NASA Still Honors A Nazi Who Used Slave Labor To Build His Rockets
Rethinking How And Who NASA Honors, earlier post
“At a time when everyone seems to be taking a hard look at commemorating past events with a light shone on racism and the denial of human rights, one would think that someone at NASA would reconsider having the heroic bust of a Nazi SS member who used slave labor to build his rockets as the way to greet people who arrive for work every day at NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center. NASA openly admits that von Braun used slave labor. Yes he was the first center director at Marshall and led a large part of the Apollo effort that landed humans on the Moon. No one is suggesting that this be erased from the history books. But should NASA continue to honor him like this?”
Keith’s note: FYI a reader reminded me of this exhibit at the U.S. National Holocaust Museum (larger view). It is captioned “In summer 1944, noted German film and still photographer Walter Frentz was assigned to document the construction and launching of the V-1 and V-2 rockets. He took these rare color photographs of prisoners in the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp assembling these weapons. Ullstein Bild, Berlin.”
And then there’s this photo of the Nordhausen factory showing V-2 rockets being assembled by Dora Concentration Camp slave laborers.
This bust has been in a place of honor at Marshall since 1994. A quarter of a century later one would think that this prominent NASA tribute to someone who used massive amounts of slave labor – with inhumane, lethal consequences – should at least be put in a box somewhere.
It’s time.
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Above is an image of corpses in the Dora barracks which Von Braun visited on more than one occasion. Of course the statue should be taken down (or at least altered). Von Braun’s photo (or painting) along with other Center Directors would remain. I can’t see it happening now. Trump was just defending the Confederate flag and railing against cancel culture. Is Bridenstine going to have the courage to do the right thing? If he did, he would still have to get this past Shelby and Brooks.
The Von Brauns statues days are numbered. The comments predictable (…but it makes us remember all that history…yada, yada…but no, we should not add these pictures, or a plaque or such providing that history BTW…). Moving on, what should we put there instead to greet everyone? I vote for Sally Ride, if a person, or an actual Falcon 9 reusable booster, if a rocket.
I’d like to see someone put a Falcon 9 flown core at MSFC or maybe the US Space and Rocket Center.
They already have the Fastrac engine on display at Marshall which is basically the designed used for the Merlin
The one that launched DM2 should be saved and put on display.
He was a full fledged Nazi SS officer who used slave labor to build his rockets and NASA continues to place a statue in a place of honor on the grounds of a NASA facility.
It’s time to put VB in the proper context. Remove the bust. Display it at the US Space and Rocket Center next to the V-2 across from the Saturn V. With some historically accurate words about slave labor that built V-1/V-2 rockets.
More loss of human life was expended to produce the V2 than the total number of human lives taken as a result of its operational use.
So it is OK to kill slave laborers building weapons to try and kill more people?
I didn’t read any hint of that in Steve’s post.
I did. It some sort of warped equivocation about whether it made sense to kill people to make weapons or to kill people with the weapons.
Nor did I. I had read that long ago and always saw it as a tragic irony of technological history. It was made to cause destruction and, I would assume, cause horror; its production yielded more destruction and horror than that intended by its purpose.
The fact is what it is; I see no passing of judgement in Steve’s noting the irony, which he lifted directly from the article.
The bust is on guarded Federal property so the antifa and anarchist protesters cannot get to it. But there are other Huntsville city facilities named for the famous Nazi. I would rather see the removal of landmarks done through appropriate civil processes rather than by
partisan lawbreakers. That after all is a difference between the U.S. and the Nazis or at least it used to be.
And now we are not looking the other way.
Interesting article particularly Abe Silverstein work in liquid hydrogen technology and chose the moon program’s name of Apollo. Looking back at when we successfully went to the moon and back, now these days trying to do the same… It seems SpaceX doesn’t carry baggage from the past. Unless there’s other issues being ignored. Talk about balancing act for NASA management these days (along with other topics i.e. SLS presented here on NW). Some items from article that stood out for me:
“There were basically four groups in Huntsville — the local whites, the blacks, the Germans, and everybody from out of town, who were considered Yankees,” Mullin said. A white man from Southern California, he fell into the last group. “None of the groups mingled. A Yankee couldn’t get a date with a young lady in that town.”
Moreover, the Jews had to deal with plenty of discrimination in America. Many went to work at NASA specifically because they were blocked from jobs in private industry.
“I said, ‘I’m not flying with any damn Russians,’” Bolden recalled. “‘I am a Marine and I trained all my life to kill them, and they have done the same.’” But he relented when he met his Russian partner, and they became lifelong friends. Still, Bolden, an African American from South Carolina, was asked: Could he have made a similar leap to work with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan?
After a long pause, he said, “My hope would be that I would be big enough to see what kind of a person they are now, and let’s see if we can establish some kind of commonality between us. That might make a difference. “I am certain that is what happened with Abe Silverstein and the [other] Jewish guys,” Bolden added. “We are putting what is good for the country ahead of anything personal. I am almost certain we wouldn’t see that today.”
