Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aduty 241 days ago
He only cared about sending rockets up. Where they came down was other people's problem.
4 comments

I always laughed at that line from Lehrer, but Von Braun absolutely cared about where his rockets came down.
That's not his department.
He was also totally ok with slave labor. He was a voluntary Nazi party insider and SS member. He deliberately chose to participate in Hitler’s totalitarian regime to advance his own goals. This kind of behavior should be remembered and condemned.

He was a brilliant designer, engineer, and project leader but he is an extremely problematic person for the methods he was comfortable using to achieve his goals.

The message you replied to is a reference to an anti-von Braun song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

Wasn't Vernor von Braun also infamous for poisoning pigeons in the park?
Seems isomorphic to today's slave-driving death-marching CEOs that we celebrate so much. In a past time they would be right up there on the podium
Very insightful thought. Which tech CEO today would not have been up on the podium along side the leaders of the third reich? Would you, would I, if necessity required it?
> Seems isomorphic to today's slave-driving death-marching CEOs that we celebrate so much.

Von Braun used literal concentration camp slave labor. You should reconsider your use of “slave-driving” here because it is a very bad look.

Their point is that plenty among our current batch of sociopathic CEOs would be using concentration camp slave labor where they in Nazi Germany as well. That they don’t is because of the societal restrictions preventing them from doing so.
I recommend reading "Operation Paperclip" to see the conditions the Nazis put their concentration camp workers in. Not really isomorphic.
Conveniently this administration is not allowing access to their extrajudicial concentration camps.
> He only cared about sending rockets up.

Which extended also how exactly those rockets were produced... and by whom.

EDIT: Yeah, I get it, the Zwangsarbeiter from the camps building the rockets are not very conductive to the carefully whitewashed "hero technocrat" image certain "hackers" just love to invest in. :T