Satiric birthday song for Wernher von Braun

Today would have been the 100th birthday of Wernher von Braun, an amazing scientist whose complicated legacy includes both engines of war and one of humankind's greatest achievements.

Is von Braun the guy who got us to the Moon? Or is he the guy whose V2 rockets wreaked havoc on behalf of the Nazis, and who designed ballistic missiles for the United States? Frankly, he's both. Sometimes, we can respect a person's genius without respecting all of their choices.

With that in mind, please enjoy this satiric sort-of-tribute to von Braun, performed sometime in the 1960s by singer-songwriter/satirist/mathematician Tom Lehrer.

Video Link

Via Matt Novak

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

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Brainspore

Now that’s some burning satire. Like, rocket fuel burn. And I thought Peter Sellers gave him a good ribbing!
benenglish

My dad was on a guided missile development team at Redstone, a project at least partially directed by von Braun. Dad met him several times and met with him once or twice, though it would be a huge overstatement to say he “worked with” Wernher von Braun.

Still, they had enough contact for my dad to form an opinion. Since the work was classified my dad never told me anything about the work. But he would share one personal observation when asked what he thought of Wernher von Braun.

“Smartest Nazi I ever met.”

I’m not sure that’s fair. Then again, I’m not enough of a history buff to know that it isn’t. Insights from the less ignorant welcome.
http://twitter.com/Elladrion Elladrion

Tom Lehrer is fantastic, I remember one of my scoutmasters back when I was a teen playing his album on a trip and not knowing who he was until years later. I highly recommend his CD, his lyrics and his timing is incredibly clever, even if some of the subject matter is a bit dated.
- Doctor Device
  
  I would recommend his three live albums (An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, Tom Lehrer Revisited, and That Was The Year That Was), personally. the songs deserve his excellent set-ups, and the other three albums are exactly the same songs, but recorded in a studio.
  - Tynam
    
    Absolutely. The studio versions are a greatly inferior experience, only worth having for completeness. But everyone should own the live shows.
  - http://twitter.com/Elladrion Elladrion
    
    yeah, I picked up the 3 cd set a few years back and it had the studio versions, live versions, and some of his later work. The live versions are vastly superior. The man knew how to play a crowd, that’s for damn sure
- social_maladroit
  
  “Keep those reefers hidden where you’re sure
  
  That they will not be found
  
  And be careful not to smoke them
  
  When the scoutmaster’s around
  
  For he only will insist that they be shared –
  
  Be prepared!”
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSwjuz_-yao
  - http://twitter.com/Elladrion Elladrion
    
    The irony was delectable when I finally heard that song. It was not played on the trip which makes me appreciate it all the more. I get an absolute kick out of it every time I hear it now.
Nadreck

Rumour has it that this is the song that ended Tom’s career through the libel lawsuit from Von Braun. The line “and he’s learning to speak Chinese” was the crux of the suit as that’s the only not-strictly-true part of the song. Can anyone confirm or deny?
- http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm
  
  According to Wikipedia, Lehrer denied this. Another commonly-repeated story is that he gave up satire when Kissinger received a Nobel Peace Prize because he felt that no satirist could hope to compete with reality, but this seems to be false as well (although it sounds like a joke that Lehrer might have made).
  
  Although his songs often refer to specific issues or people from the time they were written, I actually find that they’re much less dated than most comedy of the time, perhaps because his humor is so dark. Saccharin ages fast; bile keeps.
http://www.facebook.com/timothy.krause Timothy Krause

It’s a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun’s birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with old Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh. . . .

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
- http://profile.yahoo.com/4MC2FD6U2ASY7SIHELAYS2DD7Y Steve
  
  Thanks for reminding me of what a wonderful writer Thomas is.
Jane Shevtsov

” Sometimes, we can respect a person’s genius without respecting all of their choices.”

And working for a regime that is likely to imprison or kill you otherwise is totally a free choice.
- Brainspore
  
  Some choices are more difficult than others but it would be foolish to assume that everything Wernher von Braun did for the Nazis (or the U.S. military) was completely beyond his control. Just look at Oskar Schindler: if he’d put his full talents to use for the German war effort (as was expected of him) he never would have ended up as the protagonist of a Spielberg movie.
  
