From: mcdowell@head-cfa.harvard.edu (Jonathan McDowell)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: Controversy over V-2 anniversary
Date: 5 Oct 92 13:45:46 GMT
Organization: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA,  USA

From article <SHAFER.92Oct4084155@ra.dfrf.nasa.gov>, by shafer@rigel.dfrf.nasa.gov (Mary Shafer):
[About "our Germans":]
> 
> That still doesn't make it right.  Not persecuting people for crimes
> against humanity because they may be useful to you is wrong.  Period.

> Mary


 I agree with you about that, Mary; and certainly there were members
of the Peenemunde team who had a prima facie case to answer on war crimes.
But it's the usual question: how much did you know and when did you
know it? There is a large body of anecdotal evidence, some of it possibly
even accurate, that von Braun himself was only interested in building
missiles as a route to building space rockets, and a lot of people have
defended him on those grounds - he wasn't really happy about bombing
London. Personally I think that's irrelevant, participating in the
war effort was one thing but being complicit in the mass murder
in the labor camps used to build the weapons is quite another. It
seems to me quite possible that during development and early
testing of the V-2 there wasn't much involvment of the labor camps,
and it was only when they went into production that slave labour
was used. At what point did von Braun know about this? My guess is
quite early on and that he didn't care a bean, but I'm think the
question is a valid one historically. At what point are you criminally
complicit in a crime against humanity? (For instance, are those Americans
who voted for governments which gave support to the genocidal regime
in Indonesia in the '60s complicit in that crime?) 

My personal opinion is that the hagiography of von Braun and his
colleagues prevalent in a certain city in Alabama is inappropriate,
that they were likely guilty of war crimes in some degree, but that
they were not responsible to anything like the same degree that
those that ran the camps and oversaw the camp system, many of whom
(like Krupp) spent a few brief years in jail and emerged to 
become rich, respected and powerful. I also feel that the first A-4
flight (it wasn't called the V-2 yet) was not a product of the Nazi camp
system but more directly of the Peenemunde military R&D team; so
while I don't think it good to celebrate the anniversary of the
V-2 weapon system, I feel fine about celebrating the Oct 1942 flight
from Test Stand VII as the first rocket flight into space.


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