The other day I ran into Dr. Wernher von Braun – in a very strange and unlikely place. Unless you are a boomer or early Gen Xer you may not even have heard about him. And maybe it’s because he has turned into what George Orwell would call an “unperson.”
Dr. von Braun was the famous rocket scientist who masterminded America’s victory in the space race. Von Braun celebrated his very own V-Day on July 20, 1969, when the U.S. put a man on the moon and the Soviet Union didn’t. His earlier attempt at winning didn’t go so well because the Vengeance Weapon 2 (V-2) rockets he built for Hitler towards the end of WWII didn’t stop the Allied advance.
With von Braun it was all about timing, whether it was the moonshot right before the end of the decade – as JFK had asked for – or his swift change of allegiance from the Third Reich to the U.S. just before Stalin’s Red Army had caught up with him. Even his exit from this world seemed perfectly timed, as it happened when the most unappetizing parts of his CV were still classified information. After his death in 1977, he still got a glowing obituary in the New York Times peppered with anecdotes from the old days when his rockets used to hit London instead of the moon. Several years later the successful moonshot had drifted into the past and von Braun’s uglier skeletons into broad daylight. Many Americans voiced outrage that they owed the space race victory to a Nazi who, after all, hadn’t been so terribly reluctant to join Hitler’s political party and even the SS. Was it really that surprising? Or were all the pearl clutchers reacting like Captain Renault in Casablanca who first pockets his wins before he is “shocked, shocked” to find out that illegal gambling is going on in Rick’s Café Américain?
The embarrassment clearly lasted through the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing since there isn’t a single frame with von Braun’s face in the 2019 documentary Apollo 11. Imagine my surprise when I was running into von Braun the other day while browsing the internet in preparation for a class on organized religion in the U.S. and Germany. Apparently, he has a growing fan base among American evangelicals who are heaping praise on him as a recovering sinner, born-again brother and, above all, groundbreaking creationist – despite the fact “creation” is no rocket science.
[image_caption]Henning Schroeder[/image_caption]
Henning Schroeder, PhD, is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.
You don’t have to be religious to respect the people’s First Amendment rights to religious freedom. Donald Trump frequently praises the role Judeo-Christian values have played in this nation becoming the freest, most powerful nation in the history of the world. That’s why the Christian Right supports Donald Trump and not religious hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, two fake Catholics who would rather worship Government.
Do you think Donald Trump is a Christian? He has said he “doesn’t know” if he agrees with the dictum to love one’s enemies. According to one Jesus of Nazareth, said by many to be an influential figure in the development of Christianity, loving one’s neighbor as oneself is one of the two central tenets of the faith.
Perhaps you have forgotten the clip of him holding a Bible like it was some not-too-fresh roadkill?
It doesn’t matter to me. And it shouldn’t to you. Christians support him because he defends their right to religious freedom. He would allow prayer in public school, for example, while the “Christians” in the democrat party took God out of the public square. Have you ever seen the movie “Mrs. Miniver”? The ending of that movie could/would never be made today because of the atheists who run Hollywood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VmIIpLCw6g&ab_channel=v1nc3ntw0ng
The ending of that movie called for shared sacrifice by all the people. Yes, Republicans are big on that idea.
I could pick nits and say that the scene’s setting was in a state-supported church, and that it’s US equivalent is pretty darned woke, but why bother?
How is the religious freedom of Christians being threatened?
The idea that of the two men, Biden and not Trump is the “religious hypocrite” is the height of delusion. You may need to look up the word “hypocrite”.
Most of the instances you bemoan about “religious freedom” not being respected were the product of decades-old rulings by the Supreme Court, not anything done by “Democrats”. The rulings protect the rights of non-believers from being forced to participate in religious (usually Christian) rituals, such as school prayer. Non-believers are now an enormous group in America, as well as non-Christians, and their rights to have a society free from an established religion are now being infringed by the democratically-illegitimate Repub Supreme Court, a court majority which the irreligious Trump (and McConnell) forced upon the nation using minority rule mechanisms.
It is this (illegitimate) minority rule which the Christian Evangelical movement (and its orthodox Catholic allies) applaud. Because Evangelicalism is now becoming antithetical to democracy. “Onward Christian soldiers, marching off to war, with the Cross…”, etc.