  So Wernher von Braun wasn’t the devil incarnate but he certainly wasn’t a saint either. Humans are complicated creatures.
  - Mister44
    
    Schindler’s factory and Peenemünde are in two totally different worlds. The rocket program had special funding and a lot of pressure on it’s shoulders. Though like Schindler’s factory, their Jewish labor greatly hindered their success.
    - Brainspore
      
      Maybe so, but a highly principled person in von Braun’s position still could have made choices resulting in fewer lives destroyed by the Nazis. The choices he made may have been understandable under the circumstances—fear is a powerful motivator—but they were still his choices.
      - enterthestory
        
        Yes, we all have choices. And Lehrer could have chosen to leave America and fight Franco, Pol Pot or Idi Ahmin. But that’s “not his department. “
        
        We all have choices, and we all choose to believe that the other guy’s choices are far worse than our own.
      - Brainspore
        
        @boingboing-9ff32fa785aef7b3ede67ed7e7823734:disqus
        
        And Lehrer could have chosen to leave America and fight Franco, Pol Pot or Idi Ahmin. But that’s “not his department. “
        
        That’s an odd comparison—I’m unaware of any major criticism leveled at Werner von Braun for all the things he didn’t do.
  - Jane Shevtsov
    
    No, he wasn’t a saint. He wasn’t a hero. He did what most of us would have done and people like Lehrer shouldn’t make him a villain for it. Actually, I thought Maggie’s post was quite good, except for this choice of words.
    - Brainspore
      
      No, he wasn’t a saint. He wasn’t a hero
      
      Exactly. Thank you.
      
      He did what most of us would have done and people like Lehrer shouldn’t make him a villain for it.
      
      I think a little counter-point was appropriate seeing as how so many people were (and continue to) make him into a national hero.
      
      Actually, I thought Maggie’s post was quite good, except for this choice of words.
      
      So you’re saying we SHOULD respect all of his choices? I’ve already said I don’t think he was the devil incarnate but I’m not ready to go that far.
      - Jane Shevtsov
        
        ”So you’re saying we SHOULD respect all of his choices?”
        
        Of course not. I meant that I would’ve written something like, “Sometimes, we can respect a person’s genius without believing that everything they did was good”. (Maggie’s version definitely sounds better.) It’s the word “choices” that I objected to.
    - tuvaorbust
      
      “People like Lehrer.” “People like Lehrer”? Ah, you mean Jews, yes?
      - Jane Shevtsov
        
        Umm… At the risk of feeding a troll, I’ll say I mean those who condemn others for failing to be heroic.
      - tuvaorbust
        
        Wait. I thought you were the troll.
        
        Oh, alright, I’ll de-escalate. What I mean is that it’s distressing, in the context of history, to see Tom Lehrer, who is Jewish, maligned for satirizing Von Braun, who was a Nazi, if only because Lehrer’s satire is such a gentle response to what the Nazis did to the Jews.
    - ocker3
      
      Lehrer didn’t make him a villian, he made him an amoral opportunist.
- ffabian
  
  “And working for a regime that is likely to imprison or kill you otherwise is totally a free choice.”
  Nazi Germany or the USA post-9/11? The irony…
  - Mister44
    
    *eye roll*
Mister44

re: “whose V2 rockets wreaked havoc on behalf of the Nazis” I love the V2, but its actual impact was pretty small. It did more damage on the British psyche than its infrastructure.

ETA – if you want to see a V2 and are near Kansas, check out the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson.
Guest

@DrVonBraun is wonderful. :)
eldritch

In the final months of the second world war, the Allies initiated a firebombing campaign against Japan. The Japanese navy and airforce had been decimated – so much so that the new B-29 Super Fortress bombers that had just entered service flew without armor to make room for more bombs. The Allies had total air superiority and flew unopposed.

Sixty seven major Japanese cities were firebombed. Sixty six of those cities suffered 20% destruction or more. Thirty two suffered 50% destruction or more.

