nothing to do with anything.
I see your other comment and I get the point you're trying to make but I don't think it has anything to do with speaking respectfully or with any sort of courtesy about a Nazi, just about trying to make a point.
I wasn't familiar with von Braun before reading this thread, and I appreciate the extra info. Complex figure. Maybe even a really bad guy. But, also interesting that his work was useful in getting us to the moon.
Maybe we can all appreciate that dichotomy.
Even more interesting to note, is without your initial pushback, I wouldn't have read more detail about him, so I owe your resistance to actually exploring this facet of the man's alleged history to getting me to actually read a bit about it.
Yes, agreed. I'm not arguing that the standards of Nuremberg were actually the right ones.
As for Allied war crimes, many of those were only criminalized after-the-fact. For example, the justification for nuking Nagasaki was "well, there's a factory nearby, so that's a valid military target".
[0] For example, "fiduciary duty to shareholders" was a valid excuse that saved several businessmen at Nuremburg, despite them running forced labor camps that were deadlier than Auschwicz.
Erm, what? The justification for nuking nagasaki was that demonstrating overwhelming might would swiftly end the war (it did) while continuing conventional war would cause many more casualties over time.
Maybe you mean to say that because a lot of ships, bombs and military equipment were made there (though it wasn't merely "a factory nearby") they dropped the bomb there rather than somewhere else.
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
The H&N bombings followed close on the heels of bombing 72 other cities (including Tokyo) as part of an ongoing HE + incendiary campaign with list of targets.
These specific targets were selected for atomic tested as they had not been bombed before and served as "clean" test beds for the before and after comparisons, in addition to having some containing topography.
What's important to remember is that they were selected from a long list of targets that were all scheduled to be bombed, the fact that they were low priority from a military standpoint is what had "saved" then from not already having been bombed.
When Hiroshima was bombed the only prior atomic test at Trinity was on a tower with a lot of external controls .. it wasn't even certain at the time that this would work as a bomb let alone "end the war".
The military compulsion to battlefield test a weapon that had consumed more R&D budget than any ever before in history was intense, and the WW's were rapidly closing out with Germany defeated and Russia closing in on Japan.
After the bombings, immediately after, came a lot of retro fitting justifiction, more so with the Cold War .. but it was never as clear cut and about swift endings and saving casualities as came to be believed.
People forget that atomic bomb or not the US was already committed to levelling all cities within Japan.
For more, and a deeper dive in the many takes on dropping the bomb, see:
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u...
for example (it has many references to many historic viewpoints)
It seems, unsurprisingly, that the military didn't really see the atomic bombs as anything other than a really big bomb - it was only later that they came to be seen as something qualitatively different, and "a bomb so big it is war-ending" is really only something you can know in hindsight.
That, arguably, came with advances in delivery methods. A-bombs alone don't end wars. Multiple sides each putting them on advanced bombers and intercontinental missiles, made to hit quickly and be effectively impossible to stop - that's when nuclear weapons graduate from being just bigger bombs to being existential threats and/or tools for keeping world peace.
That was probably one reason, but by no means the only one, nor even IMO a very significant one (and the article you link to, which is a good one from a good historian whose entire nuclear secrecy blog is worth reading, does not make the claim you are making--it gives a number of justifications that were made at the time, and the one you give is not one of them).
The Gar Alperovitz book referenced in the article is also worth reading, as is another historical study, Racing the Enemy [1] by Hasegawa. The latter book is not solely about the decision to use the bomb, but more generally about the process by which the war with Japan ended, but that decision and the process that produced it of course play a large role.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...
> it wasn't even certain at the time that this would work as a bomb
AFAIK there was no doubt that the implosion method used in the Nagasaki bomb would work after the Trinity test. And there was never any doubt that the gun-type method used in the Hiroshima bomb would work--they didn't even bother to test it before the Hiroshima bombing. The only question was what the practical yield would be under bombing conditions. But that could have been assessed by bombing tests on uninhabited locations, as was done after the war.
> it was never as clear cut and about swift endings and saving casualities as came to be believed.
People forget that atomic bomb or not the US was already committed to levelling all cities within Japan.
