Not GR but interestingly related

[Monte Davis]

This is a point I've tried to make in connection with the list's recurring
discussions of von Braun (and the broader public's re-discovery every
decade or so that OMG There Was a Nazi in Our Spaceport):

That in the insane moral/economic landscape of wartime Germany, slave labor
was very widely used (and very widely abused, including summary executions
for the most trivial causes or none at all) throughout civilian industry
all over the Reich as well as in war production...

That therefore tens of thousands of executives, professionals and managers
-- both Party (even SS) members and not -- saw that every day and did
nothing...

And that postwar "de-Nazification" penalized -- let alone tried -- only the
tiniest handful of those.

All of which is to say that while there was brutal, bitter irony in von
Braun's reincarnations as genial Dr. Space on Disney programs in the 1950s,
and a leader in the race for ICBMs and then the Moon, there was nothing
very uncommon either in his offenses nor in his escape from consequences.
For all the recurring focus on the weapons-tech figures brought over by
Operation Paperclip, they were far outnumbered by Germans who emigrated
quietly on their own to Allied countries in the 1950s and 1960s, one by
one, to pursue careers in construction or auto-making or vegetable canning
which had earlier been entwined with horrors.

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> apropos for anyone sympathetic to VW's recent  recent payouts and layoffs
>
> Slave labour was an integral part of the Nazi war machine. Many
> concentration camps were attached to dedicated factories where company
> officials worked hand-in-hand with the SS officers overseeing the camps.
>
> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34358783
>
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