These were not military targets. This was not the collateral damage of the denial of war assets. This was expedient retribution. This was the purposeful targeting of civilians living in a nation which no longer had the capacity to make war. They had no ships left, no planes. They had no resources to produce more weapons, no factories to process resources with, no labor force that wasn’t devoted to other vital tasks. There was little food, the economy was in shambles. And we rained a literal holocaust down upon countless millions, and that not including the penultimate nuclear fire.

And why? To “save American lives”? Bullshit. We had no need to invade the mainland. All we had to do was sit tight and blockade. Surrender was inevitable because the Japanese physically could not continue the war. But the inevitable isn’t soon enough for politics, and the Russians were the new bogeyman to worry over. So why not kill millions of innocents? It’ll appease the troops and the American people as well as keep the Russians out.

Lehrer quips about the pensions of widows and orphans in London, but London was a single city with natural fortification against bombing owing to the nature of her construction. Many Londoners lost their lives to V2 rockets, yes, but the city was a hard target and the rockets were ultimately ineffective – both militarily and psychologically. Meanwhile the allies returned the favor literally twenty-five-fold, obliterating such German cities as Mainz, Hamburg, Hannover, Dresden, Frankfurt, Nuremburg, Stuttgart, Munich, Berlin, and others. The prefered tactic was to drop high explosives to blow in rooftops and crack open streets and gas lines, then follow up with incendiary bombs to ignite the exposed building interiors and blow apart the gas mains. In Japan, things were simpler – a culture of primarily wooden architecture doesn’t need to be weakened first, it just burns right away.

People like to point to figures like von Braun because he’s a well known name and because he was “on the other side”. But I never hear a word spoken against the Allied High Command’s firebombings, or the scientists and engineers who made the wholesale incineration of civilians possible. America commited her own attrocities in the war, but we love to harp on about the crimes of the “bad guys” and pretend our own don’t exist.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Does the fact that the Germans and the Japanese were the aggressors in the war not even impinge on your consciousness?
  - http://www.facebook.com/magnus.redin Magnus Redin
    
    Germany and the Sovjet union initiated the war in europe, the third major aggressor in Europe were Italy. The war started and ended with different alliances. Sadly were one major dictatorship left standing after the war, Japan and Nazi Germany fell but not the Sovjet Union.
    
    Google “molotov ribbentrop pact” for references about the set up for the war in Europe.
  - DevinC
    
    The point here is that this was warfare directed exclusively against civilians. (Yes, Germany had bombed London well before the Anglo-American air offensive, and the Japanese had some strange ideas involving bombs carried by paper balloons to the West Coast.)
    
    The question is not who started the Second World War. It is ‘is the killing of enemy civilians in wartime justifiable?’ If you think the citizens of the aggressor nation ought to suffer the consequences even when their deaths serve no (or dubious) military purpose, you should come out and say it.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      The point here is…The question is…
      
      No. It’s not THE point and THE question; it’s A point and A question.
      - DevinC
        
        I was trying to explicate the point that the OP was trying to make, that I think you missed. He just didn’t think the fact that Germany and Japan started the war was relevant to his point about war crimes.
    - http://www.facebook.com/magnus.redin Magnus Redin
      
      The point is that war is hell, it breaks down people and their moral, that goes both for soldiers who see whom they kill and policy makers that do not.
      
      People who are sure that they are doing the right thing remains more sane, sane as in functioning as individuals who can remain happy, care for their kids and so on. Nazis who were sure they were doing the right thing for the common good for the race did not see themselves as evil and that were good for their sanity. Some had to overcome instinctual responses to do the common good for the race such as the bone chilling screams from sub-human test subjects while finding out the physical limits for a human bodys endurance, a great sacrifice that got social support from their superiors. The same kind of sacrifice as those made by they who learn and practice enhanced interrogation techniques such as water boarding, they are doing things for the common good and it is not even torture since they are good and the subjects are evil terrorists who only wants to do bad.
      
