Historically High - Operation Paperclip: How Nazis ended up in the U.S.A.

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

You ever wonder how exactly the USA won the space race? Or why we snuck thousands of German prisoners of war into the country during World War II. What exactly would you turn a blind eye to if it meant winning? Join us on our Journey down the rabbit hole as we talk about Werner Von Braun and Operation: Paperclip.Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Good man. Hey, yeah, General, you want to see me? Yeah. How did our latest rockets go? This one made it 12 feet off the ground before it exploded. 12 feet? Yeah, I mean, we were at 6 last week. So, if you extrapolate that, doubling every week, we should be able to hit a mile in three years.

That's not enough. I'm not trying to hit the houses outside of the base. We need something. We need more. Okay. Okay. This is just a crazy idea. I said I wasn't going to mention it, but I know a guy who knows a lot about this stuff. He tons of experience. And just the guy really knows. He's kind of a little bit of an issue. like on base like he's a pot washer and he's not getting any respect no no um it's stupid it's he needs to be like a little bit of a nazi a nazi like a little bit of a nazi how a little bit of a nazi how are you a little bit of a nazi like you're only like a little bit into the nazi party like yeah like you pay your deuce and stuff like that but you're not like, I don't know, like, wearing the uniform. So, he was just a little bit of a Nazi.

He's a little bit of a Nazi, and he was only a teeny bit in the SS. He was in the S-S-et, the S-fucking S. Yeah, again, this was a thing. He just paid his dues. He was, yeah, he was just part of the SS. He didn't do any S-S-Sing. How am I supposed to spin this? How am I supposed to tell the public?

Here's the thing. This guy, is able to go ahead and advance our rocket program like five to ten years. I mean, the guy designed the V2. The ones that hit England and just tore everything apart? In his defense, he said he was not aiming for this planet and that it was just unfortunate that they had happened to land on it.

So I'm going to have to spin that the guy that launched the rockets is now working for America? You're going to be the guy. that helps us beat Russia. I don't hate that. You crazy son of a bit. I'm in. Are they working?

Yeah. Now that I got that one side down, I don't feel like I have a lopsided head where they're like this. I don't want this to sound like tinfoil hatty, but I think it always does. Oh yeah. You see that beforehand.

There are people in positions of power. I'm not seeing the United States because there's a whole checks and balances system and to launch nuclear, you've got to have more hands in the pie than just one person pressing a button on a desk. We've had a lot of accidents.

I know. But what I'm saying is that, like, what if that's not the case because of how long, like, Putin's been in power? What if that's not the case over there? Because he's been in such control. At some point, did he get that control where it's a button?

Or does it have to go one button and then to another guy to be like, yeah, we can do this? Because it ain't going, I don't feel like in that situation. I don't feel like there's a lot of people that are half and a half keys, you know, matching keys, you'd have three keys turn in, and then I don't feel like it's like that.

I feel like there's very little authorization that has to be given. And at what point does somebody that's been so entrenched in power that you almost get delusional? Like, you don't feel like normal rules apply to you because they don't. You kill all your political enemies and everything. You get to a point where reality is parody. So, you poison people, you use anti-aircraft. You just feel like in this day and age, you're just like, I'll go invade somebody else's home.

Like another country, that should be ridiculous. And I know that we do that, but we don't do it with the intention of absorbing. I'm not saying that the way we do it is right at all. I'm just saying the difference is one is going in to do something, one is going in to try to absorb them back when they don't want. We do things strictly for our interest under the veil of, because they don't call it occupying. It's like a good faith tour, whatever they call them.

And then they're like, oh, hey, if you let us put this Air Force base in here with all these weapons on it, it'll protect you and us. Correct. It's good for everybody. Yeah, well, and all the natural resources that we would also like to help ourselves to eventually. Correct. But we're going to help you. We're going to help you mine them. We're going to make sure you guys can get rich off them too. So there is that, which that might just be, that's like absorption through negotiation or absorption through, like benefit. I'm not saying that that's right either. There's a thin veil between what can happen and go extremely bad and the other side of it going extremely good. Because it doesn't take much

to go bad. All it takes is something if he does have that kind of control or something. All it takes for him is to have a lapse in judgment. Maybe he's, you know, mentally, he's got some type of mental illness. Yeah. How do you not have a God complex when you literally have been never been questioned you don't get to be questioned or anything like that how do you not develop a god complex with something like that he the way that Putin made his shit

happen over there is incredible to me because all he had to be in Russia was just the most sober person into the room to make it to where he is everybody else was drunk everybody else was arguing and he was just a hard line through it all but the one wow the one

reason that that stuff doesn't worry me is because everything along that line has to be set up by a human that's fallible. And I don't think Russians are over there, like, on a daily basis, checking to make sure that all the systems are in place in case there is an emergency to fire something. And not only that, like, this is almost perfect leading into what we're talking about. The story about one of Von Braun's first rockets,

where they got everybody out there and they tell us. It was supposed to be their answer to Sputnik when the Russians sent up their first satellite They got the rocket out there on the I guess the launch pad and everybody was watching it and it raised four inches off the ground And then fell back to earth and exploded The only thing that was screwed up about it was one of the adapters was two prongs And it didn't fit So the guy that was in charge of putting it in there was like well fuck this I can't go back and rebuild this.

I'm just going to grind a little bit off of it. And that's what it was, was he ground one of the prongs like a centimeter shorter than the other one. So when it connected and the power ran through them, the thruster on the side that was shorter didn't connect so it didn't lift up. I'm pretty sure that's how most of Rush's programs are.

I don't think it's like that. I think how advanced would they have to be to launch? They could even launch Cold War era stuff, but they have so many of them, something's going to get through. Yeah, and, but then at the same time.

It's not going to happen. I just, my whole point is, is that, like, I, I've always felt that I've been, like,

really optimistic about stuff. I've always had an attitude of, like, things, I know, I'm sure things are going to work themselves out. I've always been the,

I'm sure. Yeah. And it's switched more now over to, like, I hope things work out. So, like, there's that. It's just that change I've noticed,

but kind of, I guess what leads into all this or our ability to even do this just like you said was what we're going to be talking about today is one of our Von Braun Von Braun. I'm going to interchange I'll probably say Von Braun the whole time. It sounds cool.