Well, as a Christian (or at least a Christ follower because I do believe in and try to emulate Christ’s teaching on those two Greatest Commandments), I most certainly do not support Trump or any of the other right-wing Republicans who support him (I suspect more from fear than respect). You’re partly correct in part when you write that “Christians support him because he defends their right to religious freedom.” But that’s hardly all Christians. I suspect more Christians are opposed to Trump than support him. When Professor Schroeder writes that Werner von Braun joined an Evangelical Christian Church, he doesn’t mention which one. President Jimmy Carter was an “Evangelical Christian” who was a Southern Baptist for much of his life. The most “liberal” of the Lutheran denominations is known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America or ELCA. For most of the Twentieth Century, “evangelical” was associated with enthusiastic sharing and promotion of the Good News of Christ’s salvation and redeeming love not with promoting right-wing politicians and political agendas.
I do agree with you that the religious views and practices of others are entitled to respect. But I think that respect is what respect is “due”. I don’t think “due respect” can be expected from or given to anyone, like former Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachman, who presented herself as a “super-Christian” who used her platform to use churches to raise funds and give speeches trashing Muslims and even other Christians who she didn’t think were sufficiently Christian or “godly”. I don’t think respect is due to any of the so-called Evangelical preachers like Mac Hammond, Franklin Graham and other Elmer Gantry charlatans who use their pulpits and their church’s 501 (c)(3) tax exempt status as political platforms to raise money for candidates and preach hate against those they don’t feel are sufficiently “Christian” or share their ideas of “Christian values.” “Evangelical Christianity” in the 21st Century has degenerated into a political movement and personality cult, hardly differentiated from Q-Anon, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, the Klan and other vigilant groups that comprise the alt-Right.
Christians in this country have nothing to fear from religious intolerance. Separation of church and state is not only in the Constitution, it’s in the Bible: “render unto Caesar the things that Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. Somehow, this country made it through over 200 years and Christianity thrived by respecting the separation of church and state. Then the Republicans got the bright idea of passing a law (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993) that allowed intolerant, mostly right-wing Christians to complain about intolerance against them when they used their “religious beliefs” to discriminate against someone else they can’t tolerate. (It should be called the Promotion of Hypocrisy Act of 1993.). And the “Evangelicals” were successful in wheedling six right-wing hacks onto the Supreme Court where they could hammer away at the First Amendment under the guise of protecting “religious freedom.” It may take awhile to turn around but in the meantime I’m hopeful that the 75,000-80,000 Treasury agents provided for the IRS in the recent bill will be deployed to reviewing and revoking the 501 (c)(3) tax-exempt status of a lot of these so-called “churches” who use their tax-exempt status for promoting political agendas and political fund raising.
What kind of prayer? Whose definition of “God”?
Do they ALL get to be represented, or only those that are Christian (via Dennis’ definition) approved?
If your religion is allowed in the public square, religious freedom cannot exist. If your religion is permitted to ingrain itself in secular law, religious freedom cannot exist. If I cannot be free to reject your religious dictates without legal or social consequences, religious freedom cannot exist. You desire not religious freedom, but rather religious supremacy. Even our fundamentally flawed Founders were smart enough to recognize that.
Well Donald Trump likes people whom like him. He certainly isn’t personally bound to ANY of the their moral codes. Ants march on I guess. Relativism is the new right wing reality then. As it were.
Had to get Trump in there. Couldn’t just be about the slaves killed under von Braun , but had to get Trump in there. What a joke.
It’s called making a point in an opinion piece. You really need to understand the difference between “news” and “opinion”.
Many contributors to history are flawed in some ways. Charles Lindberg, Joseph Kennedy, Genghis Kahn, Rock Hudson. Many had a side they hid from the rest of the world, does that make their contributions insignificant?
Exploiting slave labor and building a rocket that was targeted at random populations are war crimes, not flaws.
Well, to many on the left, if that contributor is white, then it certainly does make their contributions insignificant. Look at all the efforts to rename schools, including ones named after Abraham Lincoln. Look at how the UK had to move Winston Churchill’s statue so it wouldn’t be vandalized anymore. While Churchill was flawed, just like every other person who ever existed, his leadership and resolve likely saved minorities from genocide. But that doesn’t matter to a lot of people anymore. Long gone from our society is the idea of sweeping off our own doorstep first.
Surprised about Evangelicals’ veneration of Von Braun, when they have adopted Trump as one of their greatest political leaders?
“A man whose allegiance/Is ruled by expedience.”
The US swept up a lot of unsavory sources of knowledge after WWII, Herr Dr. von Braun being only the best-known. Scientists and engineers were recruited, but former military officers were recruited (and their crimes overlooked) to provide intelligence on the Soviet military and on the political and military situations generally in Central and Eastern Europe. Not all of this intelligence was accurate – a lot of it reflected wishful thinking. The accuracy was not questioned, however, because it was anti-Communist.
