WWII in GR

[Dave Monroe]

... well, I think you all know by now how I feel on this, not sure why "obvious"
necessarily equals "well, obviously not," but, no, the Americans didn't just
have to hand any of these people over to the Russians (though, as I noted
earlier, at least one prominent member of the V-2 team was enticed away, only to
have the Soviets dismiss any Germans they might have "acquired" in 1951).  As
Gravity's Rainbow itself notes (p. 416 in the Viking/Penguin eds., p. 485 in the
Bantam--maybe we should adopt Weisenberger's notation when possible, if one can
make the conversion, so that those with the Bantam eds. can better follow
along?  V416, B485, though, obviously, not everybody's going to be able to make
the conversion), von Braun did fall  out of favor for a time, though from I
recall it wasn't a "palace revolt against" him "because of his youth and a
number of test failures," but rather an attempted usurpation of the V-2 program
by Himmler and the SS (from Dornberger and the Army) in which WvB was accused of
making "treasonous" statements in re: problems with the damn things, and how
he'd rather be running a space program (unless Pynchon is referring to an
earlier incident I don't recall, someone let me know; in the meantime, see
Michael Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich, pp. 213-20).  Neufeld also notes that
although WvB"and the officers in the program showed every sign of
enthusiastically embracing Hitler's rearmament and 'national
regeneration'"--that "grim phoenix," perhaps?--"none shows any sign of having
been a Nazi ideologue" (pp. 46-7).

Nonetheless, concentration camp slave labor was used--Walter Dornberger, the
Army overseer for the project, euphemizes this as "foreign labor" or somesuch in
his memoirs (V-2, though I stupidly lent teh damn thing to somebody)-- not to
mention abused (to say the least, atrocities WERE committed, and Neufeld soes
print some photographs of victims; Dornberger does not mention this ...), in the
V-2 program, and Neufeld, for starters, is clear on von Braun's complicity
therein (see, e.g., pp. 227-8, 278-9; see also, e.g., Alexander Cockburn and
Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout, chap. 5, and Yves Beon, Planet Dora ... for
starters ...).  What should "we" have done?  Well, again, some of us--well, I,
at any rate--take a stand based on at least the principles established at the
Nuremburg trials if not exactly teh practices followed nonetheless, some of us
take a stand based on some sense or another of prgmatism, realpolitik, whatever,
but ...

 ... but I guess the question here should be, what's going on withh all these
elements--the V-2, von Braun, Peenemunde, Dora, the Mittelwerk, the Nazis,
German, WWII, Operation Paperclip, NASA, the military-industrial complex
(interestingly, Neufeld notes that von Braun had "misgivings" about the
potential involvement of private firms in the V-2 program, worries about
"military secrecy" and "commercial exploitation," reflecting not only "the
attitudes of his superiors," who wanted "a large, secretive miltary laboratory
in which corporations were only subcontractors," but "the rather empty
anticapitalist rhetoric of National Socialism" as well, although here MN makes
the comments about WvB ideological antipathy I noted earlier [p. 46]), and then
some--in Gravity's Rainbow?  Thing is, Pynchon tends to have done his homework,
and it oftens pays to attempt to reconstruct (not to mention deconstruct) it ...

.. that play, by the way, is Michael Frayn's excellent Copenhagen, though it's
Werner Hesenberg's participation, and not Bohr's (Bohr did not, to the best of
my knowledge, in any way actively, or pasivley, participate in Nazi projects;
Heisenberg, on the other hand, did run the eventual German A-Bomb project),
that's at issue.  Surprising, perhaps (Methuen seems to have been caught short
on copies, at any rate), a Broadway smash/Tony winner.  I've mentioned these
titles before, but, if you're interested, the short list ...

--Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War
--Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Bomb Project
--Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power,
1939-1949

See also David Casssidy's (no, not THAT David Cassidy ...) WH biography,
Uncertainty, and the Farm Hall (where the German a-scientists were impounded
after the surrender) transcripts, either Jeremy Bernstein and david Cassidy,
eds. Hitler's Uranium Club or Sir Charles Frank, ed., Operation Epsilon.  Robert
Heilbron, The Dilemma of an Upright Man, on Max Planck during the war years,
might be of interest as well ...

Derek C. Maus wrote:

> The play "Copenhagen" (I forget the author's name right now) has some
> interesting musings on the role of the supposedly apolitical scientist (in
> this case, Niels Bohr) participating in Nazi projects.
>