Post War USA 🔨 Hypocrisies And Lies

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ Werner Von Braun (pronounced Verner Von Brown), 23rd March 1912 – 16th June 1977, was born into an aristocratic and noble German family.

He was a man who liked playing with the ideas behind rockets and was also a German scientist and mass murderer during the years of the Third Reich. There is no doubt he was a brilliant man and, in another life, would be worthy of countless awards for science. However, we are dealing with the life Von Braun lived and not some imaginary existence in another dimension.

Von Braun was the man who was tasked with, and almost achieved, perfecting Adolf Hitlers “Wonder Weapons” or “Vengeance Weapons” - the V1 and V2 rockets which poured death on London. He was given pretty much a free rein by the Fuhrer and a science site at Peenemunde Army Research Centre on the Baltic Sea. He perfected the first liquid-propellant rocket which could reach space and carry warheads. Over 1,000 of these deadly projectiles landed on London in a last-ditch effort by Hitler to change the course of the war, now going very badly for him.

During the manufacture of these deadly rockets Von Braun used slave labour from the concentration camps, Jews, Communists, Socialists, trade unionists etc. and over 20,000 of these slaves lost their lives at the hands of this ‘scientist’ working on these projects. Werner Von Braun was as guilty of ‘war crimes’ as any of those tried for such crimes at Nuremberg after the war. Why was he not on trial? Simple really, he was of use to the United States in their programme of space exploration and their race to the stars in their contest with the Soviet Union.

Many Nazis were given a ticket to freedom, Claus Barbie being another - the “Butcher of Lyon” - because he was useful to the Yanks in their campaign against Communism in Eastern Europe. It did not matter how many people these monsters had killed, the slate was wiped clean by the misleadingly called “land of the free”! According to historian, Michael J. Neufeld “if ‘we’ had not taken him, the Soviets would have done” which is pure supposition. Would the Soviet Union have employed Von Braun if they had got there first? We’ll never know and the fact is the USA employed this war criminal to suit their own ends, not the Soviet Union. What total hypocrisy after the same USA, along with Britian and the USSR demanded the stiffest penalties, rightly so, for those tried and found guilty at Nuremberg. This so-called post-war justice appears very selective because if the defendant had a brain, he was either ignored and used, as was Von Braun, or given a prison sentence as was the case with another Nazi Engineer, Albert Speer.

Von Braun was also an accomplished liar claiming he “knew nothing of the prisoners suffering working for him” – a Nazi of the worst kind, knowing he only had to give his new employers, the USA, a veneer of reasoning not to send him to the gallows. He was, after all, a scientific genius which trumped all other considerations in the eyes of the USA including mass murder and torture. Considering Von Braun carried out daily inspections of his site to then say he “knew nothing of the prisoners suffering” is stretching the imagination of even the most romantic amongst us.

The same argument could be put by some that Jack the Ripper was a scientific genius, he certainly knew his human biology, but would this have saved him from the rope had he been caught? I doubt that very much! A ‘blind eye’ was turned by the USA to this man’s Nazi past and the crimes against humanity he had committed. In his new employment it was Werner Von Braun who propelled the US space programme to surpass the USSR, eventually. If we believe, as we are supposed to believe, and I am sceptical, that in 1969 the US landed a man on the moon then it was the scientific knowledge of the former Nazi who perfected the rocket. I am in no doubt Von Braun propelled the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) programme and he no doubt got men into space - but landing on the moon in 1969? Maybe, maybe not but the point here is not to question whether Neil Armstrong was dancing on the moon or the Arizona Desert, but the man who made such a programme possible, a mass murderer and officer in the criminal SS.

During his days as a leading Nazi, Von Braun visited concentration camps to select his slave labour force to be worked to death. He was often in the company as such monsters as SS chief, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, both men hugely instrumental in organising the “final solution”, the Holocaust. There is no doubt this man was a war criminal of the highest degree, just like Albert Speer, but unlike Speer he had a bargaining chip, his scientific genius. Speer's brains allowed him to escape the noose, that there is no doubt, but he did not have the leverage possessed by Von Braun. The USA wanted this scientific knowledge possessed by Von Braun and were prepared to turn a blind eye to the man’s Nazi past. As far as his new paymasters were concerned being a mass murderer counted for little compared with what he had to offer them. His former life was conveniently airbrushed away and forbidden to be spoken of as he began working for the US Space Agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics which, in 1958, would become NASA.

The USA tried to make out Von Braun was not really a Nazi, or at least not a bad one, but an old-fashioned conservative nationalist who had always wanted to go to outer space. A little boy who had a dream, liked playing with rockets, a harmless man with a scientific dream and a marvellous brain. This somewhat romanticised analysis may, to a point, bear some truth but do “harmless” men wanting to go into space always kill upwards of 20,000 slave labourers and then pretend, when the chips were down, they “knew nothing of the prisoners suffering”? The image of Von Braun portrayed to the public was one of an ambitious man who had dreams of going to the moon, a likable jovial man of the highest intelligence who was doing sterling work for the USA. Dr Stephen Waring, Professor of History at the University of Alabama described Werner Von Braun as a “Knight in shining armour” and the “hero of Huntsville Alabama.” Some fucking hero!!

Space exploration today is one of the major causes of accelerating climate change and causing planetary vandalism. Much of this advanced space technology is the brainchild of Werner Von Braun. At the numerous summits, like the recent COP 28, such major causes of climate change and planetary destruction are, like Von Brauns past, never mentioned.

Werner Von Braun, the Harry Houdini of Nazism escaping the gallows because he was of use to the United States died on 16th June 1977. What a charmed life this murdering bastard lived, courtesy of the USA.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.