It does. The most interesting part of this, because it does happen once he actually gets like he goes to college and everything like that, just hit on the main points of just him growing up. He grew up into like a wealthy, I guess you would call it. I heard

someone referred to it as like what you would consider like a German oligarchic type family like his father was in government his mother was like related to like several royal families so he grew up privileged what was it he wasn't a duke oh a baron a baron that's right he had some sweet-ass pseudonym name so he was a baron so he grew up wealthy and everything like that um he I think he had champion bloodlines. You know how like with dogs, when you do like their AKC registered name, you go through it. His full name is Werner, Magnus, Maximilian, Free Hair, Von Braun. Yes.

That guy's got more names than... It's kind of what eventually the Nazis would consider what eugenics. Yeah. So it was like eugenics without really meaning to do it, but kind of meaning to do it. So he's born March 23rd, 1912 in Poland. At that time, Poland's its own thing, or is Poland part of a rush? I don't think they were part of the USSR yet, because the USSR didn't really come in until after... So Poland's its own thing at this point.

He's born, grows up wealthy, grows up privileged, I think he goes to a couple academies or like specialized schools. He got arrested when he was like early teens. Did you see that where he got arrested because, he strapped rockets to the back of his bike. And he almost killed himself by blowing it up. And then he was like doing a demonstration in front of people. And it could have killed a bunch of people. So he always had, his mother gave him a telescope.

That's what started kind of getting his interest in space and the moon and stars and everything. They had a real up and down relationship, I feel like. Yeah. She fostered that feeling of wonderment in his head to, you know, look at the stars. And to understand that there has to be something further out there in space. and probably one of the main reasons why he ended up going to the Tech University of Berlin and the Wilhelm University of Berlin where he got his diploma in his Ph.D. Because it was something I think back then where the elites, his family,

were probably the people that were going to those universities. Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, this is pre-World War II. This is even him going to school, so if he was born in 1912, that was right when World War one was going on yeah it was kind of in the wrap down it might have been in the wrapdown

he grows up in that whole recovery stage of World War I so he ends up going to school around the time Germany and Poland how far away are they they touch I believe I believe that's why Poland was one of the first ones that was invaded because it was right on Germany's border so

Germany borders France on the west side and then has a bunch of other countries bordering it on the east. After World War I, they're already paying reparations back. It has to affect kind of that whole region in there,

because they were intertwined a little bit. Yeah, definitely. So he would be just getting out of school, kind of as the Nazi party is coming into power. I don't think it's like the major power, because there's some steps that take place for the Nazi party to establish itself. It's a minor player.

Then it becomes stronger. And then it ends up becoming the dominant government binding of government right leading up to World War II so he ends up becoming a member of the Nazi party in 1939 yeah we still gotta go over the first time his mom screwed him

okay in his first marriage oh I didn't hear about that you didn't know about his first oh buddy back after the Nazis took over they put different things in place so you could like as far as marriage and things like that

the government wanted a hand and literally everything and he tried to get married his first time and I'm trying to find it there's a special office that you had to go through and register basically the husband and wife that are getting married and they go through and check like your ancestry and make sure that everything's above board there

so this this whole thing this is part of the the early Nazi party's plan to get people registered, find out what they would consider the undesirable members of society. So different religious sex professions, things like that. Yeah, they're looking for blonde-haired, blue-eyed people to start making a blonde-haired blue-eyed people. Yeah. Well, his mom ended up being the one reason why he didn't get married the first time

because she had a disagreement. She didn't believe basically that they deserved to be together. so when the people or when they went in and filed the paperwork they went investigated it talked around to everybody and his mom just goes no I don't disagree or I don't agree with this marriage I disagree with it I don't think that it should happen so the committee rejected their ability to get married so was she another like kind of in that aristocratic party or was she I guess you would consider someone normal did he meet her at school like I think it was during

college is where I met okay okay Because he was kind of a hot dick in college. He was fancy. He liked to show off. He honestly not the worst-looking dude. They say that's one of the things that people noticed about him. He is very, he's just very Aryan-ish, very tall, sturdy. He's not fat.

He's a pretty stout guy. He's what they were looking for. Exactly, yeah. Did he go ahead and move? Because I know that at that time, there was United States research being done for a Rockets, and that was Robert Goodard, correct? Yeah. He was one of the guys where, I don't know quite how they interacted back then

because we're back to talking about like, you're mailing a letter across the world. You have a correspondence with somebody, yeah. And they talked about different things, different propulsion systems, kind of how Goddard's research was something that Von Braun almost wanted to copy. and when they started launching the V2 rockets, the A4s over into England, it just right at the beginning when they first started using them, they would recover them and take a look at them and just basically go through like the forensics of it,

check and see what the propulsion system was. Goddard immediately knew that his systems that he talked about with Von Braun went into those rockets. We're being used at least something to inspire it. At this point before all this research, to rockets is being done. So this all kind of gets started with, it was a demonstration. Remember where they did the rocket propelled vehicle? And then was it also a rocket propelled, it was a rock propelled plane, right? But it was a non, I'm trying to think it. I know it was a car. Or was it like

a bike or train or something? Like a crude jet almost. Yeah. Because isn't that the difference between an airplane or jet? Correct. But it could only be temporary. It wasn't like you could take this thing up like a fighter jet now that has a rocket strapped to the back of it. Yeah. These rockets had a limited amount of fuel that they could go ahead and use. They were meant to get to a certain altitude and then basically get in a trajectory to hit their targets. So as soon as this stuff starts happening in Germany about this vehicle being powered by a rocket, the first thing that they're going to do was weaponize it.

So Von Braun gets hired by a guy in the military, in the German military, who was like, believe in ordinance. He's like the director of ordinance. Well, one of the things that led him into the Nazi party was when he was still in college, he was receiving grants from the Nazi party. Okay. To perform these experiments and he looked at the Nazi party in the beginning, not necessarily as a political movement, but as a means for him to continue to do what he wanted to do. Yeah, exactly. He's like, no one else is paying me to do this. These guys are giving money to do this. not going to go and look too deeply into what they're doing. I'm doing what I want to do and what I feel is going to go and help mankind because his whole intention here is completely the opposite

of military. He wants to make it to the moon. He wants to fly to those stars that he was looking out. Correct. So he has, so, and this comes, this is when I start to get like the comparison between when you're able to go and rationally think about something and then when you just make a snap position between like, nope, he was a Nazi, he was bad, Nazis are bad. That's generally correct. That's the correct way of thinking. But you then put yourself in the position where, imagine in this country, you didn't know your government was evil. And you're getting to do the passion project that you've wanted to do your entire life. And they're like, yeah, we're going to go ahead. You keep developing these rockets. We're going to keep paying you to do this. And part of that starts me.

moving to the direction of, hey, we're still going to allow you to develop these rockets and the tools you need. We're just going to need to tweak the plan a little bit to where we're going to need you to start putting a bomb on the end of these rockets. And instead of landing them on another planet or in space, we're just going to need to have those come down where we specify in a very specific target area. About 800 miles from where we are now. But hey, dude, you're still going to go ahead and be able to develop these rockets. So when all this is over, you're going to be able to go and use these rockets that you've done the development of to get to space. And that's one thing where I definitely can see it as using the party as a means to an end.

