von Braun in the Rainbow

[David Casseres]

On Jan 3, 2008, at 7:29 PM, robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

> And if not, is there anything good on the tube tonight?

Mmmyeah.

To this thread I must add an anecdote.  The father of a good friend of  
mine – I'll call the father Prof. W – was a math professor in Germany  
until he fled the country, because he was a Jew.  But before that  
happened, one day out of the blue, von Braun, whom he had met only a  
few times, invited him out for a sailing expedition on a local lake.

So there they were, out all alone on the water after various bits of  
small talk, when von Braun confided to Prof. W that he had never  
before spoken socially with a Jew.  And the rest of the encounter was  
spent on further small talk, conventional pleasantries such as you  
might expect between a distinctly endangered Jew and an aristocratic  
godling of the Herrenvolk, member of the Waffen SS, who would actually  
rather pursue rocketry than Jews, and wasn't much interested in  
mathematicians – but had his social curiosity and his collegial  
instincts to satisfy.  A friendship did not develop, neither did any  
antipathy.  Von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937, after Prof. W had  
left Germany.

Prof. W told me this story very dryly and without further comment, as  
part of a larger conversation about mathematicians and their  
interactions with the world.