Content warning: it’s pretty tough listening in places. It doesn’t pull it’s punches describing the atrocities committed at Mittelbau.
The picture it paints of von Braun is one of a man who was focussed on his goal, and would do anything to achieve it. He joined the Nazi party because it got him political connections to finance his research - he wasn’t a particularly enthusiastic Nazi, but being in the party got you in front of people with the money to pay for his research, and he didn’t care that the research would be applied building bombs. He used slave labour to build his rockets because it was cheap and expedient and he didn’t care about the people being starved and beaten - he didn’t hold any particular malice, he just didn’t care. He surrendered to the Americans rather than the Soviets because he guessed that he’d have greater autonomy working with the Americans - he wasn’t interested in who got to the moon, just that someone did.
To me, this disregard puts him pretty clearly in the evil column. He isn’t like Fritz Haber (inventor of synthetic fertiliser averting countless deaths from famine/massively reduced the cost of explosives and a significant part of how deadly WW1 was) who was very aware of how dual-use his invention was
Oh yeah, parts of what he did were pretty evil. I’d just say he was not quite Mengele-levels of evil and was pretty flexible, unlike those that were hardcore Nazis til the end when the Mossad had hunted them down.
Tim Harford did a really excellent podcast series about the V2 generally, and von Braun specifically: https://timharford.com/2024/02/cautionary-tales-supersonic-nazi-vengeance-v2-rocket-part-1/
Content warning: it’s pretty tough listening in places. It doesn’t pull it’s punches describing the atrocities committed at Mittelbau.
The picture it paints of von Braun is one of a man who was focussed on his goal, and would do anything to achieve it. He joined the Nazi party because it got him political connections to finance his research - he wasn’t a particularly enthusiastic Nazi, but being in the party got you in front of people with the money to pay for his research, and he didn’t care that the research would be applied building bombs. He used slave labour to build his rockets because it was cheap and expedient and he didn’t care about the people being starved and beaten - he didn’t hold any particular malice, he just didn’t care. He surrendered to the Americans rather than the Soviets because he guessed that he’d have greater autonomy working with the Americans - he wasn’t interested in who got to the moon, just that someone did.
To me, this disregard puts him pretty clearly in the evil column. He isn’t like Fritz Haber (inventor of synthetic fertiliser averting countless deaths from famine/massively reduced the cost of explosives and a significant part of how deadly WW1 was) who was very aware of how dual-use his invention was
Oh yeah, parts of what he did were pretty evil. I’d just say he was not quite Mengele-levels of evil and was pretty flexible, unlike those that were hardcore Nazis til the end when the Mossad had hunted them down.
Yeah, I suppose he didn’t set out to kill people - he just took advantage of the fact that others did