But for the Nazi party to rise to power, they weren't exactly running on a campaign that I would call something where rational people would see it and think, okay, the Jews may not be the reason why all this bad stuff is happening. just, I mean, this is an entire episode, and we're going to end up getting off a tangent of this. But the entire reason that the Nazi party was able to kind of sneak in there is that, like, pride of country and morale and everything was at such an all-time low after World War I, after the reparations were getting taken out, then you have this can to come in that is so pro-Germany. I want to go ahead and make us great again. I want to restore us to our glory,

all this kind of stuff. When you've been down for so long, you hear about that, and you're like, yeah, you know what? Let's see about that. Let's give the guy a chance and everything. And in this situation they got in a party, they gave the guy a chance and the guy just happened to have been Hitler in this situation. Bad shit crazy.

So, you know, I'm sure Warner von Braun had to have had these conversations in his head. Like as a human being, just looking at that decision, having them come to you and be like, hey, this is what we're going to go ahead and do, we're going to need you to do, but you're going to keep getting to do what what is he going to say in that situation like he's going to be like nope i'm not

going to do that because his options i think in that scenario are go ahead and do this for my country agree to do it agree to do it and then try to escape because i'm not really going to do it and where am i going to escape how am i going to get out of here i'm going to leave all of this all of my work my life's work behind all my friends family potentially that he has or just say no on the spot and guess what that Nazi government, that's not going to go ahead and let the smartest people in the room get away. No, his escape plan is not there. It's not going to be like, okay, yeah, just hang out in Berlin and just, no, they're going to be like, okay, well, we're not going to risk you getting taken by our enemy. So you're going to rot in a cell underneath Hitler's headquarters in Berlin until the war is done or until you agree to start helping us. So I want to believe from a human standpoint that there had to have been some of that,

like, do I even, is no even an option in this scenario? Yeah, at this point, he hasn't reached his peak. He hasn't created the V2s, the A4s, whatever you want to call them, they're pretty interchangeable. But he's ramping up. He's learning new things every day. He's doing exactly what he wants to do. And like you said earlier, he had a piggy bank.

He had financial backing to do it. And at that point, if he were to escape to another country and say, hey, I was working on rocket teams, we were working on propulsion systems for different things in Germany. I feel like I would be somebody that would be able to help you guys do the same thing but better because he didn't have proof at that point that he was the man. He also, at that point, think of how long it probably took for most people outside of like high. German command for their military how many people knew at what point the war was actually lost for Germany like they

they knew about it and then it had to have been a long time before that information filtered out to anybody yeah the propaganda arm of the Nazi regime's not out there saying yeah so I mean you also have in a weird way trying to put myself in this guy's shoes you also have a situation where

even if you were like I can escape and get away from this, but what if we win and I escape to the losers? Yeah. Like, what am I going to? Like, I don't have any evidence. We're doing pretty good so far. We just plowed through France. We've got a huge foothold.

Yeah. We have resources. And we're looking pretty, like we're doing pretty good at this point. Should I? Yeah, I think I'm maybe going to hang out here for a bit. Well, and at that point, really what. lost World War II for the Germans was just a few strategic errors. They were

rolling through. Yeah. And with the use of the V2, which kind of came towards the end, it wasn't by any means, the guidance system on them wasn't great, but they were firing so many of them that anywhere that they were hitting, they were... But like, think of, like, going back and thinking about, like, that technology then, that long ago, that's, that that's 80, 85 years ago, 90 years ago, you think about like, they're building a rocket,

and when you just like look at a rocket, you're just like, oh yeah, just squirts some gas, it ignites, and it shoots out the back. Like, looking into some of this information about, like, what had to be done to go and create these V2s and just any of the rockets that they made. The technology itself about the mix of chemicals, knowing exactly which chemicals you're going to mix, exactly how much liquid needs to be in there for cooling. just the amount of work for the rocket itself. And then you had to build in,

they had the stabilizing fins that used gyroscopes to keep the V2s at a certain pitch and everything. Yeah. Just, how does your brain work like that? To be the first people like, you know, you think of people now that piggyback off those ideas because they know how they work, to be the first people that are coming up with this.

Well, yeah, we put gyroscopes in motorcycles now, so they stand up straight on their own. Yeah. It's technology that back then... That's consumer technology now. Yeah. And stuff we use. Like, as bad as it is,

most technological advancement comes from war. And that's me just thinking, like, just right now, the reason that probably electronics and microchips and started to gain so much traction is for guidance and bombs and for radio communication between military. You know, they always have the top-tier stuff, And then a couple of years later, the civilian sector gets to go ahead and develop it for other uses.

Yeah, you see, like, when Garmin first came out, and it was the first GPS system. That was something the military had a long time before that. They were using satellites for that. Oh, yeah. Can you imagine if the military was like, as soon as we get something, we're going to let everyone have it. They had GPS. They had to have had GPS so long. They're like, yeah, that's what we're going to do.

We're going to go and give ourselves the ability to locate ourselves and track ourselves anywhere on Earth. We're also going to give that. No, they're going to keep that to themselves for so long. Well, once it makes it out to the public, it's going to creep into other people's hands. Patents, different things like that can usually be worked around. I don't even think you can patent something like GPS because it's just a system in how you do it. Which, one of the funny things was after Goddard, like after he got to take a look at what his rocket was, they asked

Werner about the situation where he got it and Goddard claimed that this was something that he had invented and when Von Braun was asked about it he said

at no time in Germany did I or any of my associates ever see a Goddard patent so that's like basically admitting we used his technology without knowing that this was his technology, which... It didn't have to be as Pat, but if you guys talked about it,

and he gave you an option of how to build it, you could build it and tweak it a little bit, and that's no longer his Pat. Yeah, well, but it's like him coming out and say, yeah, it looks the same because it was the same, but we're not going to say that that's exactly where it came from.

