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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

One of my college profs worked with Zuse. In class I said, "Wait, so you worked for the..." and then stopped realizing what I was about to say. He was Hungarian-American, and at the time very old. What I was going to say wasn't fair.

On the other hand, the class he was teaching was my assembly language class. And he knew the material inside and out.

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Quoth Wikipedia:

> While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort. Much later, he suggested that in modern times, the best scientists and engineers usually have to choose between either doing their work for more or less questionable business and military interests in a Faustian bargain, or not pursuing their line of work at all.[28]

Which seems true enough to me.

I'm not sure I understand what you were going to say. I was assuming "Wait, so you worked for the inventor of the computer?", but then you went on about race and I didn't get it anymore.

He was probably wondering whether the guy worked for the Nazis.

Yes. And realizing mid-sentence that he would have been a very young Hungarian at the time and it would have been a complicated and probably not fair to him question.

That's not really a question. He absolutely did work for the Nazis. The OP's point was that there wouldn't be much value in simply pointing that out (it's not like it would be news to Prof. Zuse).

What he was about to point out that while it is known that Zuse worked for the Nazis, by association his professor also did.

Awkward.

He probably would have had some fascinating, if very uncomfortable, stories, if he was willing to tell them... which he probably wasn't.

Somehow that makes me very sad.

Was he helping with NASA as well?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/operation-nazification-u-s-mili...

Lockheed, actually. :-)

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