this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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Explanation: After WW2, many members of the Nazi military and political apparatus fled to Argentina, which was run by a fascist government, but had not joined the Axis (and thus remained standing after the war). To avoid being hunted down like the rabid dogs they were, they generally changed their names and identities and attempted to keep a low profile.
Many Nazi scientists, on the other hand, had better prospects ahead of them - as the Nazis focused a great deal of resources on military applications of scientific fields, particularly rocketry (which was not highly prioritized by the Allied governments in WW2), and the Cold War was revving up, a mixture of "They were just apolitical scientists!" and "We're going to ignore all this slave labor they signed off on" got a large number of Nazi scientists free tickets to comfortable Western countries, particularly the US through Operation Paperclip. And what Cold War drama would be complete without the mirror effort of the opposing side, in the Soviet Operation Osoaviakhim?
In the admittedly weak defence of the Nazi scientists, many of them weren't ideologically dedicated Nazis, but ordinary academics who allowed their work to be pressed into service of an abominable cause out of fear or apathy. Some claimed (perhaps truthfully) to have 'slow-walked' research; others that they just kept their heads down like good little obedient pawns to avoid getting shot.
Werner Von Braun in particular should've gotten a noose and not a position at NASA, though.
I'll bite: tell us about Von Braun!
Von Braun was one of the higher-up Nazi engineers during WW2 who did work on the V2 missile program which was used for the terror bombing of British civilian targets. Now, while any aid offered to the Nazis is unacceptable, he was only an engineer, not a strategist, and was not involved in choosing targets, to my knowledge, for the weapons he made.
What he did do, however, was gleefully exploit slave labor to its fullest possible extent, to the point of requesting more coerced workers for V2 construction, knowing full-well that the conditions being demanded of the slave labor was literally killing them in huge numbers. Post-war estimates would put more deaths from slave labor on the V2 project being worked to death than the V2 missiles themselves caused.
Because of his expertise in rocketry, however, he got to make some ridiculous denials and start up a job at NASA after the war.
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That's not my department, says Werner Von Braun
If you find von Braun repulsive, wait until you learn about Walter Dornberger, one of von Braun's underlings. He had, to put it very euphemistically, shown some talent in organising rocket production, which lead to him becoming project leader for the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo lunar missions. His involvement in Nazi atrocities was so direct that he was deposed from this post after it became public.