NP - W von Braun on Nazi Hunter doc

[Monte Davis]

TE> slave labour at Dora ("Vernichtung durch Arbeit") appears to have been
deliberately hidden from the public view.

Hardly. In addition to press accounts from April 1945 on, there were trials
in 1947 specifically directed to crimes at Mittelbau-Dora:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_Trial.

>From our GR angle, the cover-up -- to the extent there was one -- was to
encourage the idea that there had been a de facto "firewall" between
Peenemunde (all engineers and scientists and technicians who sent their
designs and revisions "somewhere")... and Mittelwerk-Dora, built and run by
Kammler's SS.

To anyone with experience in high-tech manufacturing that's still so close
to R&D, that's patent nonsense. The inconsistent quality and performance of
the A4s was priority #1 for Peenemunde from mid-1944 on. Von Braun and many
in his circle *had* to make periodic visits to Nordhausen to look into
every aspect of manufacturing, and *could not* conceivably have been
unaware of conditions there.

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 3:59 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> *Many thousands* of German business managers (as well as the SS/military
>> liaisons who supplied their laborers) were deeply implicated in those
>> crimes. Very few were ever charged; many continued their careers
>> successfully; and some became pillars of the Wirtschaftswunder and
>> German public life.
>>
>
> Of course. One of these business men, and a particularly egregious
> example, was Fritz Ries:
>
> '[Fritz Ries] had a great deal of influence over Kohl. "Even if I call him
> at three o'clock in the morning, he has to jump," Ries once boasted.
>
> But who was Ries, and where did he get his money? During the Third Reich,
> Ries made a fortune from expropriating "Aryanized" Jewish property and from
> slave labor in factories near the Auschwitz concentration camp. Not only
> was Ries never condemned for his Nazi-era crimes, he went on to become the
> patron of several conservative West German politicians, including Kohl, who
> was elected chancellor in 1982. As a token of his gratitude, Kohl awarded
> Ries West Germany's highest civil decoration, the Bundesverdienstkreuz or
> "Federal Cross of Merit."
>
> It gets worse: (...)"
>
> http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jun/25/opinion/op-44604
>
> NONE OF THIS EXCULPATES WERNHER VON BRAUN ET AL. IN THE LEAST. But just
>> as the "Paperclip and Dora were a deep dark secret" meme is false no
>> matter how many times it cranks up a new book or History Channel
>> re-hash, so "these Peenemunde exploiters of slave labor got a unique
>> free pass on their crimes" is is a gross exaggeration.
>>
>
> Based on the excerpts from Hunt I posted it seems to me that we should
> distinguish between Paperclip and Dora. As well known as Paperclip must
> have been since 1946, the aspect of slave labour at Dora ("Vernichtung
> durch Arbeit") appears to have been deliberately hidden from the public
> view.
>
> The rocket scientists certainly were not unique in getting a free pass.
> Far worse war criminals were smuggled out of Europe via the Vatican/CIA
> ratline and in some cases (Klaus Barbie comes to mind) later continued
> their dirty work elsewhere. Far worse war criminals continued their careers
> after a short hiatus in the Federal Republic (e.g. in the military, the
> secret services, the police, the world of industry, the banking sector(see
> for example Hermann Josef Abs)). Denazification certainly was a difficult
> task but there can be little doubt that it should have been performed much
> more thoroughly.
>
> Watching Wernher von Braun on Disney TV is a rather strange, not to say
> discombubulating, experience.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20151022/1f235d8b/attachment.html>