So you have the V-2s that get developed. They finally get it to the point where, during the war, they're able to go ahead and launch rockets from France and hit London. From France? Yes, they were launching them from... The rocket sites were in...

They had a rocket site in France, like northern France. Oh, okay. So even closer. They were basically launching them almost across the English channel. Correct, but London is still a little bit in. Yeah. But you also have to do... You are shooting a rocket at something that you're not visibly seeing.

Yeah, you're... The whole point, like, the technology in this is that they were able to go ahead and get these rockets to a point where they could fire them. these things aren't the most precise you're not going to go ahead and aim it at a square city block of london and hit it what you're going to do is they would calculate the amount of distance between the two targets that would go ahead and determine the amount of fuel burn the amount of speed and then the and then when the flaps kicked in it couldn't make like you know it couldn't

halfway to its target be like oh i'm off course it had to stay on a set course but it was still just allies didn't have it we didn't have any like this. It was almost like a hand grenade over a horseshoe at that point. You brought it with enough explosives. Wherever it hits, it's going to leave a footprint. Correct. Or the simple fact that these things were, I think they were subsonic, but it was still the fastest thing that anybody that was in existence then, the fact that these things would come in without warning. It wasn't like you could hear the planes coming when you're being bombed. These things just... Yeah. And an explosion. That's how fast these things were coming. You couldn't intercept them. Planes couldn't

keep up with them because everything at that point was propeller and it was going too fast to intercept. Well, you're launching your crew rocket at a V2 hoping that it hits, but you don't hit that V2, then you have something that's falling to Earth because they couldn't even do that because there was never a warning. Like the people that were manning, you know, raid state or the stations on the coast that would see bombers come in, they would radio it ahead. This, the people wouldn't even able to see it. It would just zip past them. They'd be like, oh, and London's it. Well, and anybody that sees it's not sticking around to tell everybody else, they're probably running as fast and as far as possible.

I think that's why it was such a terrifying weapon. They didn't, I mean, they used this thing to me, the number sounds like a lot. And I'm trying to remember, what was the exact number of V-2s that were? There was a ton. When they started producing them in the slave camps, they were putting them together like crazy. Correct. Once they got it down to where the process could be manufactured on a large scale, that's when they brought in the concentration camp workers. Well, and Arthur Rudolph, which we'll get into a little bit later, kind of towards the end in the war crimes,

but he was the chief engineer for the V2 rocket factory, and him and some of the members of the SS were the first people that started talking about... Was that the factory the one that was in that weird... Penamunda? Penamunda? I believe Penamunda was an island that they had moved them to, just for secrecy, basically. A place where they could go ahead and work. Penamunda was... It was a municipality on the Baltic Sea Island of Yusinom.

And they ended up getting bombed there. Okay. So I have, I know how that happened. So this is going to go ahead and take a little bit of a turn. So what was happening during this? entire time during the war as the war was going on. America was taking a ton of prisoners just back directly to the United States without like taking them to Britain for like deep brief and everything like that. Yeah. Okay. So they said that America had or the United

States they set up to the south of Washington, D.C. They set up basically what was kind of like a prison camp in Virginia. Maryland, I think. Depends on how close, sorry, depends on how close DC is to the border, but it was like,

um, like a few miles south, far enough out into the woods in that area before it was developed that it was very secretive. This camp is called P.O. Box 1142. Very discreet. Yeah, exactly. This place had a tennis court,

a pool. It was like bunk houses and everything, like a rec center, all this stuff. What they were doing is when they would get these German prisoners. And it's not just like you're run-of-the-mill like foot soldiers and stuff like that. These were like if they got officers or

they found people that were scientists. Members of the SS, the higher class. Exactly. They would send them here. So basically they had this secret group of soldiers who, when like recruiters would be interviewing soldiers, they found within this

group of maybe I think it was only like 30 or 40 of them. They were finding these these German or European Jews who had just come into the United States that could speak German because it would be very fluent because at that point

there weren't a lot of people in America that were going to be learned foreign languages, German, stuff like that. Families of immigrants at that point. Exactly, correct. And these guys... You weren't going to school to learn German.

Correct. And these guys had just come over, been driven over from the Nazis in Europe. So their German was still fresh. They were still used to all that. Interacting with Germans too. So a few of these... guys got essentially recruited they joined the army to go fight the Germans and along the way they would meet with superiors and they'd be like I hear you speak German and he's like yeah he's like

let me hear some of it and he would talk me he's like uh here's your new assignment and would send him to this camp so what they would do is their job was to go ahead and guard these German officers these POWs it was still kind of a resort it wasn't like they couldn't go anywhere of course but their job was to go ahead and this first pool of guys while the war was still really hot, these guys would go actually into full-on interrogations. It was still kind of like

of resorty. It wasn't like a prisoner of war camp, like major shit. Not like an internment camp or anything like that. It was kind of like German club med. Yes. But these Jewish guys were just hammering the shit out of these prisoners. Oh God.

That would have been so much fun. And any time one of these guys would even mention the word rocket, that would focus the attention on this guy. Yeah. Because the Americans were trying to get this information so bad.

So basically, one of the guys they were interrogating was able to go ahead and tell them where Werner von Braun was at Pena Munda. They got that through

interrogation of one of these guys and that's how they knew to bomb it. Okay. So going back to going back to that, that's how

I never even thought about that like interrogating prisoners, getting information, finding out where the military like, that stuff is so I don't know the details of that

you don't think about that when you're thinking about large-scale battles and war and everything just kind of the more admin side of it or no and you got to think too it seems a little counterintuitive if you're going to take prisoners of war to go and treat them nice

but you bring them over America they got a decent place to hang out decent digs they probably realize at this point they're not making it back to Germany whether things go south and they all get executed because they know what's going on back over there with concentration camps.

