![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldGerman experimentalist Wernher von Braun played a critical role in the development of rocket technology in Germany and its elaboratinon by the United States. It isn't saying too much to say that without von Braun's researches, the space industry as we know it wouldn't exist.
The standard biographies of von Braun do acknowledge that conditions at von Braun's Peenemünde facility for slave labourers were horrific, as noted in The Telegraph back in 2001.
What has often been passed over, by the West's Cold War propagandists as well as by space activists, and even by the 21st century types, is the degree to which von Braun was himself a war criminal, as Leon Jaroff wrote in Time Magazine back in 2002.
In a perfectly just world, von Braun would have been hung. In a perhaps more humanly just world, after being accidentally detained with the survivors of Peenemünde von Braun would have been a suicide victim, found after he had laboriously beaten himself to death. But von Braun gave us the worlds of the solar system, and so, for the most part, we praise him.
British scientist and public figure C.P. Snow once argued that morals of some kind were inherent in the very grain of the culture of science, that in certain respects science was superior. Quite rightly, he was rebuked for this presumtuousness by H.P. Leavis, who noted that no one mode of human cultural activity can be said in this sense to have a rightful claim to this moral superiority.
I'd go farther: Morality is something that you have to consciously include in any mode of human activity, morality is something not automatic at all, morality is not natural. Pretending otherwise is a sure way to hold yourself up to rightful contempt. Brilliance oh so easily coexists with evil.
The standard biographies of von Braun do acknowledge that conditions at von Braun's Peenemünde facility for slave labourers were horrific, as noted in The Telegraph back in 2001.
The first section of the exhibition is devoted to the inaugural flight of the V2 rocket on October 3, 1942, the first time in history that a missile entered outer space. Original film of the take-off is offset by the voice of the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, glorifying the new "wonder weapon" specifically designed to terrorise Britain.
Wall-sized photographs of the destruction caused in London by the V2 and the earlier V1 flying bomb are coupled with private snapshots of German technicians, officers and their wives enjoying the almost holiday-like atmosphere of the Peenemunde base.
Such images contrast sharply with the horrific conditions experienced by more than 20,000 foreign slave and concentration camp labourers who perished through starvation and maltreatment while constructing the V1 rocket at "Dora", the underground Nazi armaments factory in Thuringia, central Germany.
What has often been passed over, by the West's Cold War propagandists as well as by space activists, and even by the 21st century types, is the degree to which von Braun was himself a war criminal, as Leon Jaroff wrote in Time Magazine back in 2002.
[T]his sanitized biography [. . .] has roused the indignation of Tom Gehrels, a noted University of Arizona astronomer and pioneer in the program to discover and track Earth-threatening asteroids. A member of the Dutch resistance during World War II, Gehrels readily acknowledges von Braun's contributions to the world of science, but is all too aware of the little-known dark side of both him and his brother Magnus. "They were Jekyll and Hyde characters," Gehrels insists, "and the full truth ought to be known."
It is Gehrels who has pieced together that truth, largely from interviews with surviving political prisoners who had been forced to build V-1s and V-2s under the supervision of the von Brauns in an underground complex near Nordhausen, Germany. These prisoners were housed in an adjacent concentration camp called Dora, and new arrivals were given the standard welcoming speech: "You came in through that gate, and you'll leave through that chimney [of the crematorium]."
Indeed, some 20,000 died at Dora, from illness, beatings, hangings and intolerable working conditions. Workers, scantily clad, were forced to stand at attention in the biting cold during roll calls that went on for hours. Average survival time in the unventilated paint shop was one month. One prisoner told of being bitten on his legs by guard dogs. Presumably to test the effectiveness of a new medication, one of his legs was treated, the other allowed to fester and deteriorate.
For reasons best known to von Braun, who held the rank of colonel in the dreaded Nazi SS, the prisoners were ordered to turn their backs whenever he came into view. Those caught stealing glances at him were hung. One survivor recalled that von Braun, after inspecting a rocket component, charged, "That is clear sabotage." His unquestioned judgment resulted in eleven men being hanged on the spot. Says Gehrels, "von Braun was directly involved in hangings."
In a perfectly just world, von Braun would have been hung. In a perhaps more humanly just world, after being accidentally detained with the survivors of Peenemünde von Braun would have been a suicide victim, found after he had laboriously beaten himself to death. But von Braun gave us the worlds of the solar system, and so, for the most part, we praise him.
British scientist and public figure C.P. Snow once argued that morals of some kind were inherent in the very grain of the culture of science, that in certain respects science was superior. Quite rightly, he was rebuked for this presumtuousness by H.P. Leavis, who noted that no one mode of human cultural activity can be said in this sense to have a rightful claim to this moral superiority.
I'd go farther: Morality is something that you have to consciously include in any mode of human activity, morality is something not automatic at all, morality is not natural. Pretending otherwise is a sure way to hold yourself up to rightful contempt. Brilliance oh so easily coexists with evil.
