Former Nazi Removed From Space Hall of Fame

[Judi Lynn]

Former Nazi Removed From Space Hall of Fame

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. May 18, 2006 (AP)— A former Nazi scientist who was linked to experiments on prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany has been ousted from the International Space Hall of Fame.

Hubertus Strughold, who had been honored in 1978 for work in developing the spacesuit and space capsule and for his contributions to space medicine, was removed last week by unanimous vote of the New Mexico Museum of Space History's commission.

The German-born scientist was brought to this country by the U.S. military after World War II to work on aerospace projects. He died in 1987.

The removal process began last fall after a museum visitor noticed Strughold's name in its hall of fame and notified the New Mexico Anti-Defamation League, said Susan Seligman, the league's regional director.
(snip/...)

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1977542





Dr. Hubertus Strughold (second from right) at the Johnson Space Center monitoring the health of astronauts in orbit.
http://www.brooks.af.mil/History/space.html

[DrunkenMaster]

1. what about Von Braun?

Or the SS officers that helped found the CIA under Operation Paperclip? Oh, nevermind....

[Sequoia]

9. Right! He was responsible for working on the bomb that

fell on London. He also was pals with Walt Disney and helped him design that World of Tommorrow place in Anaheim. A few years back I found a children's book written by him back in the 1950s about going to the moon. I had no idea then he was a former Nazi until I read up on him.

[Hardrada]

21. When I was a kid I used to think he and Lawrence Welk

must have come from the same place because of their accents! Also von Braun was on Disney quite a bit if I recall correctly.

[sofa king]

13. Most German rocket scientists were Nazis.

The Nazis forbade civilian rocket tests, and like today's Republicans, if you weren't part of the club you weren't going to get a job.

Von Braun reputedly despised his SS uniform and was only http://www.reformation.org/wernher-von-braun.html">photographed in it once. Nevertheless, his statements about his Nazi past contradicted other evidence collected by the Americans in the wake of World War II. Whatever the case, von Braun was important enough that unlike most Shutzstaffeln, he never had to participate in the genocidal and criminal activities of the SS, nor did he actually fight.

[LostinVA]

16. Totally agree about Von Braun, etal

Heroes? NO.

[warrens]

19. Nazi-Schmazi says Werner Von Braun...(Tom Lehrer lyrics inside)

Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.**

You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.

[Hardrada]

20. Yes, good old American know-how by good old Americans

like Doktor Werner von Braun!! Loved those Tom Lehrer intros and songs!

[Yupster]

36. "All the world is in tune

on a spring afternoon
as we're poisoning pigeons in the park"

Yes I'm old - I admit it.

Loved the old Mexico song

"And the picadores of course,
sat up on their horse.
I shouted ole every time one was gored."

Haven't thought of Tom Lehrer in a decade.

[Bigmack]

28. Really old!

Shit, I remember virtually all of those songs.... my fav has to be "So long Mom, I'm off to drop the bomb".... "nearly 3 billion chunks of well-done steak."

Tom Lehrer was Jon Stewart with music.

[FVZA_Colonel]

34. Didn't he say that political satire was made obsolete when Kissinger won

the Nobel Peace Prize?

[noonwitch]

30. My grandpa met Von Braun once

My grandpa invented the Camloc ratchet wrench. When NASA (I don't know if it was called NASA at the time) was having problems with leaky gas tanks in some of the early rockets, he sent them one of his wrenches, which tightens bolts securely, because it has a series of springs inside the coil.

NASA used the wrench and it worked, so Grandpa was the Detroit celebrity of the day, because Von Braun came to Detroit to meet him and the picture of them shaking hands was in both papers.

I'd heard that Von Braun was a nazi, but I didn't want to really believe it. Then again, did he have much choice in the matter? Not everyone has the moral fortitude of Einstein, Bonhoeffer or the Von Trapps, and be able to refuse to go along with evil no matter what the price might be.

[Blue_Tires]

32. i read somewhere

(may be urban legend) that the Nazis were very meticulous record-keepers when it came to their research on torture/interrogation--many of their methods became standard CIA practice

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. But...but...we NEEDED our Nazis!

We couldn't let THEIR Nazis beat us in the space race!

[Igel]

31. Which actually is a valid point.

Lots of documentation about the Nazis that the USSR recruited after the war--picking up entire production lines with their engineers--and carrying them home as booty.