So if you're going to be here, they're treating you decent, you're probably going to start giving them more information than you should. Correct. And so it did end up as soon as the war started

kind of winding down and the Allies knew they were going to win because they needed less and less information. The camp kind of turned more into like just a luxury holding pen for these high-ranking Nazis. So the V-2s are in use

and everything like, that and I looked it up. So there were 12 or more than 1,300 V2s were fired at England. So I mean, they were manufacturing these things. There were a lot of them. Now here's the other thing, is the V2s, even for that many, it was still something that you were firing from a long range and that you couldn't see where you were aiming, you were just hoping it landed. It didn't really kill as many people as you would think. I think the estimated deaths are 9,000. civilians and military personnel and then the amount of people that died the forced laborers to build these things like you're saying in the factories 12,000 more people died building these

things I'm guessing not just from being worked to death and everything like that malnutrition but think of how dangerous trying to assemble or work with these chemicals was well and this kind of leads into that what did von Braun see and how much was he cool with what was Correct. Because when they, I believe they went to middle work after they got done with Panamunda and they wanted, it was an old mine that had been abandoned that they wanted to dig and make it basically like an underground layer. And these slave laborers that they were wearing over from concentration camps would

be dying down in the tunnels as they were digging them and they wouldn't have time to bring them out of the tunnels, dump their bodies, anything like that. they were just stacking bodies in these tunnels. And Von Braun's moving in and out of these tunnels. He's moving through with Randolph. He's moving through with the guy named Gregor or George, however the Germans say it, that are building these tunnels and seeing it. And at some point, for me, I feel like my brain would click in and say,

hey, you know, why are all these people dead? Is this just something at cost that you can look at and say, okay, well, I'm still doing what I want to do? and that's kind of the first burning question that I have is how innocent can you be after seeing what you've seen and knowing that these slave camps are what's building these rockets that are killing people and I imagine when he probably found out that there were more people

that died in slave camps building these things than the intended targets that were killed you have to start kind of wondering at that point is he still doing it just for his own personal game or is this something that he's accepted is, well, these people have to die so I can continue doing what I'm doing. Looking at it in a standpoint also of being like,

what did he know at that point about how the war was going? Yeah. So is he in a position where he's thinking to himself like, because he's obviously if he's surrounded by these people dying like this, he's like, these guys don't really give it. I mean, they're working these people to death. How valuable am I going to be to them? Because at some point, they did go ahead and throw Von Braun.

They thought he was, I remember reading something that he was talking to Nazi High Command. He expressed a little bit of doubt. It casts a little bit of doubt on if they had the ability to win the war. Yeah. Something like that. So when he was, he was with a few different members of the SS. They were talking about things. He kind of knew, I believe that he knew at that point what his worth was because his things were

winding down. He had made a comment to somebody about how Germany wasn't looking good and things weren't going well. And I believe it was a servant, somebody that was working with them that heard him say it. It was, oh, she was a spy for the SS. Yeah. And she was like a dental assistant. Yes, the receptionist at a dental office. So I mean, that's, the SS had spies that were receptionist and dental offices. And, yeah. And, yeah. And, you know, the receptionist at dental office. And, And just to add in at this point, so I know we get kind of glossed over, but so Werner von Braun, he does get approached early on to go and become a member of the Nazi party. Now, at that point, it's a government party. And so it's basically just saying, hey, do you want to be part of the Democrats?

Do you want to be part of the Republicans? It's more of a fringe group than that. But you basically pay a yearly due and then I don't know what benefits you get. But anyway, he joined up because they were helping him with his research. he then got approached well into the war about joining the SS because at that point the SS

was essentially the elite of the Nazi party they wanted to count amongst its members all of the you know all of the top power players all of the experts in whatever fields they want that was kind of there they wanted to go and have everybody as part of that it was bragging rights

so he he had an offer made to join the SS he was like, can I give it a day to think about? And then he contacted his, he was working essentially for the military at this point. It was his senior officer, not his senior officer, the guy right above him. Yeah. His reporting officer, who he worked with for a long, long time entrusted. And he was like, hey, they want me to join the SS.

And he's like, if you want to keep what you're doing, doing what you're doing, he's like, just join the SS. So he ends up joining the SS. And I think there is, there's a couple. pictures of him in his SS uniform. Yeah. Well, that was one thing that when he comes over, he said that there was only the one time. He had to wear it at his ceremony or something like that.

The membership numbers were one of the most startling things that I had ever seen. So when he joined the Nazi party and they brought him in, he was... Five million, was it? His membership number was five million seven hundred thirty-eight

thousand six hundred and ninety-two. And when they joined... So there were that many people that were a part of the Nazi party that that number is astounding. And then when he joined the SS, I think he was 32,000. No, no. When he joined the SS, his membership

number was 185,068. Okay. So there was almost 190,000 members of the SS. So of course they were using dental assistants as spies because they had so many everywhere. That's true. At that point, you have to be freaked out because

if you do say anything bad, Like, I don't know how much he thought, and that's why I think he had to know that he had a little bit more self-worth than what was going on, is because if you know that there's that many members of the SS out there listening to you that are going to report back to Himmler and say, yell, I heard this. This sounds like something that we need to investigate. Yeah. You'd have to be terrified. So he ends up getting put into, I think, jail for like a week or two.

Hamler put him in jail. Yep. And I don't know if they were going to prosecute him for treason. It's not really treason. Just saying bad things. I'm sure they could have made something up. All right. I got to pee.

And then we'll find out what happens to him actually and how he gets out of it. Good. And we're back. Okay. All right. So while I was peeing, I was checking out something just really quick. So, yeah, he was arrested and kept in a Gestapo prison cell without knowing the charges against him for two weeks.

you gotta believe how did you check that were you sitting down to pee no I can pee with one hand and oh okay

Google with the other one some of us it's just not that simple some of us have to sit down okay so after he's arrested basically what happens is

the guy who's his like officer ahead of him basically goes to the minister of ordinance and like ammunition

who was I'm trying to remember his name it was Speeler or Albert Speer so wasn't he one of the H-man's guys he was he was the guy that was the Reichs minister for munitions and war production so it was his job essentially to be making

the war materials so basically he persuaded Hitler to reinstate von Braun so that they could continue with the V2 program or be turned into like the V4 program just to basically help it grow and they didn't believe that they could do that without Von Braun's leadership

you think when they were pitching the V4 that what do you think that pitch looked like you think they were trying to explain it to a roomful idiot and like it's twice as strong as the V2 they just were to they just went to go talk to Hitler and he's like why should I prove this they're like it's double the bomb

so when his memoirs came out Albert's spirit, he states that Hitler finally conceded that Von Braun was to be basically protected from persecution as long as he is indispensable and then at that point once he wasn't indispensable then they could do with him whatever. So I think that he probably, after his arrest, I'm guessing Werner von Braun was like, oh yeah, like as soon as like this thing goes far enough south that there's no coming back, they're going to kill everyone. Yeah, there's no...

