Nazi war criminals collect millions of dollars in Social Security after leaving the U.S

The Nazis did some disgusting, despicable things, but at least they never tried to rhyme “frown” with “Braun”.

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You do not understand. This is the internet. Standards of evidence do not apply. In fact, watch how “suspected Nazi war criminals” become “Nazi war criminals” with a wave of the html.

I pray when they finally catch me, Xeni is not on the jury.

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It’s easy to judge with the 20/20 hindsight.

At the beginning, he was just playing with rockets at a shoestring budget. Then the military came in and offered money to do what he wanted to do - a no-brainer to accept. After some time, the war started; things were getting worse (while at the same time the importance of his projects skyrocketed) and later the true face of the regime shown off - and by then few would step out if that would mean going to get shot or sent to the Eastern front, I know I wouldn’t. By the time things got this bad he was too deep to get out and live. Then the war ended and he, knowing that he possesses important knowledge, gave himself up to the side that seemed to (and did, as it shown later) promise higher chance to continue his work on his spaceflight dreams. Which got fulfilled at the end.

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Meanwhile, the US treated him as a hero of the US Cold War effort - we sure were happy to have him working for us in the Space Race, and helping us with our ICBMs.

If we’re to fault Von Braun for anything, it ought to be for his willingness to work for governments and militaries period - not for working for this specific country or that specific regime - because they’re all rotten, and they always have been. Politics is a dirty business, and if you build moon rockets by making a deal with a devil, it really doesn’t matter which particular devil it is.

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I’m not much of a military-industrial-complex apologist, but there were a few key differences in the production process between those two particular programs:

Proof exists however that von Braun himself went to KZ Buchenwald to pick slave laborers (letter to Albin Sawatzki dated August 15, 1944). Former inmate Adam Cabala reported: “[…] 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 and bestiality 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” [39]

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And what would speaking out have gotten him? Nothing. At best he’d be ignored, at worst he would have been beaten and imprisoned by the Gestapo.

Not perfect person by any means, but having read several books on early rocket pioneers, von Braun appears in my eyes as someone who allied with the powers that be at the time. He didn’t have dreams of conquest, just building rockets. He saw the Nazis as an ends to a means and really had no other choice in Germany at the time. He wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, believing in the Third Reich. Remember in March 1944 he was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for daring to say he’d rather make rockets to go to the moon to be used to bomb cities. They also cited that since he as pilot he had the capability of defecting with his secrets. He might have spent the rest of the war there if one of the higher ups hadn’t petitions to get him released.

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All this talk of Von Braun has reminded me of Fritz Haber. Who pretty much solved the 20th century’s food crisis, and has allowed the planet to support a population of over 7 billion. Also, he developed practical methods for storing and weaponizing mustard gas, and oversaw it’s use during the first world war. He was, quite possibly one of the most diametrically opposing figures in science to Von Braun.

Von Braun was a guy who liked building rockets, and was pretty much forced by circumstance to work for the Germans first, and then later the Americans. He was for the most part a-political. While Haber was a diehard Nazi** supporter of the state, and devoted himself to the state in both word and deed. So much so in fact, his wife threw down the ultimatum that he stop his work creating chemical weapons, threatened to kill herself, and did when he refused to cede to her demand. Then a few days later Haber decided to double down on chemical warfare and went to oversee a chlorine gas release on the battlefield.

** I didn’t read carefully enough and misspoke, it was before the Nazis were in power, as @JonS kindly corrected me.

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You’re ignoring my point entirely.

I don’t care how much worse which particular devil was, the other guy was still a devil too - one that was all too happy to employ Van Braun for his own nefarious ends once the bigger devil was done with him.

And we’re celebrating his work every time we power up our GPS or watch satellite photos of weather…

I think celebrating is a rather strong, completely inaccurate word for it.

Van Braun shaped history, and we certainly find ourselves benefiting from the technology that ended up being developed out of his advances, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also still find fault with the path that was taken to bring all of it about. We need not agree with the choices of the past to make the best of where we find ourselves in the present.

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The problem is that in a state with real rule of law it is difficult to take away a state pension once the pensioner has paid in for the required time period.
OTOH the accusation of Jew outside of the Reich proper or living in a ghetto was usually enough to throw him to the work-to-death camps without requiring a court hearing on racial purity. Diabolical these camps as they literally used up the energy reserves in these humans to further the German war effort until the people became starved and of no further work value before industrial genocide of 30-40% of the well dispersed worldwide uninvolved/neutral/noncombatant in the war Jews who still have yet to replace their lost numbers.

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You think that makes it okay? There’s all sorts of awesome advancements that came out of WWII, not least the computer development that led directly to this great big ol’ internet of ours. Should we praise Hitler as the great scientific philanthropist of the age? Is any atrocity excusable as long as we accidentally got some sweet gadgets out of it?

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He was just following orders, eh?

That defense didn’t work out too well for all the guys who weren’t politically useful.

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And yet, in America, there were men “just following orders” who never spoke out against Japanese internment; or against the development of nuclear weapons; or against the firebombing campaigns in the late stages of the war when Germany and Japan had so little means to defend themselves that bombers flew in broad daylight, unescorted, with all of their armor removed so they could carry more bombs.

Plenty of Americans had very strong moral and ethical misgivings about what they were asked to do, but they followed orders.

One might argue some orders are easier to follow than others, but I thought the complaint here was that people were knowingly doing things they felt were wrong, period.

One might argue that mass internment of innocent civilians, the deployment of nuclear bombs on civilian targets, and the firebombing of countless cities to ashes were seen as “necessary evils”, but the same argument was surely true from the German perspective about their own crimes.

One might argue that more Americans disobeyed orders they disagreed with than Germans did, but we’ve established that not only were the orders themselves easier to obey, they were also much less dangerous to disobey. An American who chose to speak out risked being branded a traitor and locked up in jail, while a German who chose to speak out risked their own life, and the lives of their family. How, then, are the Americans who failed to speak out somehow better than the Germans who did the same?

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Easy for someone who I am assuming lived their entire lives in a country where they could say just about anything they want and fear no retribution. It’s easy to do the right thing, except when it’s hard.

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The German pronunciation of Braun does rhyme with frown.

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The brown Braun prawn has a frown?

Especially in my accent :smile:

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