Academics that had useful information got the same treatment.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. Fine with me.

I still find it rather insulting that we used nazis like this and Von Braun.

[Julius Civitatus]

4. Ok, flame away, but I don't agree with this ruling

This is a way of re-writing history.

You don't have to "honor" the guy. You don't have to respect him as a person, but he had a contribution to the space race. Hey, the USA made sure he escaped Nuremberg trials, and brought him safely to the USA to engineer for our space race! As a matter of fact, the USA made sure it got a bunch of former-Nazi scientists an easy way out, unscathed, by working for us. Von Braun is the most remarkable of these cases.

Are we to deny now that the USA did this? Are we just writing a PC, uber-patriotic history of the space race? Are we incapable of conceiving that the US has broken the rules when it was convenient?

Does this mean that he no longer exist in the history books of the space race? As despicable as this individual was, this erasing of history makes me uncomfortable.

[coffeenap]

5. I agree--a special section of the museum should hold the photos of

the Nazis who came here and worked "for us". We need to teach this fact of history, not hide it.

[Julius Civitatus]

6. I agree. That would be a fair solution

It would be a way of honor history, without erasing those "spotty" aspects of our international policy.

[RaleighNCDUer]

29. Yup. Keep the names, but with asterisks.

* And this is where we ventured into the Dark Side of the moon.

[Book Lover]

38. How about a just paperclip next to their names? (nm)

[mainegreen]

7. I totally agree.

Thanks for writing out what I would have been to lazy to!

[Julius Civitatus]

8. Thanks. Next thing you know, Prescott Bush never traded with Nazis either

And if the rewriting continues, he never got in trouble with the US government for war-profiteering and trading with Hitler.

Nope. Move along, nothing to see here. Praise Big Brother.

[Nihil]

26. Good point.

They should leave the pictures but document that these people were
Nazis, explicitly rescued from justice by political decision at
that time (by X, Y, & Z).

The history remains accurate (indeed, its accuracy has been improved)
but the truth about the person is admitted, not whitewashed.

There is enough re-writing of history ("sealing" records, "losing"
files, "forgetting" details) without adding to it.

[One_Life_To_Give]

10. Agreed

We shouldn't be censoring history. Show the whole of what this man did.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

15. I agree.

We could scrub our history books of all the bits that are unappealing, but that only makes the situation worse by making it seem that the US is ALWAYS right. Hiding the work of former Nazis avoids a very interesting discussion.

Many discoveries made by the Nazis on human subjects have been ignored because they were made in the concentration camps. I undertstand this as well. However we don't pretend that they never happened.

As for von Braun - the option was either we got him, or the Soviets. I'm glad that we used him instead of the "other side," at least.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. Removed from Hall of Fame, not from history

The idea of being in a Hall of Fame is to honour them. So if you say 'You don't have to "honor" the guy', you should be agreeing with taking him out of the Hall of Fame.

[Critters2]

23. I agree

it's one thing to acknowledge his work, quite another to "honor" it. Nazis don't deserve to be honored.
Period.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

18. Hear, hear! n/t

[No Exit]

22. I hear you! Erase the names of the f*cking politicians who brought him

here in the first place--if people are now so outraged about the Nazi being credited. If he's that bad now, how much worse must he have been so much closer to the time when he supposedly committed whatever crimes he committed?? So, then, the damn politicians and other Americans who brought him here should ALL have THEIR names erased from whatever lists/monuments/etc. that THEY are on!!!

[LongTomH]

25. You make a good point!

The Cosmosphere space museum in Hutchinson, KS, has a display featuring restored V1 and V2 missiles. The display features 2 figures: The one you would expect: an engineer in a white labe coat, and a worker in a concentration camp uniform. The placards attached to the display tell the story of the Mittelwerk and the Nordhausen camp.

On another level, I think we could have done a space program without the Germans. We had some great rocket people in the U.S., including Capt. Robert Truax, who designed the engines on the X-1 rocket plane. and the colorful and controversial Jack Parsons, one of the founders of Caltech. Remember, the liquid fuel rocket motor was invented by Dr. Robert Goddard.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

11. We have our own generation of Nazi fascists to purge

starting with the next election cycle... :evilgrin:

[Hekate]

12. Nothing like re-writing history, is there? I think we should own up to it

Some German rocket scientists went to the USSR, and some to the US. We did what we did, and it wasn't pretty.