We're not going to ride this out on the German side and live to tell our tales. So what they actually did, and just to kind of jump forward a little bit, he sent his, was it his brother? Yeah. Okay, so they heard that there was, they got communication that the Russian army was approaching on one side from like the east, and that they essentially the allies in the United States, British, what not would be coming from the other direction

coming from the West. So he sends his brother who works for him out to find the Americans he ends up finding a detachment like of American troops. While he was out there doing it, did you read about Von Braun going and burying a bunch of his paperwork

in, it was like an old mine shaft? Yes, that's right. Just to make sure that if he did get killed it wouldn't stay in the hands of the Germans. Yep. So he went and buried a ton of information like an old mine. So he finds the Americans, he's like,

hey, I've got a ton of rocket scientists and everything. And so at this point, a lot of the commanders throughout Europe and everything had these blacklists. And the blacklists were basically a breakdown of, if Operation Paperclip was a party, this was the guest list.

Absolutely. So basically, it was the name of all the people they had had information on during the war that were like these major players and all these different fields of industry. So engineers, scientists, um, I mean, aside from that, I don't know who they would have. It would have been like high ranking officials that were over the different branches that they had because they were, the amount of testing and the amount of doctors that they had that were doing just unspeakable things to other human beings in the concentration camps. True.

As terrible as it sounds because it just, it is, the research that those guys did have leaked into many different facets of the scientific community. On like genetic mutation

and like different reactions to chemicals and stuff like that. Yeah, that's a disgusting part of it. Is that that information? What, okay, so here's, here's the other moral question then on that. If that information could be used for the betterment of mankind. Do you use it or because it was obtained in such

disgusting and horrid way is it tainted and you destroy it? It's like the example of if you have 10 people in a car driving directly towards you and there's two people on the side of the street, do you swerve and kill the two people to save the 10? It's... Yeah. I would say some of the stuff was probably we would have got to it eventually. And that's what I kind of battle with is how long would it take? Would it have been another 10 or 15 years before we'd figured out what they had figured out?

Or unfortunately, are we going to go test on mice and animals? How much of that could have only been determined by testing on a human subject? How much of the science itself was science that scientists wouldn't have touched? Yeah. It's, I don't know. Like, to be able to perform surgery on a live human being and then get their reaction from it, I mean, there's, unfortunately, I think there's only one way to do it.

Well, I was going to say, I don't think there's any reason for that. That's something that you're just like, well, that's just like someone just torturing somebody. I don't know what the... Well, we see it nowadays. Matt Hoffman, the BMX writer, he's had so many surgeries on his knees that one of the last ones he had, he had them give him a local anesthetic at the hip, and he was awake the entire time talking to the doctors about what they were doing as far as like what he wanted them to do. I mean, there's surgeries that they still keep you awake for today.

No, you put a nerve block in and you can't feel anything. I think that, you know, if you're really thinking about it, the only reason they probably really do put people to sleep is to keep them from having a freak out because I don't know if you're, unless you're that guy or you have so much experience with it like a doctor that you've seen it if you're just a normal person and you were to look down and someone was operating and had the skin peeled back on your knee

I'm telling you right now you may have locked down that leg or both my legs from feeling but what I'm going to be doing when I freak out with my upper body and my hands is throwing me off that operating table and you're going to be grabbing at instruments and trying to push people away

but so they end up finding von Braun a whole bunch of his guys so this kind of kicks back into that documentary I was watching about that PO Box 1142 these guys weren't brought to like allied command allied meaning British being involved in it everything like that the the British the Chinese like all the allies together

like Canadian like they took the American detachment took Werner von Braun and all the scientists they could get at that time Yeah. And what they would basically do is they would ship them, keep them in American hands. They wouldn't disclose who they were, anything like that. They would get them to America as quickly as possible. So what they would do is the government branch that ran this 1-1-442, they took over an island in Boston Harbor.

To avoid immigration, what they would do is when the troop transport ships were coming in, smaller ship would go up next to it. They would unload the German guys onto it. it. Troop transport, ship would keep going. This smaller boat would then come through to this island, Boston Harbor. Warner von Braun came through like that. And what they did is, at that point, once they knew the war was one, and they were collecting being scientists, the camp really did turn more into like a fence resort. And what they said is their role almost changed from interrogation beating these guys for information to find out is they were like, okay, at this point,

like the war is pretty much over. We want you to go ahead and kind of sweet talk and make friends with these guys. They would go get them. There were nights when they would go ahead and get them like booze and cigarettes and, you know, music and everything like that. It was a German club med. Yeah.

I have such a tough time with that because we don't treat anybody that way in this country. No. We don't treat prisoners that way. We don't treat anybody that we get it. You got to think if they're bringing up a smaller boat on the side of the other boat to offload these guys, they're doing everything that they can to cover that they're bringing Nazi scientists in very important people. So like you,

you can't let your, first of all, what you're doing is at this point during the war, trying to go ahead and bring in people that could have been charged as war criminals. Because it was wartime and war criminals, you couldn't just bring them in because their names would have to be logged and everything like that through immigration. And then what's going to happen when you're doing the, you know, Geneva Convention. And at that point, not the Geneva Convention, what was the Tribunal? Yeah, it was a Germanberg trial.

Sorry. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. When you were doing the Nuremberg trials, and you're getting names of all these guys, all these guys in Naming Werner von Braun. Well, who is this guy? How can we don't have this guy? You've got this guy hidden secretly in America.

You didn't even tell your allies, because you're already, at this point of the war, there were already people predicting what the name. next war is going to be whose job it is and all we're thinking is we just got to be the ones to have the top everything yeah we're not gonna not us in britain because we don't know if britain's going to be our ally in the next war well when they started creating this list when they saw through the smoke and they realized that it was going to happen british intelligence were some of the first people to start putting the list together and the list that the germans had was called

the osseberg list which this thing, the way that it ended up in the hands that it ended up in is the craziest story ever. So when the Germans knew that things weren't looking great, they immediately started destroying documents. And at

a college, I don't even know how it got into this guy's hand. I don't know if he was a janitor, professor, whatever, worked with the Nazis. They were flushing things down the toilet. Different special things, different paperwork, different, just anything that you can think of. And somehow,

when the guy went to flush the toilet with the Ossenberg list that had all the scientists on it, it didn't go down. It ended up being found at this college that was then brought to British intelligence saying, hey, this is a list that came directly from them of all these guys. We know that we're cool with the Americans. There's a great chance that once this is all over and the land grab happens and we divide Germany and what they own, the Russians are going to be the ones that are going to want more. I don't necessarily think that it was us thinking we were going to go to war with Britain.

