Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer
R.I.P. Tom Lehrer
(Heard this first in For All Mankind, an excellent show I recommend to everyone, pirate it if you don’t have Apple TV+.)
project paperclip be like
Submitted 2 days ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/1e58dd86-d735-4805-9410-76c1aa787d95.png
Comments
TheRealKuni@piefed.social 2 days ago
JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Well shit I didn’t know he died
carrylex@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Ferrous@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
The difference is that the Americans rolled out a red carpet for the Nazis and offered employment contracts. The Soviets showed up one night and kidnapped nearly 7000 nazis at gunpoint, and then forced them to work to pay reparations. Based.
AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml 2 days ago
The remaining Axis scientists that the Soviets did capture still had to live in unglamorous conditions: on some projects the Soviet authorities limited the rôle of the Axis specialists merely to consultation and practical training.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 days ago
And now the Marxist state is a fascist one.
Hmm.
ShoeThrower@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
And the one that fought fascism is a fascist one.
Hmm.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 2 days ago
To be fair to Von Braun, he did have slaves build his rockets.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Wasn’t just Von Braun and the V2. Me-262s were built with forced labor. Then there’s the Comet, which was an amazingly bad idea. I’m surprised it wasn’t flown by slave labor, as little as they seemed to care for the pilot’s safety. The fuel was so corrosive that if it leaked the pilot would be dissolved alive.
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Russia like “Ooh! Write that down!”
mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Huh?
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Russia also employed a bunch of Nazi scientists for their own rocket program
Goretantath@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Its the reason the USA is fucked right now, they witness protectioned a bunch of nazis and they grew familys based on evil values.
carrylex@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well Wernher von Braun was a weird one… for example he opposed segregation while some local govenor clearly did not
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I do not think german nazis were too motivated against africans, specially african-americans. They were ultra racist against Jewish and Slavic.
The American nazis were the ones obsessed with skin color against black people.
At least that’s the impression I get when reading about those times.
bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 2 days ago
Hitler was inspired by the US manifest destiny and genocide of the native americans, nazis did well in the US because they fit perfectly in, they did not corrupt the US.
Bristlecone@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Among other things
Cat_Daddy@hexbear.net 2 days ago
I feel like the “Nazi SS Officer” part should also be the ostrich
yucandu@lemmy.world 2 days ago
What were they supposed to do, leave them all to Operation Osoaviakhim?
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I wish humanity had the ability to download brains so we can just suck out all the info from those nazi scientists and firing-squad them all
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Since the Nazis were fighting the Soviets in cold conditions, they did a lot of research on hypothermia. Their methodology involved putting Jews out in the cold and measuring how long it took for them to get hypothermia.
There was a lot of debate over whether the results of their research should be used or just be destroyed because using it might encourage future scientists to use immoral methods in their research. They ultimately decided to use that research.
But when they looked at the data, there was no real science happening. They were just freezing people to death out of cruelty with no benefit to science.
A lot of “Nazi science” is very overrated. Turns out cruel and hateful people don’t make for good scientists. Science is done by people and people and if those people ignore morality, they become very warped. “Science at all costs, ignore morality” doesn’t actually result in useful research. It may feel like ignoring ethics in favour of scientific progress is a strong pro-science stance, but it’s just another fascist power fantasy.
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
the problem after WWII was there was only one christopher lee
if_only@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
How many were there before that?
AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml 2 days ago
It’s not really funny.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I did a report on this in 5th grade, people thought I was making it up.
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
i had someone here on lemmy try to say the scientists recruited to the US via operation paperclip weren’t involved in crimes against humanity. a lot of people have missed in the shuffle of the past 80 years exactly what happened during the holocaust.
TheRealKuni@piefed.social 2 days ago
The US is all about realpolitik, and begins to make a lot more sense when you look at everything through a Kissinger-shaped lens (rest in piss, you evil bastard). We pretend to be ideological so our citizenry can feel good about ourselves, but the way the nation operates is purely pragmatic. Look no further than Israel-Palestine and how buddy-buddy we are with Saudi Arabia for modern examples. Even our support of Ukraine, while overlapping with an ethical imperative, is driven primarily by the interests of NATO and the relatively inexpensive degradation of Russia’s military and political standing we can participate in. We only give a shit about “human rights” when it benefits us.
Operation Paperclip was pragmatism. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance when we try to hold in our minds that we brought Nazi scientists over and the idea that we’re “the good guys” and fought for “justice,” so our brains try to reduce that cognitive dissonance by saying those scientists weren’t behind any of the evils of the Nazis. They were, obviously. That didn’t matter to our government, but they kept the operation classified for a reason.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think the US media has washed their image so clean with the WW2 movies that most people have no idea about stuff like the nazi rally happened in the US and the support for eugenics in the Us, and the concentration camps in the Us.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
not to mention that one of the issues Nuremburg faced at the time was they couldn’t go too heavy on the pro-Jewish side because your average man on the street was so antisemitic as a matter of course that if you looked too sympathetic towards the holocaust you’d lose popular support.
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Paperclip can be rationalised as pragmatic, but bow about these guys?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_Gs-0dhOo
…substack.com/…/ratlines-nato-and-the-fourth-reic… businessinsider.com/former-nazi-officials-in-germ…
Changed my view on history over the years.