Hekate

[onager]

14. OK, you asked for it...

From way back in 1965, by you-know-who...

I'll sing you a story of Werner von Braun,
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Nazi, Schmazi," says Werner von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once der rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Werner von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.

You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German, or English, I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Werner von Braun.

[kineneb]

24. For more info on "our" Nazis (reading suggestion)

Great book:

The Beast Reawakens, Facism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists
by Martin Lee, 1997/2000(paper)

Details US use of "ex" Nazi spys, including lots of info on Otto Skorzeny.
Scary stuff.

[hyphenate]

27. Removing him from the Hall of Fame

is one thing, but denying his existence, and the existence of a great many others as well, is ludicrous.

While some of these people were obviously Nazis, I ask everyone, isn't that true of a great many other people in Germany? Are we to overlook the fact that most of the German people were coerced into being a part of the Party, whether they liked it or not?

Especially scientists. Think about it--most scientists I know here in the US (although it's not a big number) try very hard to be neutral if they can. They look at politics with a cynical eye, but try not to participate in anything, because it's not in their interests to be part of an organized political party. The closest they come to it is in applying for grants--at that point, they know they must pander to the government and other sponsors.

If you were a scientist, and an evil force took over your country (gee, doesn't that sound familiar!), what would you do? Abandon your life's work? Or continue on with it as best you could, because the discoveries you are making are worth far more than the governmental interference?

How many climatologists and meteorologists and other earth scientists in general are working on the subject of global warning? Aren't they still working, despite the government trying to twist their conclusions? And then there are the anthropologists, the paleantologists and the archaeologists who are working still, despite the creationists and fundies?

After the war, bringing them to the US or sending them to Russia was certainly better than executing them. After all, yes, they were working on many important technologies, and what good were they to anyone if they were killed? Imagine that we would not be the first to land on the moon, imagine that a goal such as that would have been scuttled if our science had not progressed because the experts were dead.

What good would these scientists have done here if they were not given the opportunity to continue their work under less harassing scrutiny? Many gladly came after the war, even though they would likely have stayed in Germany if Germany had won the war. They weren't "leaving" their work, they were just relocating it. And at that point it was necessary, regardless of what the obstacles were.

This is no different than any other person with defined skills in potential moves worldwide. I know for a fact, for instance, that Canada gives people with certain skills a very large margin in immigrating. They rate potentials by a points system, and if your skills are in demand, you are given preference over others that might try to live there.

There really is nothing wrong to honoring these scientists for the work they did on the space program or other scientific project, but it is understandable that some people are uncomfortable with that decision. Surely, their work can not be denied in the greater scheme of life on planet earth, because their contribution to advancement exists, and we are better for those advancements. Acknowledgement is par for the course--but we must also acknowledge that they were Germans living in Germany under Nazi government. You can't have one without the other, as the combination defined each of these people as surely as our beliefs, environment and way of life define each of us.

[mortlefaucheur]

33. Heads Will Roll...

Once the Feds find out who the museum visitor was. Imagine the nerve, complaining about honorable Nazis to an organization likely funded by the Federal Government; it could lead to all sorts of 'unpleasantness' in contemporary Amurka.
:scared:

[noel adamson]

35. Don't forget the Nazis that were the charter members of the CIA and never.

...wonder why the CIA set up so many fascist dictatorships around the world since their inception. From the Shah of Iran in 1953 to Pinochet and the rest with their death squads, suspended democracy, virulent anti-communism, anti union and the whole Nazi/Republican hit list. Operation Paperclip is something everyone should know about. It was the name of the program that brought Nazi scientists and spies into our government. It included altering the records of war criminals in order to get around the restrictions on allowing war criminals to enter the U.S.

this page has a few Paperclip links; http://www.treasoninc.com/paperclip.html

[bobthedrummer]

37. Without comment, here are some related links to the PAPERCLIP Nazis

Staff memorandum for Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments 4-5-1995
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet13/brief13/tab_f/br13f3.txt

Documents of Human Experimentation
http://www.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/assignments/experiment/docs.html

The Nazi ideology
Nazi document excerpts compiled by Daniel Keren
http://facultystaff.vwc.edu/~dgraf/nazidocs.txt