

Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says - linhir
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

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jacquesm
That's not exactly news, Werner von Braun and a lot of others certainly
weren't part of the boy scouts in Germany.

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cdavid
Von Braun was far from the worse - although he directly contributed to the
German war effort, and knew about death camps through the usage of slave
labor, it is generally acknowledged he did not have much choice.

Low-ranking nazi researchers, doing experiments on human, were never put on
trial AFAIK. This was more pervasive in Japan, where most scientists from unit
731 were given pardon, and held highly respectable positions well after the
second WW (e.g. M. Kitano who worked in the green cross group).

I was recently horrified to learn that figures related to how long does it
take to die underwater, at high altitute, etc... were known from nazi
experiments.

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jacquesm
> it is generally acknowledged he did not have much choice.

Why didn't he have a choice ?

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daliusd
Some controversial background:
<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
I 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.

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rdtsc
The fact that US is harboring terrorists should not be news. No need to go all
the way to 1950s for this.

More recent ones are:

Pedro Ramon : bombed Cuba's UN mission to US.

Guillermo Novo : car bombing in Washington DC of Chilean Foreign Minister
Orlando Leteller.

Luis Posada : bombed Cuban airliner in 1976.

~~~
variety
No need to back to the 70s, either:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulbuddin_Hekmatyar>

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rdtsc
Also let's not forget about this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731>

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments
with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. ... The Japanese defense
counselor argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was
dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence.

Some former members of Unit 731 became part of the Japanese medical
establishment. Dr. Masaji Kitano led Japan's largest pharmaceutical company,
the Green Cross. Others headed U.S.-backed medical schools or worked for the
Japanese health ministry. Shiro Ishii moved to Maryland to work on bio-weapons
research.

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motters
Apparently at the end of the war the Russians captured Lorenz cypher machines
and continued to use copies of these with minor modifications subsequently.
Probably any Nazis with knowledge of those machines would have had not too
much difficulty finding gainful employment in the US in the post-war period as
the cold war intensified.

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wil2k
Nothing new, just read the work of e.g. Joseph P. Farrell and prepare to be
amazed.

