Revisionist Millennial Musing by Amy Shira Teitel About The V-2 Rocket
Was The V-2 a Nazi Weapon?, Popular Science
“The short answer is that, no, the V-2 wasn’t strictly speaking a Nazi weapon. The long answer is more complicated, and a lot more interesting.”
Keith’s note: Amy Shira Teitel who has done PR things for NASA on occasion, posted a video in December that accompanies this article wherein she splits hairs over whether the V-2 rocket was a “Nazi weapon”. Of course it was. Its kind of odd that anyone would even ask that question. As Teitel happily wanders through a superficial review of German military history she seems to be thinking that because it was a German Army project before some Nazi walked in and took complete control over, that this affects whether or not to call it a “Nazi Weapon”. At best this is a distinction without a difference. Anyone who has read one page in one book on World War II knows that the Nazis ran Germany – period. Teitel ends her video with a bubbly “The V2 is a really interesting rocket that played a very interesting role and it can be looked at so many different ways.” Yes, it was an “interesting rocket”, Amy. My father was severely injured by a V-2 that struck London – his roommates were killed by it, so I guess I am biased. But I am not alone in holding this view.
Amy Teitel can look at the always “interesting” V-2 anyway she wants from her millennial revisionist viewpoint 3/4 of a century after the fact- and she can even try to recast the V-2 as something it was not. Oddly, you never hear her mention the horrific and subhuman conditions that slaves endured to produce this “interesting rocket”. I guess this is a trivial detail that gets in the way of her story telling. In the end the V-2 was created by Nazi Germany plain and simple. The V-2 is and always was a Nazi weapon. Klar, Amy?
Damn freaking right, Keith!
Reading that article, it appears that she makes the absolutely bogus assumption that it had to be run by the SS, to be NAZI. Wrong.
The Wehrmacht Oath of Loyalty to Adolf Hitler
“I swear by God this sacred oath that to the Leader of the German empire and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces, I shall render unconditional obedience and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath.”
Civil servant oath
I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German empire and people, Adolf Hitler, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfill my official duties, so help me God!
She also overlooks that Von Braun joined the Nazi party and the SS in 1940.
She doesn’t overlook it. She spends several chapters on Von Braun’s membership in the Nazi party in her book that covers this (among other) topics. You can’t fault YouTube videos or Popular Science articles for being unable to cover every single aspect of the extremely complicated historical context behind this program. There is always more to be said, and these outlet have length limits.
None of us have her book. I can certainly fault Youtube and Popular Science if that is all that I am presented with – and regardless – she had ample opportunity to describe all of the major aspects of the V-2 and its development by Nazi Germany – she just chose not to include that information.
Because its not relevant to the historical question she is addressing. The question she is trying to adress is, “Even though the V2 was undeniably a weapon the Nazis used, to what extent was it developed by and for the Nazis?” (And the answer is, evidentlly, “it’s complicated”.)
The fact that the rockets were built by slave laborers and used to kill civilians does not contribute to answering that question. The omission of those facts is not, as you seem to insist, a case of historical revisionism. It’s a case of ommiting irrelevant context; like (as I suggested above) not discussing the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima when investigating the historical roots of the Manhattan project.
You are just another apologist for all the horrors that went into the manufacture and use of this horror weapon.
I’d expect better. Perhaps Mr. Fagin disagrees with you. There are better ways to advance the argument.
The problem is that her conclusion is wrong. It’s not really complicated, aside from a very short period of time when rocket research was funded by the German military prior to Hitler’s takeover in 1934, it was almost entirely funded and overseen by the Nazi regime; they poured enormous amounts of money and resources into developing rockets and then turning them into a mass-produced weapon.
The book that this short video is about has excellent reviews on Amazon, enough praise for me to add it to my Wishlist.
However good the book may be, though, it’s very much not correct to say the V2 isn’t a Nazi weapon, even in a brief article / video.
The V2 was a major milestone in the history of rocketry, and its technical achievements cannot be overlooked. However, neither can the historical context of those developments be overlooked, and especially not the people it killed. In addition to the thousands killed in V2 attacks, over 20,000 concentration camp inmates died building the manufacturing infrastructure and the rockets themselves. As far as I know, it’s the only military weapon that killed more people building it than it did in combat.