      Both sides in a war see themselves as sane and good people fighting for what is just, then is the history written by the winner.
      - DevinC
        
        You make an excellent point, I think, in that what is deemed acceptable is contingent on culture and circumstance. I’m not sure, though, that what is right and what is commonly acceptable are the same thing.
      - http://www.facebook.com/magnus.redin Magnus Redin
        
        Yes, what is deemed acceptable is contingent on culture and circumstance. Also, evil people do seldom see themselves as evil, they find justification for what they do to other people, evil is often delivered withouth nazi swasticas and in other colours then brown.
    - Preston Sturges
      
      Not killing the citizens of the aggressor nation wouldn’t be “war,” heck it would barely qualify as soccer.
      - DevinC
        
        My fault: I should have said ‘civilian’ rather than ‘citizen’.
    - tuvaorbust
      
      OK. Someone needs to point out in here somewhere that while the Allies were killing the aggressors’ civilians, the aggressors (that’s the Nazis in this case) were killing Their Own civilians. Millions upon millions of them.
  - Chris Wright
    
    It’s appropriate (in private; in closed-door meetings involving military and political chiefs; since this would never survive a popular vote with people emoting rather than thinking) to determine an acceptable number of deaths in various categories to achieve a particular goal. That should include our soldiers, enemy soldiers, people who support our enemies directly (war production sort of thing), people who support them indirectly (taxpayers, mostly), and people who don’t have any desire to support them but just got in the way (children, tourists, and so forth).
    
    Those numbers might change depending on which side is invading other countries.
    
    However, this topic deserves a lot more thought than the offhanded implication: “the government of country X decided to invade first, so it’s acceptable to kill millions of noncombatants.”
    
    That said, if you’re going to kill millions of noncombatants, firebombing cities is a relatively efficient way of accomplishing that goal.
- RedShirt77
  
  Read some Vonnegut. He wrote on the subject tons.
  
  The allies clearly bombed civilians to reduce military loses in Dresden and accross Japan.
  
  Moral? Justified? Real questions.
  
  Building advanced weapons for murderous racist dictators hell bent on taking over the world is not a question. Clearly this guy was scum.
  - Guest
    
    and just as clearly we employed him while other nazis were tried for getting drafted.
  - Jonathan Badger
    
    Unfortunately Vonnegut’s source for numbers of dead and the motivations behind the bombing of Dresden was the infamous David Irving. When Kurt wrote Slaughterhouse-5, Irving was still considered a credible historian, but he was later outed as a Holocaust denier who fudged numbers in order to shine the best possible light on his beloved Reich.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Looking to fiction for historical and political context is a rather questionable practice in any case.
      
      Unless it’s The Lord of the Rings, of course.
      - lese
        
        Fiction, but the author was there and it’s semi-autobiographical. The image of Dresden the morning after looking like “…the surface of the moon” when they climbed out of the slaughterhouse has stuck with me far more than anything in any strictly historic works has.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        …has stuck with me far more than anything in any strictly historic works has.
        
        It’s. Fiction. The fact that he was there doesn’t make it all factual. It sticks with you because fiction writers turn facts into drama.
      - Guest
        
        Or a new play about Apple.
- social_maladroit
  
  You seem to enjoy self-flagellation, so you should definitely read Richard Rhodes’ book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, if you haven’t already. Especially the chapter on the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Japan. His graphic descriptions of what it must have been like to suffer through that horror will simply fill you with guilt.
  
  Do you think civilian deaths suffered as a result of a blockade would be less, what’s the word, “ugly” than civilian deaths suffered as a result of bombing? Just how long do you think it would have taken to get Japan to surrender if we’d merely blockaded them, since it took 2 atomic bombs, and why do you think the US should have waited that long? Estimates of civilian casualties at the hands of the Japanese range from 5-1/2 million to 30 million; why should we have been “nice” to them?
  
  (I’m playing devil’s advocate here. Personally, I don’t have much of a stomach for killing and maiming anyone, even if it’s the “enemy,” which makes for some rather interesting mental conflicts.)
- Mister44
  
  wahwahwah – Japan got bombed to end the war quickly. You need to read more on the Japanese. They would rather kill themselves than surrender. A blockade would just result in them slowly starving to death. An invasion meant millions of more lives lost. The two targets WERE military targets.
  
  Civilians ARE a valid target in war. They ALWAYS have been. Where do you think the army comes from? Who supports said army with gear, food, etc. Do you think a civilian wouldn’t kill you if given the chance? Rape and Pillage used to be the norm.
  
