more about V-2 and Werner von Braun

Dear Mikey:

Werner von Braun and the V-2 just make me sick. As a moral authority, von Braun is ludicrous. Whether he was happy, sad or indifferent to the unbelievable suffering in the V-2 slave-labor production facility, the fact remains that (at best, if he did not lie through his teeth in his autobiography) he did nothing to alleviate it. If Oskar Schindler could get the Nazis to agree that adequate food was necessary for prisoners to produce weapons components, surely von Braun, who was working on the most important weapon in the nation, would have had the same or greater leeway!

Some historical info that you may want to use:

” It is a little known truth that more people died manufacturing the V-2 than were killed by its blast. Each operational V-2 to come off the Mittelwerk line consumed about six human lives.”

(from http://www.v2rocket.com/start/chapters/mittel.html )

Of about 5,200 V-2s built, over 3,100 were launched, killing an estimated 7,250 people. A direct hit on a building full of people could kill hundreds, but many landed harmlessly or killed only a handful of people, due to difficulties with accurate targeting.

The 1945 quote from von Braun about why he gave missile technology to the United States being because they were guided by the Bible is somewhere between bullshit and ass-licking. If he had wanted to serve the United States or another biblically-inspired country with his technology, he could have left Nazi Germany any time between 1934 and 1939. No doubt many countries would have welcomed such a brilliant scientist in such a militarily useful field.

V-2 slave laborer Alex Baum recalls von Braun’s statements during the war: ‘ ”I understand German, too, because I was raised in Alsace-Lorraine (a region of France on the German border),” Baum said. ”I could hear von Braun talking about the ultimate weapon that’s going to destroy the United States and everything else. We (the prisoners) were not very close, but we could see them.” Later, he would see von Braun visit the Mittelwerk, usually in the company of top military officials. ”He was very desperate to get this thing going, and he knew exactly what was going on,” Baum said. ‘ (from http://www.v2rocket.com/start/others/news-archive.html )

He and his fellow military scientists wanted to surrender to the Americans to save their lives. The Soviet soldiers were permitted to run amok behind the front lines, and might have killed them. Furthermore the Soviet government would have essentially enslaved them, although in material comfort, as they did with other German military scientists in Operation Osoaviakhim.

Von Braun’s protestations about his unwillingness to join the Nazi party, join the SS, and use prisoner slave labor are most likely lies (see reasoning about self-exculpatory statements by Nazis in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. Multiple survivors of the Dora-Mittelbau camp, where the V-2 was constructed, have testified that von Braun witnessed and encouraged the mistreatment of prisoners there, which was already so horrific that the life expectancy for prisoners (originally prisoners of war and “criminals”, but later also including resistance fighters and Jews) after arriving at the camp was less than a year:

” The Mittelwerk V-2 factory produced some 4,575 V-2s between August, 1944 and March, 1945—the period in which these rockets were headed for firing batterys (as opposed, earlier on, to development testing). It is also estimated that of the 60,000+ detainees employed in and around the Mittelbau complex over a 20-month period, 26,500 did not survive. (Estimates of the total number of prisoners in the complex at range between 40,000 and 64,000). Sellier attributes 15,500 of these deaths to the camps or to “transports”, and 11,000 to the period in April, 1945 when the camps were evacuated by the SS in the face of the American advance. This evacuation was especially barbaric. The SS shot prisoners, herded them into barns and burned them alive,…. ”

(from http://www.v2rocket.com/start/chapters/mittel.html )

More info at http://dora.uah.edu/index.html and in the book “Planet Dora” by Yves Beon, a survivor.

(name withheld)