Werner Von Braun... the REAL Rocketman
Ah, History Channel... what would I do without you? I'd have to find other ways to learn useless information, and watch the same war movies over and over and over again. This weekend, was a little different, as I had a chance experience with two rather unrelated shows that appeared back to back.
The first show was about the US rocket program in the 60's that built into the Apollo program. The show paid some attention to a man named Werner Von Braun, the Unite States' leading rocket scientist, and how he had been plucked from a German Ballistic Missle research laboratory at the end of World War II. The programme discussed how he had been forced by the Nazis to rush production on the V1 and V2 rockets to help speed the end of the war (and rain fire down on England, Holland, and Belgium). The show alluded to the fact that Von Braun had been investigated by the Nuremburg Council at the end of the war, but that his scientific acheivments outweighed 'suspicions of his use of slave labour'. And that's where the program left it. Hmmm.
The second program was about famous divers and how they were diving in an abandoned Nazi Rocket Research Station built into a mountian that had flooded after the war. It was the facility where Von Braun had worked all through WWII, and much of the show focussed on the disproportinate number of Concentration Camp workers who had been worked to death there, compared to other Arbeitslager (work camps). They were basically forced to tunnel into the rock of a mountain using little more than hand tools. The little known camp (called 'Mittelwerk Dora'. but known to survivors as just 'Dora'), has nearly been erased from history as it's story was covered up by the US in an attempt to whitewash Von Braun and his wartime 'indiscretions'.
I'm not the first person to be sickened by all this. Peter Sellers took more than a few jabs at Von Braun in his Cold War lampoon "Dr. Strangelove". I guess this leaves us with the question... 'What can we justify in the name of science?'