PBS has a very good documentary series called “Nazi Mega Weapons,” one episode of which covers the V2. It goes into detail on the enormous amount of resources that the Nazis poured into the V2 program.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/…
Right on Keith, I agree absolutely, I wonder why this is even being questioned except maybe our history teachings aren’t doing a good enough job. The V2 (and V1) were both Nazi weapons. The fact that both the US and USSR used that technology to move on to more peaceful uses of rocketry (as well as better ICBMs, don’t forget) doesn’t change anything. If it wasn’t a weapon, the Nazi’s would have cancelled and we would never have heard of it.
Amy says: Von Braun and Dornberger became by default an integral part of the SS program.
Actually, von Braun was a NAZI SS colonel. He did not get involved just by default.
Also, the A-4 (V-2) program was failing until, in a face-to-face demonstration, Hitler decided to make the A-4’s development a priority and provide virtually unlimited funding; so regardless of Amy’s ‘progressive’ retrograde musings, the weapon and its chief developer were both fully NAZI in character, development and backing.
As far as the technology involved, von Braun said that the main source of information were the patents of American Robert Goddard.
And while, throughout the war and after, von Braun professed that his goal was the establishment of space flight, on his deathbed von Braun said that while it had been wonderful that he had been able to realize his life’s ambition’s, because of his involvement with the NAZIs, he questioned whether it had been worthwhile.
For a far more complete, fair and balanced review of the weapon, its development and its developer, read Michael Neufeld’s book, von Braun, Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War..
Exactly. This was a Nazi weapon.
Yet the A-4 was also MUCH more than a Nazi weapon. I mean, the Wehrmacht tanks were also Nazi weapons, but they are remembered mostly as the first example of modern mechanized warfare. Blitzkrieg and all that, even tough they killed a lot of people. Many more than V-2’s, I’d expect.
In a similar vein, the A-4 was the first mass-produced rocket, and ALSO the way both the US and USSR began their foray into space. Don’t forget, the first american to go over the Karman line basically used a repackaged V-2 to do so. Or the extensive use by the US and soviet army of carbon-copies of the missile.
As to the part of the A-4’s story that has always amazed me more, it’s how it was built by the end of the war: huge underground factories, with horrible work conditions, and a slave labour force that tried actively to sabotage the production (i.e: the urinated on the gyros so they would corrode and fail). and still they built and launched thousands each year, and a significant fraction of them worked.
All in all, I think the V-2 SHOULD be remembered as much more than just a “Nazi weapon”. It was truly a “sword to plowshares” kind of thing, opening up space on the shoulders of a terror weapon.
And gave birth to the ICBM which still threatens to extinguish our civilization.
I don’t think the the issue was ever “its ONLY a NAZI weapon”. It is the denial that it was, from the early ’30s on, a NAZI weapon.
Yes, prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp were used as forced labor under the supervision of the father of the US Saturn V,
Wernher von Braun. The fact that the true history of human space flight
began with Germany spending the equivalent of several billions of
dollars from a Germany already in ruin while further killing thousands
in the direct development of these rockets is completely overlooked in
our national space history. Working in the space program I think of that every time I see Apollo era paraphernalia or walk the halls of mission control. Some of us remember, empathize and respect that history.
My father, shot in the head in Germany and evacuated to hospital in England, temporarily blind, said the scariest part of the whole war for him was being wheeled around blind and helpless while these things fell around him. Nazi terror weapon indeed. He said he’d rather be back in his foxhole near Cologne.
Yea my Dad said that these things just happened – no possible way to be warned in advance.
Your dad was probably referring to V1’s, which flew at about the speed of an aircraft. V2’s were so fast with a near-vertical trajectory that there was almost no advanced warning.
No, he was not V-1’s made a distinctly noise and flew slow enough that you could see them. When the sound stopped, well, that was when it was going to hit. V-2s came straight in from space and hit at several times the speed of sound. There was simply no way to be warned.