  Only as our precision has increased have we gone through efforts to keep civilian losses low, to the point that our ROE has limited our infantry on the ground from fighting and they end up dying. With drones and smart bombs we can hit what we want, when we want. We didn’t have the luxury during WWII. I am afraid I can’t muster up much empathy for the two initial aggressors.
  - DevinC
    
    You may be surprised to learn that that the idea of restraint in war has a very long history, going back at least as far as Thomas Aquinas.
- Rob Gehrke
  
  There were plans to firebomb Japanese cities because Americans knew many of the structures were made of wood, especially Tokyo – which would guarantee maximum effect…
  
  They also knew the Japanese were ready to surrender before the total destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the dropping of the atomic bombs was less a way of winning the war and more a way of demonstrating to the world who the new Punisher-in-Chief was.
  
  This, however, was only the beginning of a long and glorious history of massive military campaigns targeting civilians – see Fallujah, Iraq more recently. There is also the almost total destruction of Laos and the the Plain of Jars during the Vietnam war, instigated by a secret CIA campaign, which was to push back the Communists. Documentary here :
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoeHVW1oAYY&feature=youtu.be
- Rob Gehrke
  
  There’s more information here on the atomic issue and the Japanese surrender, but suffice it to say that it was a little more complicated than is usually presented in official history :
  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/index.htm
  http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
- Preston Sturges
  
  I read that we invented napalm during that Pacific war and dropped it on Japanese cities.
  
  The problem with preemptive war (Iraq) is that the conservatives are always yelling about “taking off the gloves” against people that did not attack us, but that would be a war crime. But if we are attacked, it is customary to rain down destruction on the instigator until they SURRENDER, and not to give any respite lest they conjure up some new weapon or ally. Still, firebombing campaigns were less effective strategically than had been hoped.
  
  Also, besides Japan’s atrocities against Chinese civilians, they were also well known for extravagent torture of US prisoners (dunking a prisoners head in boiling oil for instance), and even cannibalism of captured GIs. They weren’t generating much sympathy.
  - Adam Cahan
    
    War crimes aren’t a valid justification for committing war crimes. See: Invasion of Iraq.
    - Preston Sturges
      
      I didn’t say it did, however there is the “paradox of tolerance.”
      - Guest
        
        there is also ‘tolerance of paradox’ – but that’s a liberal proposition.
  - DevinC
    
    I think this is the second time I’ve seen the word ‘sympathy’ come up, but one’s sympathy (or lack thereof) doesn’t answer the question of whether something is right or wrong. Part of the reason I (personal opinion here) believe it is important to avoid unnecessary killing of civilians is not because of any great love of them, or humanity, but to avoid the muddying of the moral waters after the war is over. It’s much easier to convince the world (and the defeated) that what they did was wrong if your side behaved noticeably better.
    
    You make the valid point that directly attacking a civilian populace may induce them to surrender. (Germany was defeated in the First World War not in the field but by the British blockade; too many men had been sent to the front lines to bring in the harvest.) It seems pretty strange, though, to say ‘we must kill lots of civilians so we can avoid needless deaths!’
  - Guest
    
    Indeed, we go to war to lower our bar to that set by those we oppose.
    
    http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003612.html
    
    They always have it coming. Amirite?
nealpolitan

My Father-in-Law worked with Von Braun at Redstone Arsenal in the post-war years also. He is my “three degrees of separation from Hitler” connection.

Lehrer was/is awesome.
Mike Baker

“Sometimes, we can respect a person’s genius without respecting all of their choices.”
- Maggie Koerth-Baker

I’ll be looking for that quote everywhere in years to come and I’ll say “I was there!”

Aside from that, it’s always seemed to me that most high levels of genius are unaware of mundane things like “compassion” and “future of humanity” and “life outside of obsession.” But then there’s people like Gandhi, Einstein, and Carl Sagan. So… yeah, I guess not a requirement.
- Jane Shevtsov
  
  And yet it was Einstein who sent the letter to Roosevelt that resulted in the nuclear bomb being built. (Yes, I know he was afraid of the Nazis, but bombs aren’t defensive weapons and Hitler probably wasn’t deterable.) I wonder if he ever regretted it.
  
