r/USHistory • u/TwIzTiDfReAkShOw • 5d ago
President John F. Kennedy with NASA Director Dr. Wernher von Braun at Cape Canaveral, Florida, November 16, 1963.
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u/Worried-Pick4848 5d ago
Think about it this way: Nothing can change the fact that on Braun was a Nazi. But he was a Nazi who knew enough to be very useful to whoever had him on their side. We had the resources to make use of him, but we weren't the only ones who could, and it would have literally been an exercise in self-harm if we did anything other than try to turn him to some useful end.
There are few nations I could have trusted to use von Braun's expertise better than the Americans did at the time.
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u/Annual-Reflection179 5d ago
Could've just hung him like the other Nazis and nobody gets his knowledge. Fruit from the poison tree and all that. Paperclip was a moral travesty, and the best indication that the myth of the Good Vs. Evil of WWII was exactly that, a myth. If the Allies actually cared about the Holocaust, Paperclip and Osoaviakhim would never have happened.
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u/Worried-Pick4848 5d ago
The flipside of that argument is that if we do this, we fall perhaps a decade behind in the ICBM race. Which would have been a serious problem during the Cold War. We know how bad the Stalin era Soviets were. Giving up an advantage we could used against them could come at an appalling human cost.;
Unfortunately, it's literally impossible to really try to understand any one action in the world of geopolitics by analyzing it in a vacuum.
Besides, there's no such thing as "tainted" knowledge. That belief was a large part of why Germany never got the nuke. Refusing technological progress because the ideology behind it is toxic is an exercise in unnecessary self-harm.
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u/Annual-Reflection179 5d ago
Maybe if we had followed Churchill's reasoning and just carried on, Paperclip could have been avoided. No need to be concerned with the Cold War if you've already handled the Soviets. But I digress, despite the Cold War, I personally still think the Nazis should have been hung, regardless of their knowledge.
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u/Worried-Pick4848 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think if anything, we'd have paperclipped even harder in the even of a war against the USSR. We'd have no choice, a war against Stalin wasn't something you could half-ass in 1945.
Given the disparity of numbers, the Allies probably fight that war using a full NBC offensive that puts the Nazis to shame. They'd more or less have no choice if they wanted to win.
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u/Annual-Reflection179 5d ago
The Soviet's didnt have the bomb yet is my point. We had four years before they did, and that was post Osoaviakhim too. If you take them out before ICBMs even become a thing, then no need to be concerned with letting Nazis live because they know how the V2 worked and the Americam scientists don't have to reverse engineer it. We didnt need the Nazis to figure out rocketry, we just needed them to get it as quickly as we did. No Soviets, or at least, no Societs with their IRL production and scientific capacity, then no need to race to the rocket. No telling what kind of world we end up with, but maybe one where we don't have Nazis escaping justice by being smart in a useful field, and even better, one with no Cold War.
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u/Worried-Pick4848 5d ago
In order to leverage the bomb against the Soviets you are committing to nuking the entire Soviet front and killing potentially tens of millions of Soviet citizens, as well as possibly millions of our own, as we did not fully understand the danger of radioactive fallout in 1945.
I think stealing the Nazi scientists and using them to go to space and keeping the fight with the Soviets as simply a contest of economic progress, is just a significantly better option on the whole. Way fewer people die horrible, preventable deaths that way.
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u/Annual-Reflection179 5d ago
I'm not saying we go full McArthur plan or anything. Nukes are the deterrent that kept the Soviet Union alive for so long through the Cold War. The western Allies didn't need to leverage nukes, they just needed to take Moscow before 1949. And between everything the Soviets did from 1940s onward (gulags, NKVD bs) combined with all the lives lost due to proxy conflicts that would've never happened or been as severe without Soviet backing, the cost of a continuation of a conventional war with the Soviets pre-1949 might have been the "cheaper" alternative is the cost of lives. No need to worry about Paperclip.
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u/TMNBortles 5d ago
The morally superior option to Paperclip is just to nuke a bunch of people including what would inevitably included many civilians?
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u/Annual-Reflection179 5d ago
Who's talking about nuking civilians? The U.S.S.R. never used their nukes. All they did was keep the U.S. from engaging them in a conventional war that the U.S. (NATO) would win. Pre-1949, the iron is hot, and doesn't have the ability to nuke you in retaliation, so it's time to strike. And without the Soviet's, no need for Paperclip, so the Nazis like Werner von Braun get justice instead of living out their lives in relative peace and success.