Is there any evidence it was Von Braun’s idea to use slave labor because I’m pretty sure quite a bit of German industry was using it at the time. My guess is that nobody ever asked him if he wanted to use slaves. Nazis are like that sometimes. By contrast, Oppenheimer led the atomic bomb effort AND he was on a committee that recommended targets for it, targets that had to include lots of innocent civilians.
Read some history. He knew that slave labor was being used and visited the factories where it was being used. There is no way to use semantics to exonerate him. He used slave labor to build his rockets.
He may not have had full freedom over using slave labor, but he might have been able to stick his neck out and reduce the use of slave labor. He was in a position to say which jobs required “skilled” labor and influenced how much or little work could be assigned to prisoners from the camps. That would have been risky and gotten him in more trouble with the regime, but it might have worked and it doesn’t look like he tried.
Not only did he not try but decades later, sitting in his nice NASA office with a house in the suburbs he never apologized. Indeed he often tried to avoid discussing this period. Historians have taken note of this.
The “targets for the first atomic bombs” discussion has been going on for a long time. One of the first things that people point out is that MANY innocent civilians were killed by other bombing in many theaters by many air forces, the atomic bombs were not unique in that regard.
Any further discussion of this could be continued in many separate discussions on other sites – this is a discussion of Werner Von Braun.
So defending Von Braun is absolutely forbidden. The only voices allowed are those of the social justice bandwagon shouting his condemnation. The self righteous are behaving in the same manner as the very Nazis they decry. Had our WWII troops any inkling of how our people are behaving today no one would have stormed the beaches at Normandy. You can suppress my opinion but I lay my head down at night secure in the knowledge that I still have my stones.
Are you defending NASA’s honoring of an SS officer who used slave labor to build rockets under inhumane conditions that lead to the death of thousands of innocent people? If so then you need to find a way to live with yourself. I can’t help you with that. But you will need to spout your defense of von Braun elsewhere.
Article is behind a Paywall.
Dr. Von Braun’s bust at MSFC may serve as a weather vane of sorts for the future of our nation…and more besides.
What he achieved in the framework of space/NASA/Apollo, etc for our nation and the world—thanks to his substantial technical, leadership, and communication talents—merits our recognition, admiration, and gratitude. The horrors that took place under his supervision of missile development & production for Nazi Germany deserve our condemnation.
How, exactly, ought we to approach the unavoidable reality of the human condition that no one is perfect and that some persons who have achieved great good things also have done wrong? This case at MSFC seems clear cut to most eyes given the heinous nature of the wrongdoing (whatever Von Braun’s precise degree of culpability), but the dilemma is the same with other important figures such as Washington, Jefferson, and so many others. Should the Washington Monument come down because the first Commander & Chief owned slaves? The Jefferson Memorial eliminated because the primary author of the Declaration of Independence also did so? Should Charles Darwin be similarly ‘defrocked of honor’ because of his ‘understanding’ of the superiority/inferiority of different races which fit so neatly into his brilliant theory?
To tear down Washington & Jefferson seems ludicrous to me given that without their substantial achievements we wouldn’t be having this discussion. One might even suggest that without Von Braun’s efforts on behalf of the USA, we might not be having this particular discussion either, at least not on a forum named thus. NASA of today grew from a complicated history which included his specific contributions.
If the consensus were to be that Washington and Jefferson stay but Von Braun goes (which feels ‘reasonable’ to me at first blush and broad brush), this begs the question: Exactly what should our criteria be for making such choices? How horrible must a crime in someone’s past (or their then-present) be to have he or she ‘fail to pass’ the grade and therefore be expunged? How (if at all possible) would we actually define such a scale of ‘horribleness’? How far should the ‘expungement’ go? And where precisely does the possibility of redemption fit in? Would it be possible to honor and condemn someone at the same time? If so, how? [How do we capture the lessons entwined in the history of the monuments themselves? I appreciate the removal of Confederate statues, but I don’t want anyone to forget how & why they got erected in the first place.]
It has been a tendency of humankind to make such judgements and take such measures for a very long time. Consider how pharaohs’ & caesars’ names & likenesses were scratched off physical edifices, and monument stones were repurposed down the ages. And even recently, we all likely remember the moving of the Churchill bust from the Oval Office not too long ago—a minor example but certainly of the same fabric/impulse. Perhaps today, in this moment sparked by tragedy, we find ourselves at a significant, even deeper decision point regarding the way we want to remember our past—all of our past.
I will not suggest here (beyond my already offered first impressions) precisely how we ought to choose. I would only encourage all of us to do so very deliberately and be quite careful not to base our decisions solely on the oft-myopic wisdom of “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” (GKC) What might seem so obvious to us in this current moment may not seem so in years or centuries to come. Those who went before us thought quite a few things were ‘obvious’ in their moments of walking about, too.
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
I am closing comments on this post. I have deleted a dozen or so posts by apologists who have tried to whitewash von Braun’s Nazi past, his lack of atonement, or NASA’s continued honoring.