  “Sometimes, we can respect a person’s genius without respecting all of their choices.”
  - Brainspore
    
    And yet it was Einstein who sent the letter to Roosevelt that resulted in the nuclear bomb being built… I wonder if he ever regretted it.
    
    No need to wonder:
    
    “I made one great mistake in my life… when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made.”
    –Albert Einstein, November 1954
    - Mister44
      
      The bomb was inevitable. Thank whomever that we got it first. MAD has kept something like WWIII from ever happening. And thank whomever that we had von Braun. ICBMs were a key part of MAD and keeping the peace.
pauldrye

“Sometimes, we can respect a person’s genius without respecting all of their choices.”

I know…I’m a Sinéad O’Connor fan.
- Rob Gehrke
  
  ”I know…I’m a Sinéad O’Connor fan.”
  - I’m sorry about that.
  - pauldrye
    
    I’m not.
http://twitter.com/openfly ǝɔʎoſ ʇʇɐW

Von Braun is the quintessential engineering morality dilemma. And people who aren’t engineers won’t understand the dilemma.
- Guest
  
  everything needs a compass
alexandrelegault

As an Industrial Design student choosing to go into the military sector, I love looking to Wernher von Braun’s life. Not as an example of what not to do nor what to do, just as an example of how complex the decisions you make can become.
His story is also an incredible read, I forget the titles of the ones I have read but the larger books were definitely best.
.

During a weekend when I was in the military and stationed in New Mexico I visited a cool model railroad museum in Alamagordo. It turned out it was a retirement project for for an old Paperclipped Nazi scientist. He was a nice guy, but he couldn’t talk about what he did at Whitesands.

Also got to meet John Stapp down there too. A super nice guy that really believed in the safety work he did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Stapp
Spider Rose

OK, I hate it a little to cite from wikipedia, but wtf:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor

— snip —
Others claim von Braun engaged in brutal treatment or approved of it. Guy Morand, a French resistance fighter who was a prisoner in Dora, testified in 1995 that after an apparent sabotage attempt:

“Without even listening to my explanations, [von Braun] ordered the Meister to have me given 25 strokes…Then, judging that the strokes weren’t sufficiently hard, he ordered I be flogged more vigorously…von Braun made me translate that I deserved much more, that in fact I deserved to be hanged…I would say his cruelty, of which I was personally a victim, are, I would say, an eloquent testimony to his Nazi fanaticism.”

Robert Cazabonne, another French prisoner, testified that von Braun stood by and watched as prisoners were hung by chains from hoists.
— snip —

In consideration of evidence like this and the deaths of between 12.000 and 20.000 slave laborers who where worked to death, the phrasing “Sometimes, we can respect a person’s genius without respecting all of their choices.” gives me bellyache and leads at 03:00 in the morning to me creating accounts on websites for leaving comments. I find this inappropiate and trivializing.
earthychicano

And lets not forget the best Von Braun tribute: Perfume Nightmare.
Surely no better use of his memory than a scathing anti-colonial farce from the Philippines.
Oh, and its a great movie.
Rob Gehrke

The excellent Tom Lehrer!!
Nylund

When I was young, all of our family roadtrips were soundtracked by Tom Lehrer records. I think I probably still know the words to every song. When my brother was a student at UCSC my father basically demanded that he take a course from Prof. Lehrer.
tuvaorbust

This is one of the more disturbing posts and comment threads I have ever read. Anywhere. I’m just putting that out there in case someone sane ever stumbles upon it, as I feel having seen it I have a moral imperative not to remain silent. And if you have to ask why it’s disturbing, you’ll never know.
- bkad
  
  And if you have to ask why it’s disturbing, you’ll never know.
  
  I guess so. I find it interesting (educational).
  - tuvaorbust
    
    I do, too. This whole sorry spectacle is actually giving me new insight into the minds of the people who committed genocide. Sadly, it gives credence to the position that given human nature, the question is not, How could something like the Holocaust happen? but rather, Why don’t events like it happen more often?
    - bkad
      
      I’d hold out more hope than that. Besides, if you think are people are being too casual about this, it’s probably not a moral judgement, it’s just because they don’t know the history. I know I didn’t. The sum total of my WWII scientist knowledge is: “A bunch of scientists who developed rockets and other cool technology for the Germans later worked for the US, developing cooler rockets and technology.” And I’m a physicist by training, so if anything I’m more likely to be familiar with these people (familiar with their work, at least) than a randomly sampled US citizen, journalist, or Internet commentator.
      - Adam Cahan
        
        …..yeah, the issue is talking about “cool technology for Germany” w/out the context of what the Germans were doing with it, and who those scientists were working for.
        
