Comment by pudgywalsh

From by Tom Lehrer's "Wernher von Braun"[1],

Don't say that he's hypocritical

Say rather that he's apolitical

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

1. https://youtu.be/QEJ9HrZq7Ro?t=14

Another interesting factoid about the V2 program is it accelerated the collapse of the Reich.

How can that be, you might ask?

The V2 program was an incredibly expensive program, and sucked up enormous resources. But the V2 proved to be an inconsequential weapon, and did very little damage, because its guidance system was primitive.

The V1, ironically, was effective. Not because it wreaked critical damage on Britain, but because it was cheap to build and deploy, and the British spent a great deal of resources trying to stop it.

It reminds me of the current drone warfare.

Hitler also demanded that it be used to attack London, blowing up civilian homes, when it would have been much more effective attacking the staging areas for D-Day.

Good info Walter, but I wasn't trying to get too deep.

Point is to not judge a book by its cover.

You've mentioned Dornberger's book to me in a previous conversation regarding Von Braun, and though I haven't yet had a chance to read it I just did some research on it.

From what I can tell it looks like like an amazing source for technical details of the V2 rocket but there are many problems with it that make it unsuitable for the kind of argument that you're attempting to make here.

First of all, the book wasn't written by Dornberger -- it was ghostwritten by a Nazi propagandist and aerospace enthusiast named Franz Ludwig Neher[0]. Neher is an interesting fellow, having been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for 18 months in the early 1930s and later enjoyed a career writing numerous Nazi propaganda biographies for 'Unsere Jagdflieger', a pulp booklet series issued on Hermann Göring's authority.

Looking at Neher's biography page on the German wikipedia we see that from 1951-1962 Neher was the press officer for the 'Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung' or 'the German spaceflight society' in English, and even served for a time on its board. In 1952 Von Braun commissioned Neher to work on a Mars-project novel named 'Menschen zwischen den Planeten' which was published in 1953 apparently with poor reception by the public. Some reprints have a pretty cool looking cover though.[1]

I don't have time right now to dissect the actual claims made in V2 by Dornberger/Neher regarding von Braun but it's safe to say from everything I found that this is a very unreliable source for the argument that you're making as the man writing Dornberger's memoir was simultaneously the paid publicist of the German spaceflight lobby and von Braun's hired novelist.

Even in a first year history course essay assignment there's absolutely no way that this book would be considered an acceptable source to reference for non-technical details. Any instructor who was knowledgeable about the subject or who actually researched the sources would underline that passage in the essay with fat red lines and would scrawl the same kind of criticisms that I just made above in the margins in red pen. If your argument was the central thesis of the paper and this source was the evidentiary corner stone of that thesis you'd at best receive a C, but more likely a D grade.

In reciting this Werhner Von Braun apologia you have fallen for Nazi propaganda. Don't feel bad about it though -- we've all bought the big lie at one point or another. It's hard not to -- as the Nazis were pretty much the Wayne Gretzky of propaganda.

I'd like make this a teachable moment by introducing you to the concept of historiography[2] and one particularly important (and coincidentally German) author in the field: Leopold von Ranke.[3] It isn't always easy but proper analysis of sources is critical for making accurate claims and analysis of historical events.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Ludwig_Neher

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Menschen-zwischen-den-Planeten/dp/3453...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Ranke

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Von Braun used the Nazi war machine to make his rockets. Musk ran DOGE. They’re both political figures by their own choices.

Well, the Nazi party was banned permanently by the Allied powers on Oct 10, 1945, so technically every member still alive became an ex-Nazi at that point. Including the leaders later hanged in Nuremberg, and, of course, Wernher von Braun.

Of course some people say that once a Nazi, always a Nazi.

> nothing

Heh.