I think it was just a matter of like if these guys' names were documented or if they were closer to Russia. Because the Russians were after the same people. They were going to do the same thing we were going to do. Even, that's what Warner von Braun even said they did. They're like, we had to make a decision on who we were going to go and go to. We could go walk either direction and hit two different armies. We chose to go with the Americans. I think at that point they knew that Russia was the next one with the cross-air.

on them. They knew that the Cold War was coming at some point. Not only just that, but the Russians hated the Germans so much for the atrocities and stuff like that, like at Stalingrad. Yeah. I think they just realized that the most likely scenario of them staying alive was with

the Americans. Yeah, they weren't going to get probed annually every day in America, like they would in Russia. Russia, that kind of was America's I wouldn't call it a strength, but the fact that it wasn't ever fought on our soil, It was just our soldiers that were over there.

We didn't get to see the firsthand experience. I have a feeling that if part of World War II, part of it happened in America, we wouldn't have had the same sentiment towards these people. No, not at all. I mean, it's the difference in being able to go ahead and not have a dinkier infrastructure or anything like that. You know, people aren't homeless. Our buildings weren't exploded. Your people aren't experiencing famine and stuff like that.

Like, because the war didn't happen on our soil, We didn't have civilian casualties. These were all European, you know, World War II, that's all like European civilian casualties and Russian civilian casualties. There's no American civilian casualties, really, unless, like, you know, some from Pearl Harbor. Yeah, somebody was over there on holidays.

Correct. Stuff like that. I mean, the numbers aren't even comparable. You ever think that that would be something that would completely change America's outlook on wars if we actually had to, in modern times? We've been extreme, we have, I don't know how much of our, fortune within

like our military engagements has been strictly based upon the fact that we have a very advantageous position. Our country has two giant bodies of water on each side north and south.

I mean you'd have to you know get into those areas first. We have islands and other things that are out in the Pacific and in the Atlantic that we have structure or well we have power over that we and watch. Yes, I firmly believe

if war was to be waged on our own land and everything, that it would definitely go ahead and give people a much different outlook. If we had, if somebody figured out how to get to like Boston Harbor, rolled up in Boston Harbor and we're seeing gunfire

on the streets of Boston. Nobody back tonight. Every time somebody's like, hey, let's, you know, it's like the parents of the softball team or the little kid, little league team, everyone's like, whose house are we have to have the party at this year? Yeah. It's long as it's not your house, you, you don't care. No. Like, it's... No, you don't have to clean up the mess. You don't have to see your furniture get spilled on. People will say they'll stay in help and

everything like that, but the mess is ultimately yours to clean out. It's just... There'll be more Irish goodbyes going on than you can count. So, once we get in total, 1,600 German scientists brought over via Operation Paperclip. Now, that doesn't mean that they were all brought over in the exact same manner, like not having to go through immigration and stuff like that. But I think that they're, I think the bulk, the majority of them, were probably all kept secret. Anybody that had a high rank or something like that, anybody that was directly involved in the fighting, I'm sure it was not somebody that they... No, at the same time, these are like German scientists. So they're still war as part of the Nuremberg trials. high-ranking officers and stuff like that that didn't have use outside of military intelligence,

those people were still sent back and tried. Well, and one of the messed up things with this is at the time, America wasn't talking to the Jewish people saying, hey, come over, we'll give you passage, we'll protect you, we'll bring you into our country, we'll give you citizenship. So it was almost like we were taking people and giving them citizenship and giving them safe harbor that we're going to directly help us more than anything. So you're giving, you're basically,

they move these scientists around the country. I think first they move them to an area in Texas, which can you, like, they, it couldn't have been in like super popular in Texas because people in Texas, like, where are you from?

Yeah. I, uh, I am, um, Swedish. People in Texas like, oh, I don't know enough about that. to know if you're from Sweden or not so I guess but so they have them start working redoing essentially the work that they were doing over on the V2s they were able to go

ahead the Allies were able to go ahead and scrounge together I think enough parts and materials that they can reconstruct 80 or 82 V2 rockets to start back engineering studying and kind of improving upon it wasn't there a time when Von Braun was basically placed underneath different Americans and like he was just one of the guys he wasn't a top scientist he was working under Americans that had

completely different views and probably weren't really pumped to have him around dude for the longest time when he first got there he was not put in charge of anything he was working I think they said at some point for like a 19 year old kid who was like a lieutenant and he just called him Warner like instead of because all his other guys

got to stay with him like all his core group of scientists that would be two so they would always call him, I think, Herr Professor. Like, Herr Professor Von Braun. Yeah. And this kid who was like 19 years old, probably didn't go to college or anything like that,

just calls him Warner and used to say it just like, it was insulting the way it did it. Which, great. He was coming over. He had just, he was helping the Nazis. I'm not going to feel sorry for him. I don't think he gets to come over with a big dick

and an attitude and say, hey, I demand this respect. Like, you're lucky your ass isn't sitting in a jail cell instead of on a military base. No, I doubt they had very many actual freedoms at this point because at the same time too

none of these people that they brought over these 1600 scientists never charged with their participation for war crimes. Some of them and we'll get into it kind of after we get through these accomplishments

but some of them it was provable. Some of them... Oh yeah. There were situations where it was, they could either go back and stay in trial or we were just going to basically let them escape. Because there wasn't a whole lot else that we can do as far as anything like that. And so you get these guys that are basically, I've read that had Werner von Braun still been alive or lived a little bit long, I can't remember if it was still alive today or was alive within the 2000s or whatnot. but the Simon Weasenthal Center

has said that they would go ahead and go after him for war crimes. Oh yeah. And that was the thing was America didn't... I think the government knew that they needed to keep these secrets, but they only needed to keep these... They had a shelf life on them that they could keep them because as soon as these guys died, they could come out and say,

well, we did kind of know that this guy had killed a bunch of people, but we made it to the moon. We did some pretty cool shit while they were alive. Here's the other thing, and I guess we can go ahead and kind of revisit this too, is talking about kind of like, there's not really a theme here, or I don't really have a position whether Warner von Braun was a good guy or bad guy. Like, I don't know which way to fall on that. He was associated with some really horrible stuff, and I don't think that he did enough in his life to go ahead and make up for that. because what I think he did in his life is what he wanted to do.

