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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we should stop naming things after a man who was not only a nazi, but a uniform-wearing member of the SS? A future-looking project should leave such things in the past.

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I think this is a pretty good overview, an interview with the author of a recent biography. I am partial to your view.

I don't have a problem recognizing his achievements and celebrating his abilities, but using his name to honor him is going further than that.

There are probably still people alive today that had a parent that died in slave labor at Mittelwerk building his rockets. I can't imagine how awful this would feel for them.

Regardless of his achievements, his legacy should carry a stain.

https://www.airspacemag.com/space/a-amp-s-interview-michael-...

> There are probably still people alive today that had a parent that died in slave labor at Mittelwerk building his rockets.

My grandfather, who is still alive, was a slave laborer there before he was liberated by the American army. His descriptions of the place are pretty horrific.

You merely point out a very small subset of where he was from and his employer of the time, yet zero attention to his ideals and life legacy.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/history/vonbraun/bio.h...

NASA should be removing Von Braun's bust from in front of their Huntsville center, not publishing apologia and hagiography on their website.

"His employer of the time" is doing a lot of work for voluntarily joining the Nazi party, later misrepresenting that fact, voluntarily joining the SS, getting promoted a bunch of times, and regularly wearing his SS uniform to work.

Lots of terrible people have accomplished great and useful things. Good for them! I'm not taking that away from them. Just leave them & their names in the past where they belong. This is standard practice in medicine, a field with its own share of past nazis.

> zero attention to his ideals and life legacy.

the one's ideals and legacy are worth less than nothing if it is built, with the one's full awareness and willful participation, by concentration camp slaves dying in droves from malnutrition, physical abuse and the hard labor while building those ideals and legacy.

> employer of the time

that defense line of "i was just carrying out the orders" was explicitly addressed at the Nuremberg trials.

I didn't realize that concentration camp victims were building rockets?

The V2 was built using slave labor at Mittelwerk. 250 workers perished per day at some points and their bodies were incinerated. The entire factory was built underground to escape allied bombing. It is hard to imagine a more horrible place. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk

well they were and it was quite horrific!

> The record of Nordhausen is a most unenviable one, and we were told that 250 of the slave workers perished every day, due to overwork and malnutrition. ... They also saw stretchers heavily saturated in blood, a room in which there was a slab on which the bodies were drained of blood, and the incinerators in which the bodies were burnt.

> Wernher von Braun, the Technical Director of a separate facility at Peenemünde Army Research Center, visited the Mittelwerk on 25 January 1944,[12] and a 1991 author alleged he witnessed Mittelwerk and Buchenwald war crimes.[6]

but by all means name this space station after the guy who ran the whole operation and claimed to have no idea. because they just can't think of a single person besides him!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk

Wow lots of downvotes for asking a question.

Maybe do a bit of research before asking a question that is both trivial to discover the answer to and which is phrased in a way that can be interpreted as dismissive of just how horrible the conditions under which von Braun's slaves were worked.

I called them victims, rather than inmates or something, so I don't agree that my phrasing was in any way dismissive.

Sometimes people interpret questions about the facts as subtle challenges to the narrative. Its an interesting bit of psychology.

Not surprising! Ignoring and downplaying the crimes of Operation Paperclip Nazis is a well established pastime among U.S. historians. "A Secret Agenda" by Linda Hunt is an excellent read on the subject, and goes into lots of detail about the Mittelwerk rocket factory which Von Braun ran: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/File:Secret_Agenda.pdf

And if you think Von Braun was bad, wait until you hear about Kurt Blome (who after WWII worked closely with Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the CIA's MKULTRA program) or Klaus Barbie!

In the 1970s, former SS officer Otto von Bolschwing was made president of a California company by its director, J. Paul Getty, Jr. (Gavin Newsom's dad William A. Newsom was also on the Board). Although it should be noted they claim not to have known about Bolschwing's SS history: https://spitfirelist.com/news/ex-nazi%E2%80%99s-brilliant-u-...

Whatever you do, just don't go to Wikipedia to read about this stuff ....

The Nazis used slave labour very extensively; it’s probably safe to assume that it was involved in most of their industrial production. In this particular case, though, it was extensive, well documented, and extremely nasty.

There's a certain lack of credibility in this complaint when the space race and a great source of global unity was found in the moon landing off the back of the Saturn V. The Americans had the choice to erase werner von braun from significance and instead chose to benefit on a grand scale from his slave-built knowledge.

You're right Von Braun is part of the past now. He's apart of the Usa's past. It's difficult to hear complaints about his nazi past, long after all the hard choices about what it means were already made.

VB's work is inexplicibly stamped into space flight and trying to get rid of that influence now, is like having your cake and eating it too.

Many other fields have this same problem with terrible people making foundational contributions. The usual compromise is to rename phenomena that were named after them, not name any new things after them, and let their name drift into history. The history of the field is there for anyone who wants it, but it is just that - history. They are not venerated going forward.

If you want to make the case that this field should be forced to bear von Braun's name as a stain, I guess that's a somewhat interesting idea but I think it would have the effect of improving von Braun's legacy rather than forcing spaceflight to reckon with its past.

I would let the things he did sit with is name and prevent future things being named after him.

White-washing your past after you make billions off the back of slaves he killed and his work, is just a little too much sting to bear. I don't think you should be 'forced to bear his name as a stain'. It's just reality for what your space agencies did and hiding it isn't a valuable addition.

Maybe people should stop living in the past, naming after nazi doesn't necessarily mean supporting nazi.

There's a difference between supporting nazism and choosing to honor a nazi, sure, but we shouldn't do either.

>choosing to honor a nazi

Not even that, using that name, doesn't necessarily mean to honor nazi.

Are you implying the name could be referring to a different von Braun? Or are you denying that Wernher von Braun was a nazi?

Von Braun was a nazi but doesn't necessarily mean by using his name is to honor nazi action.

...I literally addressed this two comments prior:

"There's a difference between supporting nazism and choosing to honor a nazi, sure, but we shouldn't do either."

Using von Braun's name isn't "honoring nazi action", but it is honoring a nazi. Not sure where this isn't connecting with you.

>but it is honoring a nazi

even when it is honoring nazi, doesn't necessarily mean honoring its action.

even when it is honoring nazi action, doesn't necessarily mean honoring its bad action

Even nazi can have its good side.

Actually no, nazi action does not have a good side. Nazism is bad, through-and-through. Any benefits it purports to have for the people it doesn't kill is predicated on the murder & oppression of the people it does kill. You are a nazi apologist and should think long & hard about why you believe these things.

disagree, everything has good side and bad side. Even Hitler has his good side.

Likewise, you should think long & hard about why you believe what you believed.

Completely tasteless, I really don't get why you would put any effort into this project and name it after a Nazi (unless, and I'm being extra cynical here, that's the way they lean??)

Once ze rockets go up, who cares where they come down? Zat's not my department, says Werner Von Braun.

For those who don't know, this is from a very cutting song by Tom Lehrer: https://youtu.be/TjDEsGZLbio

Von Braun Station is a technical type/design, not the project's own name. Using designers' names normal with space designs.

Lots of better names are available:

"Originally proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, the idea was expanded by Herman Potočnik in 1929."

Why quote that when the Wikipedia article that it's from is titled "rotating wheel space station"? Rotating wheel is more descriptive than Von Braun or Tsiolkovsky or Potočnik.

There are many kinds of rotating wheel space stations with differences in layout, size, complexity, etc.

It's telling that between a nazi and a communist, some people would choose the nazi.

Tsiolkovsky lived in the Soviet Union, where he worked as a maths teacher. Von Braun was a member of the Nazi party and SS who made weapons with an enormous slave labour force; by some estimates more people died making the things than were killed by them.

Personally, I’d probably go for the maths teacher, when it comes to naming stuff.

Take your pick based on if you are more comfortable with mass killings based on political affiliation or race.

I prefer people who don't employ genocide victims as slaves for building weapons of mass destruction, but that's me.

If that's your actual beef, Forced Labor Camps/ Gulags were far more heavily used by the Soviet Union than by the Nazis. They were also used to produce weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Economic_role

“Far more heavily used” is incorrect (particularly in Tsiolkovsky‘s time; they became a big deal a bit later), but yes, the gulags existed. Tsiolkovsky wasn’t personally involved with them, though (he was a maths teacher).

According to Chertok, GULAG workforce wasn't used at least when Baykonur, a significant project, was being built. It was direct involvement of Army corps used there.

Imprisoned labor force was used in WWII time Soviet aviation and rocketry development (Tupolev, Glushko, Korolyov). Other large projects were possibly too technical, challenging to employ forced labor?..

Sorry to be a little pedantic but genocide specifically means mass killing based on race, ethnicity, or nationality. The word was coined in response to the Nazi Holocaust because the systemtimatic, ethnically motivated killings were considered to be so abhorrent. There’s no such thing as genocide based on political affiliation.

A fair point but not an undisputed one.

https://news.stanford.edu/2010/09/23/naimark-stalin-genocide...

"All early drafts of the U.N. genocide convention included social and political groups in its definition. But one hand that wasn’t in the room guided the pen. The Soviet delegation vetoed any definition of genocide that might include the actions of its leader, Joseph Stalin. The Allies, exhausted by war, were loyal to their Soviet allies – to the detriment of subsequent generations.

Naimark argues that that the narrow definition of genocide is the dictator’s unacknowledged legacy to us today."

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