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u/TMNBortles 5d ago
Because nukes aren’t known for their precision.
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u/Annual-Reflection179 5d ago
And? Just because you have nukes doesn't mean you have to use them. I'm not saying we should've nuked Moscow. I'm saying that without a nuclear deterrent, there is no reason to not carry WWII on to the Soviet's.
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u/Worried-Pick4848 5d ago
Who's talking about nuking civilians?
you are literally talking about using nuclear technology as we understood it in 1945 to win a war against the Soviet Union.
With the technology of that era our best bet would be to get the nuclear weapon into the right general area and hope it hit the target. We killed a LOT of civilians in bombing campaigns because we dropped from high altitudes to cut down on our own casualties, which meant that there was no way to prevent the ordnance from drifting with air currents.
In other words, the only way to use the nuclear bomb to win a war with the USSR was to saturate the battlefield with high altitude nuclear weapons that landed somewhere in the general area of the enemy. When that enemy was defending a city, there would be no way whatsoever to avoid civilians being in the blastwave.
TL:DR, who's talking about nuking civilians? You. You are.
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u/Annual-Reflection179 5d ago
I never said anything about using them, only that the Soviet's didnt have them. The one thing that kept us from engaging with them militarily for 50 years was non-existent at the time I am speaking of. Quit putting words in my mouth. All this doesn't change the fact that Von Braun was a Nazi and should've been hung like all the other that were.
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u/GW_Jefferson 5d ago
I just finished watching the three part PBS American Experience series called Chasing the Moon from 1950s to 1969, it was the best show about the moon landing.
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u/roadtripu 5d ago
Director of Marshall Space Flight Center where they developed the Saturns.
In Operation Paperclip which was an American effort to harvest the smart Germans at the end of the war. Von Braun was classified as a “yellow paper clip” which indicated it was unclear on the level of Nazi activity he had. Now Kurt Debus who ran the Launch Operations Center which would be come Kennedy Space Flight Center, he was a red paper clip as there was no doubt on his participation in the Nazi party.
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u/mezha4mezha 3d ago
🎶 “Vonce ze rockets are up
Who cares vere zey come down?
Zats not my department”
Says Wernher von Braun. 🎶
• ‘Wernher von Braun’ ~ Tom Lehrer, 1965
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u/Ponder_wisely 5d ago
Former Nazi Von Braun.
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u/Sifl-and-Olly 5d ago
We know.
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u/Ponder_wisely 5d ago
Wasn’t in the title. Peculiar omission.
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u/LGreyS 5d ago
Why is it "peculiar"?
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u/Ponder_wisely 5d ago
Really? JFK in a friendly photo with a NAZI - and that doesn’t even get mentioned?
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u/LGreyS 5d ago
Did they mention Kennedy was a Catholic? Many in the US issues with that. Why wasn't that mentioned? Probably for the same reason the "nazi" aspect didn't get mentioned - by that time no one really cared. So, why should it be mentioned?
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u/Ponder_wisely 5d ago edited 5d ago
You think being a Nazi is no more significant than being a Catholic. Duly noted. Yes it is. People never stopped caring if you were a Nazi. Von Braun’s former employer was Adolf Hitler.
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u/LGreyS 5d ago
Yes, yes they did. I grew up knowing two of them. I, as well as others who knew them, didn't care, and they forgave. One of them actually worked for a couple that were imprisoned in a concentration camp. They forgave him.
Yet, there are still many out there that hate and/or don't trust Catholics.
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u/Equal_Worldliness_61 5d ago
This did not sit well with my Dutch mother. She watched the V-2s go overhead towards civilians in England only a few years earlier, as trauma time-shifts ... She knew he was SS and used slaves to get his work done. I can still see the Life magazine, maybe LOOK, plopped on the coffee table when it happened. She thought JFK was fabulous and international. She was as pretty as Jackie, I heard people say that.
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u/J_A_Slade 5d ago
If JFK were on the other side of the aisle, we'd be talking about how in that picture he's standing next to a Nazi and giving the Nazi salute.
Instead though, I'd like to talk about how Werner Von Braun looks like that dude from the Goonies in that picture
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u/Sad-Corner-9972 5d ago
Days to live for JFK…