It is also not surprising that a few isolated remarks (on a subject outside his expertise) and some church attendance would endear him to religious conservatives. Political figures have been playing that crowd for years, by merely making comments about prayer or “their faith.” Ronald Reagan had the devoted support of the evangelicals even though he seldom (if ever) attended church and even though he said publicly, in 1976, that he preferred to keep religious questions out of the political debate because he had too many questions of his own. Nevertheless, because he “wised up” and started talking about prayer in schools, and because he made noises about outlawing abortion, he was the favorite of the faction my lifelong Republican Mother referred to as the “born agains.” Never mind that he never did anything to advance that agenda. He said the right things, and that was what mattered. It should come as no surprise that a man with a background as questionable as von Braun’s should be able to score a p.r. coup by holding a Bible, occupying the occasional pew, and saying something that sounds vaguely anti-evolution.
From the Tom Lehrer song about the man:
“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department!’ says Wernher von Braun!”
The truth is that von Braun initially pitched the Nazis on being able to go to the moon and as delays and problems kept coming it morphed into being able to attack London so that von Braun could keep his funding. I’m not saying he was a good guy or anything, but he didn’t start out wanting to build ballistic missiles.
“I’m not saying he was a good guy or anything, but he didn’t start out wanting to build ballistic missiles.”
He kind of did. Von Braun did research on rocketry as a university student and claimed that he joined the Nazi party so he could continue that work, so it’s not like he started building ballistic missiles because he couldn’t get a job at Volkswagen.
This involves some seriously black humor which some of our posters will never catch up with.
We got to the moon first mostly because our German engineers and scientists were better than the Soviet Union’s German engineers and scientists.
In addition to the space race, information from notes and files discovered in Germany post war, along with various engineers, scientists, and medical doctors allowed us to make great gains in both civil and military aviation, along with great medical gains after the war.
Look up “Operation Paperclip” and you will see what I mean.
I think the fact that the US and it’s industrial base was undamaged by the war and competing against a country that was decidedly not unscathed had more to do with it. Also I hope you’re not suggesting that anything of use was gained from the medical “experiments” done in the concentration camps, because that was just torture disguised as research, failed to follow any sort of scientific method and was basically worthless. The Germans were in no way superior in any of the sciences to the other powers of the time, that’s just a myth perpetrated by people who fetishize the Nazis.
Look up Unit 731 in Harbin sometime.
You are right, of course, about the medical “experiments” conducted by the nazis. I worded that badly. The only reason I mentioned medical is from an incident here in the Twin Cities from the 1980s when Robert Pozos, Director of the Hypothermia Laboratory at the U of M, made an argument to use data from nazi hypothermia “experiments” at Dachau in potentially life-saving research, but was flatly refused permission to publish the data by the New England Journal of Medicine. I remember there was quite the dust up over his attempt to use that data.
You should credit Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and some other “non-Germans” who ‘helped’ a little to do the math.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Germans.
[movie review: Hidden Figures]
” When John Glenn was waiting to be fired into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, there was one person he trusted with the complex trajectory calculations required to bring him down safely from his orbital spaceflight: Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician who worked in Nasa’s segregated west area computers division.”
“Get the girl, check the numbers,” Glenn said before boarding the rocket. “If she says they’re good, I’m good to go.”
If you saw the movie, you’d probably appreciate these women even more. They had to use a separate bathroom until a NASA manager finally put a stop to it because it took them longer to walk there from their desks and back.
Moral of the story? Question the ‘White male superiority’ in our histories.
I am familiar with the stories of these women, and they are impressive but don’t know what that has to do with von Braun.
The space program benefited not just from the liquid fuel von Braun pioneered.
V-2s only had to arrive at a target. Their weakness was their guidance systems were not too accurate. The space program needed FORTRAN and some smart math heads to achieve more perfect guidance systems and returning people to earth.
True, true. But at what cost to our moral “superiority?” Some of the things we overlooked (and continued to tolerate, once the Nazi engineers and scientists were here) are truly atrocious. But, yes, we got to the moon first (and no one has since). Could we have done it without them? Almost certainly. After all, we did a fine job of out-engineering them during the war. Fortunately. Before they got any more efficient at killing the Jews in order to get more efficient at killing the rest of Europe. Instead of just looking at the stats of Operation Paperclip, read the book “Operation Paperclip” as well as “Light of Days,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and maybe a few more, like “All Honorable Men.” Get a picture of the human nature, and greed, that led to “the first man on the moon” and other “American accomplishments.” It’s truly disgusting. But, yes. We got to the moon first. We were the only ones. And then what?