[WalterBright]

In "V2" page 179 Dornberger writes:

"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"

The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.

[GolfPopper]

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

[WalterBright]

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.

[wat10000]

The V2 cost more to develop than the atomic bomb! And Germany was far less able to absorb the cost than the US.

[pudgywalsh]

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

Point is to not judge a book by its cover.

[Teever]

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

[WalterBright]

Have you ever found a refutation of von Braun being arrested by the Gestapo and scheduled to be executed?

I don't know why arresting von Braun would be nazi propaganda - it paints the nazis as rather stupid.

BTW, I read the book because of the technical details, which were quite interesting to me.

Google "was von braun arrested by the nazis" and you'll see essentially the same thing I posted.

Confirmation of the same by "An Interview with Michael Neufeld, PhD, of the National Air and Space Museum": https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/wernher-von-b...

[Teever]

No, the arrest most certainly happened, it's corroborated from enough sources that this isn't in question, though from what I can tell the arrest report no longer exist, but there are contemporaneous notes made by Alfred Jodl. Additionally from a cursory search there are conflicting reasons given for the arrest including what you've mentioned and even communist accusations.

When I said "Nazi" earlier I should have been more precise, I was referring to von Braun, Dornberger, and his ghostwriter as "Nazis" even though AFAICT von Braun was the only actual card carrying Nazi of the bunch.

With that said, the problems with this source remains. The ghostwriter has a financial conflict of interest with the subject which would bias him to make as flattering of a portrayal of the subject, and the people involved are all intrinsically untrustworthy because well... look at the bunch... a Nazi propagandist, a Major General from the Wehrmacht, and an actual Nazi.

Look at the circumstances around this, you have the Nuremberg trials having only recently taken place which saw a bunch of dudes these guys personally knew publically shamed and hanged, These guys themselves were directly targeting civilians with these weapons, It's the middle of the McCarthy Era -- There's no way these guys could tell anything remotely close to an objective truth.

Everything they're going to say in this context is to save their skin. They're gonna write "Oh yeah, arrested by those evil Nazis for being too peaceful and science-minded" not something more realistic like "von Braun made a deal with the devil that was an absolutely psychotic and dysfunctional authoritarian regime and the deal almost blew up but that von Braun is so damn lucky he must have a horseshoe up his ass."

An adjacent topic that I've wondered about for years is his come to Jesus stuff after the war. It's plausible that he had a serious reckoning with his world view from his experiences during the war but it also seems just a little bit too convenient, you know?

[WalterBright]

Yes, von Braun was a card-carrying Nazi. But something to consider. Professors could not get their research papers published unless they were card-carrying Nazis. Von Braun could not have headed up the rocket program unless he was a card-carrying Nazi. Did he make a deal with the devil? Yes.

He was also arrested by the Gestapo and threatened with execution if he was not more diligent in his efforts to develop the V2 missile.

I don't think it is implausible that he was less than enthusiastic about nazism. And once he was in the rocket program, there was no way out for him.

[Teever]

It is well documented that von Braun had contempt for the Nazis, the problem is that he didn't have enough contempt for them to not work for them and leave Germany when he had the chance.

Taking the position that it is acceptable to use slave labour to save your life from the authoritarians that you volunteered to work for during war is only a hop, skip and a jump away from saying that it is acceptable to use slave labour to save your life from the people attacking you during war.

This is but one of the moral hazards of the kinds of activities that von Braun wilfully participating in.

In a different world where the United States and Britain more closely followed the moral ideals that they profess as cornerstones of their nations von Braun and other Nazis would have been tried and executed for their actions. Or in the very least coerced to work for them in sparse cell in a remote location for the rest of his days.

The rehabilitation of von Braun and his admittance into American society is a great stain on the ethos of the nation.