No, it was a V2 that hit his hospital. No warning just boom and lots of folks in a panic wheeling around wounded warriors. And in his case he was blind which added to the terror. He didn’t like it one bit. Now working at a POW Camp Chicago outside Reims for the rest of the war and drinking champagne with his new French buddies, that he liked.
This is the same author who had some plagiarism issues a few years ago: http://www.thespacereview.c…
Wow, that is incredibly damning stuff! Caught red handed plagiarizing in a number of articles!
How is she still being employed as a writer?!? I really don’t get this new media world sometimes.
Actually, Teitel DOES mention the slave labor and other darker aspects of the V2 program. Just not in this video. These video’s aren’t meant to be hour long history seminars, they are meant to be short vignettes for topics that are covered in greater detail in her very well researched book, ‘Breaking the Chains of Gravity’. In the book, she devotes plenty of time to the slave camps, the atrocities of the Nazi’s, the horror London citizens experienced on the receiving end of the V2, and even Von Braun’s membership and rank in the Nazi. She does not whitewash anything.
These videos represent short teasers and tangents from the research she did while writing that book. She can’t cover everything in a 4 minute video, which is why it may feel “superficial” to you.
Besides, her question is a valid one. Asking if the V2 was a Nazi program is akin to asking if the Space Shuttle was a NASA program. Sure, everyone knows program was a NASA program, but just stopping there ignores the fact that is was built by Lockheed and Boeing, and had several critical design requirements that were set by the needs of missions for the Air Force. And even if it was a civilian program, it was often used to launch military hardware. There are important historical discussions and lessons about the development and history of the Space Shuttle program that would be missed if you simply called it “a NASA program”.
The same discussion can be had about the V2. As Teitel goes into in her book, a lot of the R&D on the V2 wasn’t done when the program was under Nazi control (some of it was even done before WW2 had started). Very few of the engineers involved in the project were members of the Nazi party. So simply calling the V2 “A Nazi Weapon” or “A Nazi project” glosses over important subtleties about its history and development.
Teitel is not denying that the V2 was a weapon that was used by the Nazis. She is only trying to bring to light some of the complex history surrounding the rocket that would otherwise be obscured by the simplistic term “Nazi weapon”.
Edit: Sorry, originally typed the Shuttle was built by ULA. Meant to say USA.
Newsflash: I was referring to a Youtube video and a Popular Science article not some book. But the book is unimportant – not to mention the slave labor issue and all the horrors that people went through in an article is gross negligence – at a minimum. You are just another revisionist. It was a Nazi weapon.
In both the article AND in the video, Teitel emphasizes that the account she has just given of the V2 is extremely abridged, and missing many important parts that she couldn’t go into due to length limits (I’m sure you appreciate the maddening restriction that is word counts when writing pieces like this.)
But it IS completely possible to discuss the V2 without focusing on the historical atrocities associated with it without being a revisionist. The atrocities are an undeniable part of the context of the V2 (a part which, again, Teitel goes into very deeply when she is writing in a format that isn’t length restricted), but they are not relevant when discussing the very specific question: “How involved were the Nazi’s with the development of the V2?”
It’s just like if an historian were to ask the question “Who made a larger contribution to the American development of the atomic bomb? Robert Oppenheimer, or Leslie Groves?”. It’s undeniable that the Manhattan project led to atrocities on the scale or greater than those of the V2 program, but an historian who set out to answer the above question would not be guilty of revisionism if they didn’t mention those atrocities. Horrible as they were, they don’t have any relevance to that very specific question they are trying to answer.
Ignoring unrelated parts of the context when asking specific questions about specific historical events is not historical revisionism; rather, it is the only way any historical discussion can be held outside of the chapters of a 2000 page novel.
So … she thought it was more important to spend several minutes in the video – with its “length limit” – hyping her book at the end of the video but not to mention slave labor atrocities that are at the core of the building of the V-2. Got it.
