What if Werner Von Braun Prosecuted Not Lionized?

Analyzing history through means of understanding the situation is not apologism. Apologism would be the "The Holocaust didn't happen" / "Nazis were right, white people are dying out kill all blacks hurr" brigade of people; and this is not the brigade of people that are talking here about von Braun.

But what they seem to be saying, and what you seem to be enforcing is that he's not responsible for his actions. Understanding the situation is not the same as arguing he didn't have a choice and the latter is what I'm hearing.

The fact is Von Braun and people like him had a choice and they made the wrong one. And it feels, let's say inappropriate, to argue that people like him should be let off the hook for doing the wrong thing when their countrymen suffered and died, in conditions so godawful we can scarcely imagine them, to do what was right.
 
But what they seem to be saying, and what you seem to be enforcing is that he's not responsible for his actions. Understanding the situation is not the same as arguing he didn't have a choice and the latter is what I'm hearing.

The fact is Von Braun and people like him had a choice and they made the wrong one. And it feels, let's say inappropriate, to argue that people like him should be let off the hook for doing the wrong thing when their countrymen suffered and died, in conditions so godawful we can scarcely imagine them, to do what was right.

If history is any indication, when the options are "keep your head down and do your job" or "go to concentration camp and maybe die while your family and friends are ostracized" that a huge number of people side with the former. Shitty, but it's true.

If you start persecuting guys like von Braun then there's thousands of other engineers, technicians, managers and assorted bureaucrats you have to arrest who were complicit in the war. Who's going to be left once you've imprisoned all these people? It sets a very bad precedent.
 
If history is any indication, when the options are "keep your head down and do your job" or "go to concentration camp and maybe die while your family and friends are ostracized" that a huge number of people side with the former. Shitty, but it's true.

If you start persecuting guys like von Braun then there's thousands of other engineers, technicians, managers and assorted bureaucrats you have to arrest who were complicit in the war. Who's going to be left once you've imprisoned all these people? It sets a very bad precedent.

Yes, the precedent of prosecuting the guilty is much worse than what we have now, where the righteous are ignored and forgotten and those who save their own skin at all costs get a big round of f***ing applause. What Von Braun and others of his ilk did is morally no different than murdering someone and stealing their organs because you need a transplant. We don't, necessarily, have to prosecute him. But we don't have to turn him into a victim of circumstance either.
 
1) As to Von Braun's alleged war crimes. There was 'Mittelwerke Dora', roughly translated as 'Central Plant D', a massive underground production facility for rocket and jet parts being built mostly by slave laborers who were literally worked to death to keep construction on schedule. Think of it as the 'Bridge over the River Qwai' times ten. As production manager of rockets for the Wehrmacht Von Braun was at least nominally in charge of the construction and therefore of the cruelties happening as part of it. The discussion is on how far he was removed from the actual brutalities going on during the construction. Options range from 'He should have known if he cared to look ' to 'There is no way he could not have known' and 'Whether he knew or not would not have changed the situation on the ground' to 'By condoning, he was fully complicit'.

2) That being said, Von Braun was hardly alone in this situation. Many leaders of industry bin Germany faced the same charges. Many were tried but most of them only received minimal sentencing and were back in the 1950's to lead (West-) Germany's recovery. So there is no indication Von Braun would be treated differently. After all, those were the fifties with a new powerhouse Western Germany rapidly re-arming and doing the difficult two-step of celebrating their old war heroes without celebrating the war. Von Braun would probably be treated likewise. It was only in the late 60's and 70's that a new generation of Germans started to critically evaluate the war history of their parents. Von Braun at that time was already a figurehead in semi-retirement and a new look into the 1945 allegations would tarnish his personal image but not affect anything he has been working on since 1945. The only difference I can see is that young engineers in his organization (be it NASA or some German company) now would distance themselves from him in order to not to smudge their careers where beforehand they would curtsy to him in order to help it.

3) If convicted, at least nominally Von Braun would probably not be tapped to take the lead in the American rocket program. (Although in McCarthy's America, the US Army could simply overlook that little detail when it came to beating the Russians. If not officially, he could still be 'asked' as an 'independent adviser'. ) Would the Army rocket Program and later NASA feel any effect for not having him on board? Probably in the beginning, but not as much as often claimed. the US had its share of capable rocket scientists, German or otherwise, and without Von Braun in the lead someone else would have stepped up. Would he do as good a job as Von Braun? May be, may be not... May be just as well he would do better... This is speculation, anything is possible.

4) So what would become of Von Braun if he was not picked by the Americans but stayed in (West-) Germany? Again this is speculation and anything is possible. My gut feeling tells me that he would not follow Messerschmidt and Kurt Tank to continue his rocket program in Spain, Argentina or Egypt. Rather he would certainly find work in some field related to his rocket work for one of the bigger German firms such as Siemens, AEG, Mannesmann or Kraus-Maffei, possibly even Mercedes or Volkswagen. His work would not include rockets as there would be no will to start up a German civil or military missile program at least for the next 15 years. More typically he would be making his name with technologies he developed for the A4/ A10 programs such as regulator technology or radio control. (He would of course be a founding member of the local model rocket club and still spend most Saturdays on the flying field.)

He would however continue to write his books about the future of Space Exploration and be highly regarded in this capacity with regular appearances on TV, even may be his own popular science program like Carl Sagan.

And since this is alternate history, What about a timeline where Von Braun, overlooked by the US space program (Because at the time of recruitment he spent 6 month in a German jail for war profiteering), moves to Hollywood as a scientific adviser for the 1950's space movies and ends his career in 1969 narrating the live feed of the moon landing for CBS?
 
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