NP - W von Braun on Nazi Hunter doc

[Monte Davis]

Hyperbole: "an unprecedented move" -- Records of other, non-Peenemunde
experts in aeronautics, medicine, nerve gases etc. were also exempt or
pulled from the normal process of war crimes and/or de-Nazification
investigations. The same was done, even more secretly and probably more
widely, for Abwehr and other intelligence personnel with especially useful
knowledge of the USSR..., just in case...

Extreme hyperbole: " No one would know about twenty thousand men who died
while working as slaves on Hitler's V-2. No one would even know that Camp
Dora existed." As noted before, US and UK newspapers reported on US troops'
arrival at Mittelbau-Dora in April 1945, on the ~2000 bodies there, and on
the inmates' reports that ~250 per week had been dying there for many
months, There was never any doubt or question that Dora had supplied the
labor for A4/V-2 manufacturing. And there would hardly have been a war
crimes trial in 1947 for a camp "that no one knew existed." Dora wan't
covered up or forgotten -- it, like many other "small" slave labor sites,
was simply overshadowed by the much larger extermination camps (Treblinka,
Belzec, Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau). Gas chambers were simply more vivid
than an underground factory riddled with malnutrition, TB. typhus and the
occasional hanging or shooting _pour encourager les autres_.

Essential truth: "Wernher von Braun [and Arthur Rudolph and others] would
be saved from having to answer awkward questions about his [their] frequent
visits to that underground hell." And so could go on to propagate -- with
US approval -- the sanitized, "firewall" version of their story.
"Mittelwerk? Of course we knew *about* it, but we had nothing to do with
it."

It's not at all certain that WvB and company would have been convicted if
charged and tried. They visited but did not work on-site; as was true
for many other managers and executives in enterprises that used slave
labor, it was not they but the SS who wielded clubs, carried out
punishments, supervised housing and [lack of] nutrition and medical care.
The "Rocket Team" was less clearly culpable than the SS camp managers and
guards who were acquitted in the 1947 trial.

The point as far as I'm concerned is not that they were innocent, or even
that they were allowed to disclaim their knowledge of Mittelbau-Dora. It
was that the US wanted their full cooperation, and within a few years had a
place for them in shiny new stories of "national security against
Communism" and then "explorers of space." IMHO, the rediscovery of their
role every 5-10 years, usually with"now it can be told!" hyperbole about
how very very secret it all was, is simply bad conscience about that.
During the war we didn't want to acknowledge that our bombing was a vastly
enlarged version of what we had decried as "terror bombing" in Guernica,
Warsaw, Rotterdam and London. After the war we didn't want to acknowledge
that what was becoming our ultimate weapon was a lineal descendant of the
Third Reich's V-1 and V-2 "terror weapons." And if we didn't want to know
those big, stark, staring truths, we *certainly* didn't want to know grimy
little details about the Rocket Team.


On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

>  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.
>>
>
> This makes sense. Paperclip elect Georg Rickhey was the one
> civilian/engineer who stood trial and was acquitted because his guilt could
> not be proved -- not surprisingly, if it is true that "[h]is Paperclip job
> at the air base was analagous to putting a fox in a chicken coop. Rickhey
> was paid to translate forty-two boxes of Mittelwerk documents shipped from
> Nordhausen--the very same
> records a U.S. Army war crimes unit sought to use as evidence of his
> crimes."
>
> So, what do you make of Hunt's assertion:
>
> "Then, in an unprecedented move, the Army classified the entire trial
> record. The American public would not know that Rudolph, Magnus von Braun,
> and others at Fort Bliss had worked at Mittelwerk,
> not Peenemunde. The press would not be able to obtain Smith's report that
> noted his suspicions about Rudolph, or see trial testimony of witnesses who
> said it was Rudolph who had signed sabotage
> reports that were turned over to the SS. Wernher von Braun would be saved
> from having to answer awkward questions about his frequent visits to that
> underground hell. No one would know about twenty thousand men who died
> while working as slaves on Hitler's V-2. No one would even know that Camp
> Dora existed.
>
> All of that evidence was now safely hidden from public scrutiny. And it
> stayed that way for decades."
>
> Simply not true? Hyperbole?
>
>
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