Yes. Because those facts are (as I am evidently failing to explain) not of relevance to the very specific question Teitel is trying to answer. They are essential parts of the context for understanding the V2 program in general (which is why she devotes a great deal of time to them in her book, where a properly contextualzed accout of the roots of the space program is her goal). But in this limited article and video, where she only sets out to answer the question posed in the headline, they are not relevant facts.
You have used up your troll quotient for 2016. Saying the same thing again and again. See ya.
Of course. Hyping the book is the reason for the existence of the video in the first place.
Gotta pay the bills. 🙁
Changing the phrasing of one sentence would have made her premise more accurate.
“The short answer is that, no, the V-2 wasn’t strictly speaking a Nazi weapon. The long answer is more complicated, and a lot more interesting.”
Change “no, the V-2 wasn’t strictly speaking a Nazi weapon” to “yes, the V-2 was a Nazi weapon, but it had its beginnings well before the Nazis were around,” and she would be set.
Not mentioning the large number of slaves who died and endured subhuman conditions is necessary in any understanding of the V-2 program IMHO.
The Shuttle was built by Rockwell International. SRB by Thiokol. The ET by Martin Marietta. USA got involved more than a decade after the design and development was complete. Boeing bought out Rockwell about two decades later and Lockheed bought Martin around the same time.
What a truly strange essay — and apparently she has a longer version of it in a recent book. To suggest, per her own subhead, that the “Nazis took control” of the program only in the summer of 1944 is ridiculous.
I also like how she says von Braun “escaped Nazi Germany to the US”, as if he broke with his own government and defected to the Allies before the war was over.
Is there a major notion out there that the German rocket program didn’t exist until it emerged fully formed from the head of Adolf Hitler, and von Braun was just some flunky Herr Hitler directed to go do it? Sure, VfR predated the Nazis, and von Braun and the others deserve intellectual credit and a certain moral credit (i.e., supporting Nazi military goals was not the only reason they cared about rockets). Was anyone unclear on that?
The “therefore not a Nazi weapon” claim is like saying Fat Man and Little Boy were not “American Military Weapons” because Szilard, Fermi, Teller, Einstein, etc were not working for the US War Dept when they drafted their letter to FDR in 1939. I really don’t understand what historical debate she’s trying to address.
Nevertheless, I suspect the essay has acheived its objective: by recasting basic retelling of a well known story around a strawman, contrarian, clickbait headline, Teitel did indeed get a bunch of people to contribute to her traffic count…..
The article is disgusting. I ‘d like to say more but is best I don’t.
Sounds like she was just trying hard to sound clever.
“Can be looked at so many different ways”? In her own article she notes that the A4 was “the combat-ready rocket”. What other way are we supposed to look at it? It was a device created by some very intelligent Germans to be a weapon and later mass produced through slave labor. Am I to doubt that Captain Walter Dornberger, in the German army and consultant to the likes of Speer, was not a member of the Nazi party? Does is matter? I can’t help but to think this to somehow smooth out von Braun’s complicity as we gave him a U.S. citizenship and the keys to a NASA center.
It has come out in the last 40 years that a lot about von Braun and his German team’s background and history was kept secret even from many in NASA at the time. I have wondered just how much was known by the NASA leadership. I know from personally having spoken with some of the high level American-origin NASA managers that not all of them knew everything about the Germans and that they had misgivings about working with the Germans, to the point that when it was suggested that von Braun be made the manager of the Apollo program, many of the best known top level NASA leadership threatened to quit the program. It is also to be noted that immediately upon the goal of a manned moon landing being reached, von Braun was “promoted’ into a position with no authority and no responsibility and he quit NASA soon after.
Right there with you Keith. My father-in-law was in London during the Blitz. I think he was pretty sure the V-2 was a weapon of war.
“So let me be clear right up front, this is not calling into question whether or not the V2 was a weapon. It was of course a weapon that Germany launched on Allied cities in the closing months of the second world war.”
^ Literally the first thing Teitel says after introducing the subject in the video’s title card.
And you clearly did not hear what she said in the video and also are unaware of what she did not say in the video.
