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Some controversial background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor Answering
by daliusd 16y ago
Some controversial background:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor
Answering your question: only von Braun could answer that. We can only guess that he might have been afraid to put his family to risk. If you read more about him you can find he was arrested by Nazis once. That might give some idea about fear atmosphere that he might have experienced.
It is easy to judge when you already know who was bad and who was good in WW2.
- jacquesm 16y agoI already knew a thing or two about von Braun before this thread got started, what I genuinely wonder about is if we are just mixing up terms here. When you say 'he did not have much choice' I read that as 'he was forced to do this at gunpoint'. And even in that extreme case there are still choices, just not very many happy endings. There are plenty of scientists that would do the most unethical things if it means they get to work on their pet project. From that wikipedia article you quote there: "We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured." The hypocrisy in there is so thick it's almost comical.