        Totally recognize your comment was in the past tense – am extrapolating on it towards a general issue.
      - tuvaorbust
        
        Well, you’re quite right. Though it’s not the casualness that’s disturbing. Events occur in a context, and it’s the great error of science and scientists to fall for the illusion that they don’t. It frightens the non-scientist to witness the moral confusion this results in.
      - tuvaorbust
        
        Well, you’re quite right. Though it’s not the casualness that’s disturbing. Events occur in a context, and it’s the great error of science and scientists to fall for the illusion that they don’t. It frightens the non-scientist to witness the moral confusion this results in.
      - bkad
        
        Events occur in a context, and it’s the great error of science and scientists to fall for the illusion that they don’t. It frightens the non-scientist to witness the moral confusion this results in.
        
        I think that’s true. It’s true for me, anyway. I don’t WANT people to matter; that’s probably (from a personality perspective) one of the reasons I became a scientist.
        
        As a counterpoint, many people, some scientists included, forget that this is the whole point of science: to diminish the role of the scientist and his or her context. All that stuff about measuring things with numbers rather than making qualitative judgements, having controlled experiments, insisting on reproducibility and consensus, etc., are all about removing the bias/motivation of the scientist and finding the truth that exists independent of human perception or misperception. And science, by and large, does an amazing job of this. I don’t think this point is made loudly enough, and people get distracted by the fact scientists and organizations often fail to reach the ideal. But there are not many other human endeavors which try to expunge the influence of humanity. It makes science kindof special.
        
        BUT…. engineering, which is what we are really talking about here, is something different. That’s a question of application. Of actions, taken by humans. In a human world. Science is supposed to be context free, but engineering brings a different sort of responsibility.
      - tuvaorbust
        
        Precisely! And I’d go so far as to say that the elimination of context is both science’s genius and its Achilles Heel. Its genius because it shows people what they couldn’t otherwise see (among other reasons), and its Achilles Heel because it paradoxically creates a new viewpoint of its own that views itself as objective but is, objectively, simply creating another set of problems. OK, now I’m pretty much making fun of myself, but still, if you can untangle the meaning behind the garbled sentence, I do actually agree with myself.
noracharles

Concentration camp Dora where many of the rockets were built was truly horrendous. And that’s saying something considering many of the other camps. If you read up on Dora it was beyond a hellhole. What sticks with me is a prisoner who said, “Compared to Dora Auschwitz was easy.”

And yes von Braun definitely knew what was going on there. So that was some choice that he made.
- tuvaorbust
  
  Yes. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Nazism presented as something akin to a lifestyle choice before.
Charlie B

My father was a rocket scientist for most of his career, and he met von Braun. He said to me “The man is a Nazi; he has always been a Nazi and will always be a Nazi, because he has profited greatly from being a Nazi.”

I knew a man who joined the SS so his family wouldn’t starve. He never committed any atrocities and was a good person. But all his life he carried the burden of “former SS”.

Wehrner von Braun did not merely co-operate with the Nazi war machine. There are credible allegations that he personally committed atrocities. He certainly participated in what went on in the slave labor factories where his designs were built.

You can appreciate a man’s genius while still acknowledging that he was almost certainly an evil person who was never punished appropriately for his crimes.
http://twitter.com/MutantBrides Alex Dean Cybulski

Von Braun also worked at a prison camp, where the labor was utilized for the production of the V-2′s. A prison camp where many Russian prisoners were executed, even hung from cranes for their fellow prisoners to see. The prisoners were later abandoned near the war’s end and were starving to death when repatriated by American soldiers. Von Braun denied knowing about the events that took place at the camp. However, the testimony of a French soldier placed him at the camp, and having walked by a gallery of hung men with disinterest.
Preston Sturges

“So long, Mom”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pklr0UD9eSo