These things are quite true. They do not, however, mean that wanting to field test two different bomb designs was a significant factor. Based on my reading I don't actually think it was one at the political level (what the military people thought was another matter, but the key decisions were made at the political level). Politically, I think the biggest factors involved were uncertainty about what it would actually take to get Japan to surrender, and the desire (at least once Truman came into office) to keep the Soviet Union from playing any part in postwar Japan, and more generally to deter them from expanding further.
Circling back to at the time, there are copious notes on materials, orders, deployments, and boxes of documentation, and then there is relatively little on the underlying thought given to whether the two bombs should even be used at all. At the time. No shortage of after the fact recollections of course.
While I'm not a historian, more an applied geophysics dabbler, I'm familiar with the material, I've met and talked with Alex Wellerstein, I once interviewed Mark Oliphant, and I've spoken with a number of the technical people who came out for the Emu Fields and Montebello tests.
In the context of an ongoing bombing campaign and truly vast amounts money and resources spent on creating new weapons it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which the bombs would not have been field tested. If that kind of take is a foundation then everthing written becomes bookkeeping and for the record.
In life, where there's momentum politics will often follow rather than lead.
Regardless, I simply have an opinion (well, many and not all consistent with each other) and not a book or a career; I principally enjoy jolting people who have a particular fixed view of many events in history to become aware of wider fields of opinion and to consider how consensus views evolve over time.
The V2 killed more (enslaved) people who were building it than it did in its attacks. It was only 'successful' as a propaganda weapon.
...And by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, the heads of every allied airforce, and all of their immediate subordinates and sub-subordinates should have been dancing the hemp fandango.
I'll also point out that a lot of Nazi military officers and civilian leaders and industrialists, despite significant involvement in the regime's crimes were not found guilty[1] in those trials.
---
[1] Even in the Soviet-ran ones - and as every loyal comrade knows, the courts of the glorious Soviet Union are the fairest, most humane, and most merciful justice system the world has ever conceived, especially when it came to the question of judging fascists.
That's a very good point, although the Nuremberg trials used torture to get confessions, so literally anybody could have been convicted.
Do you have any proof of this?
Absurd. For starters, by the standards of the nuremberg trials, there's no way in hell he would be convicted. For comparison, among the men actually acquitted by the nuremburg trials were Franz von Papen, Hitler's vice chancellor from 1933 to 1934 and the man who pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to power, and Hans Fritzsche, a high ranking propagandist who was in the Fuhrerbunker in the last days of the war and after his acquittal took part in a cabal attempting to re-nazify West Germany.
The nuremberg trials targetted only the very highest level Nazis - only the top 5 highest ranking officers in the entire german military were indicted. Even if von Braun had been an enthusiastic Nazi (and there's quite a bit of evidence he wasn't), he was way too low level to have been tried nonetheless convicted by the Nuremberg trials.
Are you saying that supporting Hitler before the war should have been a war crime?
Looking at Wikipedia there seems to be something going on with Braun's involvement in forced labour and war prisoners. I don't see an outline of what the problem is; maybe there is something serious but if there is a problem Wikipedia doesn't seem to detail it. If building horrible weapons is a war crime then I think Fat Man and Little Boy probably take the cake.
How familiar are you with jus ad bellum and jus en bello?
Most legal scholars conclude German use of force against the UK was a violation of jus ad bellum and the indiscriminate nature of V-1 and V-2 rockets including their use against civilians was a violation of jus en bello.
The Nuremberg Trials were primarily focused on prosecuting individuals who were deemed to bear the greatest responsibility for the atrocities committed during World War II and the Holocaust.
Many legal scholars of international law and use of armed force agree WvB was should have been tried for the deaths of thousands of forced workers and civilians. His value to the US government definitely saved him, but for that he’d at least have been tried.
Yeah they're terms of art. When US or British people use them they mean that aggression by English speakers is appropriate (really we should characterise any aggression as fundamentally defensive in nature) but aggression by people using barbarian tongues is inappropriate (if it damages the commercial interests of English speakers it might be better termed an affront against the divine nature of things). There are some complexities depending on trade agreements and current military alliances.
For example you can see strong defensive plays by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere in the middle east. But then you have examples of aggression by the USSR back in the day in the same countries which was largely unprovoked.
Neither is being a chancellor. von Braun was much more than the super-selective characterization of "rocket scientist". His were the actions of a war criminal to anyone except his supporters and the people who benefited greatly from him not being considered as such.
