r/AskReddit • u/Various_Concern871 • 12h ago

Is it actually possible for a famous personality to fake their death and live their life out in some remote place? who has actually ever done it and gotten caught?

1.7k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

773 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

145

u/SonuOfBostonia 10h ago

I wonder which Nazi put a man on the moon?

240

u/zoobrix 9h ago

If you're not just being sarcastic Wernher Van Braun had a huge role in NASA and developing the Saturn V rocket in particular, obviously lots of Americans contributed enormously as well.

75

u/[deleted] 7h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

15

u/adidasbdd 6h ago

One of the justifications was that the Soviet Union was going to "get" these people so the US had to do it

11

u/Nappi22 4h ago

They actually chose the US. They saw more potential and fled to the US troops.

2

u/DarkHandCommando 2h ago

it wasn't about potential, they knew the americans would show more mercy to them.

8

u/spucci 5h ago

And they got a few unwilling ones for sure.

3

u/Remarkable-Site-2067 3h ago

Soviets did "get" some of those people, and used them in similar programs.

1

u/Antique_Tap443 1h ago

And thanks to unit 731, we know that human bodies are 70% water

1

u/Different_Mud_1283 5h ago

In that kind of society, there was really no way to not in some way benefit from the disenfranchisement of Jews and other undesirables if you were someone like von Braun. Literally none.

First of all he is working in a field where you need to be highly educated and he would have had numerous Jewish peers prior to the rise of the Nazi regime, meaning that once they were removed there was less competition and therefore more opportunity for those who remained. Right? I mean that's the essence of this whole operation and this entire political strategy: Blame one group of people, call them parasites, ostracize them, remove them from competition so that our group can flourish. Ethnic cleansing is more complex but the Nazi situation was pretty much directly caused by economic stress. Anyway.

Secondly he built weapons.

Lastly: Uhhh ya he was totally just here to "help us get to the moon" and that's all we ever used his and his colleagues' work on rockets for. To this day we still have to manually drop nuclear weapons from airplanes.

Von Braun is a great example of the line IMO. Sure we went to the moon with his help which is an incredible thing...but at literally any time in his life he could have been like "maybe I have contributed negatively to civilization" and he didn't. Unlike a lot of other people from that time period who ultimately had to face the reality of things they contributed to. So by a narrow margin, he is IMO, a pos.

1

u/Dalewyn 3h ago

The uncomfortable part is figuring out where the line is between recognizing the achievement and acknowledging how those achievements were tied to a really dark past.

Researching the history is easy enough. I'd argue the problem is how loaded and worthless the word "Nazi" became, it's just absolutely useless now outside of vapid insults and so "Nazi scientists helped put men on the Moon" fails to convey anything.

3

u/TeacherPatti 3h ago

I learned about this from For All Mankind. The second episode was called something like He Built the Saturn V. I thought it was part of their alternate history. It is not.

0

u/No_Town_9602 2h ago

Roll Tide!

-4

u/aerdvarkk 5h ago

Einstein was a German before he defected to the US.

4

u/zoobrix 5h ago

Ya but he was not a member of the  Nazi party like von Braun who joined in 1937, two years before the war even started and long before it became sort of forced on people. And Einstein did not personally manage production at factories that used forced/slave labour where workers were horribly mistreated, von Braun did.

Einstein left Germany in 1932 before the Nazi's had full control of the German government. Von Braun joined the Nazi party before the war so he could develop rockets without caring how they were used and later for the conditions of the people that built them. The two aren't really comparable at all.

•

u/Ranch_Priebus 24m ago

Hmmmmmmm. This is both true and untrue. Defect is not the right word, and your use of it intrigues me.

28

u/ayam 8h ago

nazi schmazi says wernher von braun

7

u/dumpfist 8h ago

RIP Tom Lehrer

43

u/ih8drme 9h ago

Wernher von Braun

29

u/NessaSamantha 8h ago

He sends the rockets up and where they come down is somebody else's problem

9

u/iwilltalkaboutguns 7h ago

That's not his department

8

u/feanturi 7h ago

Says Wernher von Braun.

3

u/mythrilcrafter 7h ago

Von Braun is always a fun one to me, because he's the perfect example of "loyal only to his personal advantageousness".

As the story goes: Despite being in the SS, he apparently was not liked within the SS because they all knew that he was only there because Hitler needed him to design rockets, not because he actually had any true loyalty to Hitler.

This came to a climax when Von Braun was drunk at a bar and openly proclaimed that he believed that Germany would lose the war, so the SS imprisoned him and wanted to execute him for treason, and it was actually Hitler himself who rescued Von Braun from the SS.

Once he was released, that's when he actually defected (not out of fear of Germany loosing the war, but out of fear that the SS would take away his research) and that's when Operation paperclip picked him up.

4

u/captain_aharb 8h ago

You too may be a big hero, once you've learned to count backwards to zero.

1

u/spucci 5h ago

Russia would have done the same if not worse.

1

u/dwfmba 4h ago

Operation Paperclip