He had his goals of getting into space, the moon, everything like that. And I think that his goals, he could say he was sorry, but I think he always had his intentional goals. And he was going to do whatever he needed to do to fulfill those goals. It wasn't for, he didn't try to go ahead and help humanity. He wanted to get to space. It was his, he served his own interests in whatever he did. Whatever was going to give him the best chance to do what he wanted to do, he was going to be fine with.

Correct. He was going to justify doing terrible things to people in order to say that he was a guy that made it to the moon. Correct. And it's not like you don't have an idea of what, even as the United States, the first thing that he starts working on before the space program even comes into the picture is they have him start working on. rocket propelled weapons. Yeah. It's one thing. It's not like, hey, Werner, come over here.

We're going to let you go to space. It's, no, we're going to have you doing the exact same thing that you were just doing. You're just going to go ahead and do it really well for us. Yeah, you're still going to be working in that wheelhouse that you've been dealing with for the last few years. We're going to milk that

for everything that it's worth, and then maybe eventually we can go into your interest. Correct. And so the whole time that he's also helping design weapons, he's being able to go ahead and design these things in a way to where he can very easily take all of these applications and turn them into getting a payload of human beings into space. So instead of taking a rocket and launching it, having it, you know, interconnalist, or what is it? Interbalistics.

Yeah, intercontinental ballistic, yeah, ICBM. Instead of getting into like that almost space and kind of come and then down on the target like that, he just, he would be able to have the, ability to take the same type of principles and just keep that rocket going into space with a capsule of humans in it. Yeah. So he's still even looking at it in this sense of, okay, well, I'm back to making weapons just for these other guys, but I'm still going to be able to go ahead and pursue my own

interest of space travel. Yeah. He's kind of one of the guiding people behind the thought of a two-stage rocket where you can launch something into space with a great amount of thrust. And then as that peters off, something that's able to fall off, and then you run into your second stage that will propel you past the atmosphere into orbit, where you can start to use not having gravity is a benefit to you. Correct.

During the 1950s, he had a lot of different rocket projects. There was Redstone, Juno 2, Jupiter, Jupiter C, Saturn 1, which we'll see become something even bigger. into Saturn 5. And that was when they moved him to Huntsville, right? Yeah, they were in Huntsville, Alabama. So I didn't know this until I watched that

show Hunters, the one that we were talking about. Yeah. I didn't even know that Huntsville had like a huge like NASA, like Rocket Town, what they called. I had no like, no clue that that was there. Like you're like Huntsville, Alabama. Like, yeah, it used to be a huge population of, it was a rocket factory or something, right?

It was. There was a military base that was down there, and they moved a lot of the different things that they would take from the proving grounds and in Texas. I'm sure moving from Texas to Alabama, not knowing how America works, they're like, what the shit is this place? I know. They're similar people, but it's just hotter, it's more humid. Oh, yeah. So there was a pretty large contingent of, like, former Nazi party, members of Germans, and that it's, area because this whole team got to kind of stay together. And they were more allowed, they were given

more free reign to come and go in different places as they kind of distance themselves from being over in Germany and we kind of got to know them a little bit better. They were allowed to go on holidays. Their children were allowed to move off of bases and go to different colleges. So around this time that he's working on all these different projects, basically we go from being able to go ahead and launch weapons with like ICBMs, then satellites start to become a thing. So now we have to use this technology to go and launch satellites into space. Yep. So they're using Wernivon bronze. It was like the Juno or the Explorer. It was part of that Jupiter C type program. Yeah. And it was launched, the first successfully launched satellite from the West was January 30th,

1958. So that was what kind of the official signaling of the birth of the America space program. because once you started needing to launch satellites, which were going to be used for probably first military application, but then you found that you're going to be launching a ton of these things, you're going to now need to have a separate program that's going to be able to go ahead and do that. And while you're at it, you might as well try to get the first man on the moon. Yeah.

So we start doing that stuff. At this point, we're running headlong into the space race where you have Russia putting up Sputnik 1 getting that launched up into the atmosphere. Who the hell knows what Russia is going to do with a satellite up there? We have no idea. So we need to make sure that we get something up as soon as possible so we can keep pace at that point. Let's see.

So May 5th, 1961, Alan Shepard is launched into orbit now. This is after 1960 when we moved away all of the different Germans that were in the military towards NASA. NASA is created in 1960. Okay. So this is when they shift out of, more of the defense systems, the rockets for the military. Well, they're still doing that, but that's like, we've gotten the hang of that now.

That's at this point, like, oh, cool, we'll take over here now that we've kind of got this down. You can go ahead and go do the space thing. Go beat the Russians to space. Yep, you gave us the blueprint. We're going to work this out. We got another deal for you right now. So Warner von Braun becomes the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn 5 rocket. Saturn 5 rocket is probably the most important rocket at that point

because it was what launched Alan Shepard into orbit. Then we run into eight years going back and forth. We're putting up satellites. We're trying to figure out how this all happens. Finally... Did we start putting... In between that time we're putting monkeys up? Yeah.

Monkeys, I think the Russians send a dog. Russians send dogs. I always remember that. American sent monkeys, Russians sent dogs. Okay, so eventually after the monkey, monkeys in space, Alan Shepard, was he the first person? Or did the Russians beat us? He was the first person, I believe, that launched into orbit and that did a trip. He wasn't up there for very long.

Okay. But this was after we had already sent some satellites up to be able to take pictures of the Earth, which were some of the first pictures that we ever had of the Earth. because it was the highest that we had ever been at that point. Yeah. So we end up then winning the space race officially when in 1969, Apollo 11 reaches the moon. At that point, the Russians were, I don't know how close they were,

but it was basically the death blow. We won at that point. And in between 69 and 72, when Warner finally was done, with NASA. He could see the writing on the wall. We lost a bunch of different funding for NASA at that point because he wanted to keep pushing. He wanted to go to Mars. He wanted to see what was beyond the moon, where we could go, how far that went. But Americans at that point, we felt like we had won. We hit the moon first. We accomplished the goal. Like there's nothing up there. