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Comment by nier | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know about this author. If you see Einstein leaving Germany in 1933 because of antisemitism, you don’t wait around for years for things to improve. You get the hell out the country.

But not Wernher von Braun. He actually doubles down and enters the Nazi party in 1937.

You might think poor Wernher, he was probably indoctrinated by his family and they were all Nazis. No. His dad was secretary of agriculture before the Nazi rose to power and his parents withdrew to their estate in Silesia when Hitler dissolved parliament because why wouldn’t you get as far away as possible from such a madman? That was also in 1933.

Looking at Wernher von Braun’s actions after 1939, my limited mind simply cannot grasp how a smart person can then join the SS, support his country in a war of aggression, and willfully participate in the holocaust.

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Wernher von Braun was a monster, and just one of the many that the United States willfully rehabilitated. Another great example is Franz Halder, who was effectively allowed to write the history of the war and significantly de-emphasized the military's involvement. 'Myth of the clean Wehrmacht' to learn more about that.

Maybe, but he did not end as a monster.

https://www.nytimes.com/1965/06/14/archives/von-braun-fights...

Surprisingly for a Nazi, or maybe not for an engineering nerd buying into the idealistic propaganda of his new home land, he could be quite naive about human evil. PBS:

> In 1952, von Braun drove the 20 minutes to the all-black Alabama A&M College, to recruit a group of its science majors for a quixotic outreach campaign at a local white high school. One of the A&M students, Clyde Foster, was not really sure what von Braun’s aim was, but he guessed the scientist was looking to get a group of mostly farm kids interested in the wonders of outer space. Why von Braun thought black college students would be the best ambassadors to rural white children is lost to history. The result was that Foster and six other A&M students found themselves standing on stage in front of an auditorium filled with white kids who were known to throw trash and spit from their school bus windows at any blacks they passed. Predictably, “nobody was listening,” Foster said, and the assembly was a disaster.

There's something pretty monstrous about being able to actively participate in the Nazi machine and then put it all behind you as if it never happened. I think "engineering nerds" sometimes get too much of a free pass from the HN crowd.

It's very easy to see how that happens. Intelligence and morality aren't closely coupled, and may even have hardly any overlap at all.

> Looking at Wernher von Braun’s actions after 1939, my limited mind simply cannot grasp how a smart person can then join the SS, support his country in a war of aggression, and willfully participate in the holocaust.

“Smart” doesn’t correlate at all with “moral”.

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