Eye witness testimonies say that von Braun personally picked slave laborers from concentration camps to work and eventually be tortured and killed in the factories he personally supervised. These facts are undisputed by any historical account. The only reason he got away with these crimes is that he was useful to the US space program.
Saying "but being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime" sounds willfully ignorant or just apologetic and that's not the kind of thing you want to excuse. Nobody's blaming him for being a brilliant rocket scientist, only for willingly killing thousands of unwilling prisoners in just a few short years.
If you want an analogy that doesn't involve a history book, imagine hearing that Amazon's or Tesla's CEOs pretended they had no idea that thousands of warehouse or factory workers they had hand picked from prisons were killed or raped every year at work according to rules and procedures signed off by those very same CEOs who routinely patrol the floors to see those rules are enforced. Would you still be here saying "but being a CEO isn't a crime"?
That's not really true though. Most nazis who were committing crimes on the same level (or even more serious ones) got away with them.
>Strong defensive plays by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere…
Do you know the difference between what you referenced above and the Nuremberg Trials from the standpoint of International Law?
Perhaps. But this doesn't change the fact that there were thousands or at least hundreds of others guilty of bigger crimes (at least directly) were never prosecuted. Only a tiny minority of war criminals were actually tried after WW2. And almost none of those who escaped justice (or received a slap on the wrist at most) were rocket scientists or were later hired by the US government.
The whole "denazification" process in Germany was very lenient and superficial relative to the severity of the crimes that were committed during and before the war. von Braun was very far down the ladder of responsibility...
> ad bellum and the indiscriminate nature of V-1 and V-2 rockets including their use against civilians was a violation of jus en bello.
Also on that.. how is this not the same as Order No. 154 (unrestricted submarine warfare). Dönitz was exonerated of war crimes because allies admitted that they were doing the same (IIRC Allied admirals even testified on his behalf). Certainly this would apply to the case of indiscriminate bombings? And von Braun wasn't even giving the order so by the standards of the day (or modern standards) I don't see who could he be legally tried for this.
The whole slave worker thing was another matter of course but almost nobody was prosecuted for stuff like that anyway..
Also, fyi the Nuremberg trials were not restricted to war crimes, with many defendants being convicted of crimes against peace or crimes against humanity for their propagation of the Nazi regime and leadership roles in atrocities like the Holocaust. Many of the defendants who were convicted were businessmen, propogandists, and members of the civilian government.
The initial ones did, but there were subsequent ones targeting entire organizations--one of which was the SS, to which Von Braun belonged.
Those subsequent tribunals were still quite limited, with only about 1600 people being tried. For context, there were over a million members of the SS.
Further, the punishment for most of those convicted in these tribunals was forced labor, so had Von Braun been tried and convicted at that time, odds are he still would have most likely wound up working for the US developing their rockets. So the claim that the US shielded him doesn't really make sense.
So they bring up Von Braun when the topic of space stuff comes up because they don't really know much about space but they want to participate in the conversation so they think of the closest pop culture thing that they can think of.
It's one of my biggest pet peeves when talking about space stuff because I'm a super passionate layman who has taking a few astrophysics and astronomy courses.
- "... also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof. Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his frequent stays at Dora. Even the aspect of corpses did not touch him: On a small area near the ambulance shed, inmates tortured to death by slave labor and the terror of the overseers were piling up daily. But, Prof. Wernher von Braun passed them so close that he was almost touching the corpses.[63]"
I agree with your comment. Let's never speak in respectful language about a Nazi SS officer. It's a loud silence when someone circles around the topic without mentioning it, as if there were some obligation of diplomacy—as if you owe tactfulness or professional courtesy to Nazis.
It's a unique feature of American/Western historiography that would incline you to believe this. I find it interesting we don't have to tack on similar disclaimers when it comes to any other similarly horrible group throughout history; the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche -- forget about it: we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers. But mere broaching of the subject of the Nazis requires confession that, let's repeat it in unison, they were evil.
There's the thing about temporal closeness and impact on actual politics and ideology. Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large in part of the world.
And there are still people alive who lived through some of the horrors the Nazis inflicted upon the world. None lives today who saw Caesar's dictatorship. Nobody, to my mind, seriously worships Imperial China or wants a return of the Caesars. There are no Comanche atrocities apologists (of note).
But Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers. It's important to note Von Braun was an unapologetic nazi and that he should not be celebrated as a person.
Not as distinct from basic impulses we can detect in all periods. These terms we use (rightwing, fascist) are new terms for ancient political dispositions. If I describe someone as imperialist, patriarchal, sexist, antisemitic, and racist, am I more likely to be talking about the Nazis, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Abbasids or the Puritans?
> Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers
My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.
I disagree. Nazism and Fascism are largely influential today but Caesar isn't.
> My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.
I cannot vouch for your understanding. I do know Nazism and Fascism must be loudly denounced whenever found. They must not be allowed to fester in the darkness.
Sorry, but this is when I just have to tune out. It's like when people say, "America has no culture," or something similar.
> It's like when people say, "America has no culture," or something similar.
I do not live in the US so I couldn't care less about what people say there.
Both America and Caesar are so influential that it's difficult for people to recognize their influence. Fish in water, etc.
It's also funny to brand Caesar as an evil dictator. He was a revolutionary with very benevolent tendencies, both toward the masses and to his enemies. Dictatorships like Sulla's, which came before, were the brutal ones. What the people back then saw Caesar as was as a populist hero fixing a crumbling, broken, and corrupt system. Later, the people of the Empire would think back of the Republican era as one of horror and chaos -- because that's what you get with mob rule.
It's all very relativist.
I think, in the far future, people will regard the Nazis as a point on a continuum and all current governments today as not that far away on that continuum -- not like we do, thinking Hitler was the devil.
Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances. Maybe it's more productive to regard that environment as "evil" than raising people up to Anti-Christ status when the environment churns them out. In Caesar's case, that was a broken senatorial system and a provincial military system not designed to deal with how large and ambitious Rome started getting; in Hitler's, it was how brutally the European powers treated Germany after WW1 and the nearby rise of communism.
We're not there yet, not when this is still relatively recent history and when we haven't yet dealt with Nazism's offspring.
> Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances.
I don't know about Caesar, but I certainly don't buy this argument for Hitler. The minute he supported the Final Solution or decided to get rid of 80% of Eastern Europe, he crossed the line. There were people at the time of Hitler, even in Germany, who were horrified by Nazism -- not as in "I don't agree with this", but "I cannot believe this is happening". Some were executed for objecting to it. I'm sure more were silently horrified, not brave or reckless enough to openly reject it, but in private repulsed by it. There were people who hid or helped Jews (and I'm not arguing here Jews were the only victims of Nazism, mind you!).
Hitler was a product of his time and upbringing, but he was also an evil man. There are no excuses for the Holocaust or Generalplan Ost or the many evils of Nazism, when we know people from that time were horrified by it. Evil may be banal, as Arendt put it, but it's still evil.
Well, we can also speak of Wernher von Braun or even contemporary figures that way. It's only more likely that someone comes along and points out that we shouldn't forget about the context.
When we speak of ancient history, the context is already forgotten beyond what has been documented. There are no living witnesses nor people who directly related to them. (Of course, archaeological and historical research can find more evidence.)
However we do speak of them passionately anyway, even if the discussion is less emotional. You bringing up the examples that you brought up is a perfect example. People immediately understand what you mean. Anyone who agrees with you will have to feel passionately about these long past events.
We all know about the cruelties that came with the Ceasars etc. because people documented them and didn't let it go. We don't need to point it out because it is common knowledge. Do go to a history conference and claim that Julius Caesar was a totally fine and nice guy and you'll see that people can get passionate very quickly.
Discussions get stirred up more quickly for contemporary figures whose power to let information disappear or fade away can sometimes extend beyond their own deaths - for as long as there are people alive who may be affected by the image created.
I would say an unemotional actor will recognize that those examples are objectively analogical. But that's not really here or there because I'm not saying one cannot have a well-founded moral reaction to the past. I'm saying it's an accident of our location in history that only Nazis receive this treatment -- well-deserved as it may be -- and admittedly one should expect any group to harbor resentment towards a vanquished enemy for some time. But this forum and particularly the context of this thread requires some stationary, objective analysis, which is impossible with the ankle-biting "by the ways."