I gave up on this writer years ago. Not only is her whole approach superficial and often word-for-word out of the work of other authors, but her fact-checking is about as poor as you’d see in some sort of supermarket tabloid. When she started being published I contacted her several times, gently pointing out the more obvious errors in her output (and got no response, naturally). Now, if I see her name attached to anything at all, I just move on. Life is too precious to waste on her, and I’d suggest that she’s basically not worth the effort.
This post got me to purchase one of her books (on the secondary market). Going for under $5 used but in very good condition. I’m interested in seeing what else she has to say.
There is a reason you can buy her books used, but in very good condition, for a pittance.
I’ve always considered it profound and somewhat distressing irony that one of humanity’s greatest achievements came from a technology originally developed specifically to be a weapon of terror to be directed at non-combatant population centres. Was that a redemption for the men who created the V2 or a condemnation?
I think that the lesson of history is clear. There is no doubt whatsoever that rocketry would not have progressed as far or as fast without large-scale military spending behind it to allow the generals their latest permutation of the Trenchard Doctrine. It’s a sad reflection of humanity that, so often, we need the lust for a new and shinier sword to motivate us to learn to do new things.
While your statement is true enough, fact is that many areas of technology-ships, airplanes, air transport, mechanized land vehicles, atomic energy, etc would not have progressed as rapidly or as quickly without strategic military support, so the rocket is by no means a singular example.
vonBraun had a choice to either accept the Nazi leadership, use them for funding of the things he liked to do in relative safety of Penemunde, go to the front and be shot at, or refuse service and become one of the prisoners at Mittlebau. Hmm, I know which one I would choose.
He actively worked in personal contact with Hitler to convince hiim to build the rocket. Hitler wasn’t interested. If Von Braun did not promote weapon and its destructive power, it would not have been built.
So rather than use the system to reach his personal goals, he should have chosen to be shot or sent to concentration camp?
If the rocket program failed to achieve support at the beginning then he would simply have been assigned as junior engineer in some other program
most likely he would have found himself on the russian front
Possibly, but more likely working in an aviation or rocketry engineering environment.
in simple terms, vonBraun used the system he had to work with to achieve his goals. How many people on the Allies side have used the system to achieve their goals? Hughes? Douglas? Northrop?
How many people worked on the Manhattan project to do things that they could not ever even dream of doing?
The question I guess is the goal. Was he acting as a patriot, somehow wanting to support the insane horror of nazi germany? Fine. I wish he hadn’t done it.
now if his goal was to build a rocket to go to outer space and the nazis provided a fortunate path to acheive this goal, then his bones should be dug up from his grave and thrown down the nearest active outdoor privy.
vonBraun had a series of successful rockets prior to his work for the Reich and SS, he was the head of the German Rocket Society, he needed the funding to take his progression to the A4 (real name of the V2) and further to the moon rocket
Immediately after the Trinity atomic bomb test, Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge turned to Oppenheimer and said. “Well, We’re all sons of bitches now.”
Oppenheimer quoted the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the Destroyer of Worlds
Later in a 1948 interview Oppenheimer said: “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin: and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
When asked why he and other physicists would then have worked on such a terrible weapon he confessed that it was
“too sweet a problem to pass up“
Hans Bethe in an interview recalled his reactions to the bomb test. “The first reaction was ‘We’ve done it!‘ The second reaction was. ‘What have we done!'”
At least These people were fighting for human freedom and dignity instead as a lackey for a monster.
That is a matter of perception, had Germany won WWII, vonBraun would have been a hero and all the people you have just mentioned would have been seen as evil.
Thank goodness it never came to pass. Anyway Von Braun became a US hero. Life’s funny in a sad way.
and how about Hans vonOhain, the creator of the german jet engine? he is the counter to Frank Whittle. They were both funded by their respective military industrial complex to develop a machine of war
One worked for the good guys and one worked for murdering swine out to conquer the world.
The very question she poses demands inclusion of at least some mention of where the Nazi’s took the program in terms of the weapon’s use and how it was produced no matter how short the article or video. Smells to me like a grab at promotion via shock that forces discussion…like we’re having here.
