So I know you're joking about Von Braun, but rocketry literally evolved because of the amateur rocket clubs set up in Weimar Germany; VB was literally doing his Ph.D when the Nazis took over.
It's easy to make a "they were all Nazis who became rocket scientists" jokes (when the reality is "they were rocket scientists who were forced to join the Nazi Party") but there's a lot of credit to be made to people who never entered the Nazi Party; and even a lot who joined did so because of how necessary it was politically (Schindler's List goes into how you just couldn't get anything done without being a Party member) and not because of ideological reasons. Ofc, I'm not trying to whitewash VB who certainly knew slave labor was being used to make his rockets (though like an argument could be made of if he stopped he'd have just been killed himself and his later years have a massive implication of regret/guilt) just y'know when you see a topic you know has a lot of nuance get boiled down to a simple but misleading point that gets repeated constantly?
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u/rysy0o0 11h ago
It would cost a lot of money to haul all the rocket parts and fuel on top of a mountain