History Memes

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.