I fear that Ms. Teitel’s continuing employment as a journalist speaks volumes about where our society/culture is going. Welcome to the Information Age…where anything—no matter how shallow, baseless, un-original, or ill-considered—is stamped as valid and insightful merely because it can be posted or printed.
How ironic in this case, given that the Apollo program’s demand for integrated circuits did its part to help usher in the Age…
I absolutely love her videos. They reach out to youth in a way anyone in the government could never comprehend. She appears to be a very pretty, very bright and very talented young lady.
It is pretty obvious she skipped over a major chunk of the V-2’s development (and deployment) history in this piece.
In her defense…if you want to do a 2-minute video essay on a something big, you are going to have to skip to whatever it is you are focusing on. Could it have been done better? Sure it could.
As far as “revisionist history” The US Government started that in 1945 when von Braun et.al. ‘escaped’ to the US side.
Gather ’round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown,
“Ha, Nazi, Schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.
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.
(full lyrics by Tom Lehr found here: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/… )
Whatever else she appears to be, it’s been convincingly shown that she’s a plagiarist. That ought to be utterly disqualifying regardless of whatever else you might think of Ms. Teitel.
It appears to me that a very young lady made a mistake. Plagiarism is common among our current youth (talk to college professors…you’ll see). It stems from a cut-n-paste world they were raised in and the self-published world (sans editors) we now live in.
It is a problem, one that can be corrected.
This current issue is not related to plagiarism – so, no, that does not “…utterly disqualify…” her. It only makes you sound as if you are the one personally aggrieved by her previous transgression. (Which may be the case – if so, you need to state that.)
Your argument also does not directly respond to anything that I posted, either. The fact is that the US very readily overlooked what von Brain and the rest of the German scientists did (or didn’t do) during the war. To continue on with the song:
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
Whatever sin of omission Ms. Teitel may have committed here pales to what the United States government and the media has promoted and sustained for 70 years, already.
I think it’s fair to say that Wernher von Braun sold the German Army on rocket weapons and used their interest to invent serious rockets. But without Nazi support, the army wouldn’t have gone very far with them. As KC says, her argument makes a distinction without a difference.
Aaaaand take it away, Tom Lehrer!
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
According to her online profile, Teitel has no degrees in history. She does have very high marks, endorsements, etc in blogging and storytelling.
I met and spoke with von Braun. He was handsome, charming, engaging, thoughtful, intelligent and passionate about space. He was an excellent manager and people person who would memorize your name, ask about your job, family, hobbies, and would remember these anytime you met even if it was months and sometimes even years later. He respected and was very loyal to his people. He was open minded and always wanted to hear the minority’s opinions; in fact he sought them out.. He did not suffer fools kindly though, and I also saw that he could go into an angry tirade, even publicly, very quickly. But I suspect Lehrer was correct in a couple of his points. I think von Braun was apolitical and that for von Braun the NAZIs were an expedient mechanism to secure the funding he needed.
“I think von Braun was apolitical and that for von Braun the NAZIs were an expedient mechanism to secure the funding he needed.”
That’s what makes him a monster.
A few of the luckier workers at the V2 factory:
http://www.v2rocket.com/sta…
Whatever its origins the V2 was expensive to build and singularly ineffective as a military weapon due to its inaccuracy and limited blast radius.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and Production, said that the V2 was his greatest misjudgment (other than making his life into excrement). He pointed out that the incredibly expensive V2 carried a one ton warhead, while in a single bomber raid the Allies dropped 23,000 tons of bombs.
Thank goodness!
Interesting aside,,, the image at the top of this blog post is a Bumper- WAC. (the WAC Corporal – W.ithout A.ny C.ontrol)
It was a late 1940’s US program that created a 2-stage missile out of a V-2 and a US Corporal rocket. A reasonably successful program that reached more than 240 miles up. One of the last Bumpers was the first launches from Cape Canaveral.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
The correct name for vonBraun’s rocket was A4.
Whatever Von Braun’s name was, Hitler re-named it V-2 and that is what the US called it.
http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PA…
The joke used to be that when Von Braun created rockets for the US they often had to be destroyed because they had an inherent tendency to tilt towards London.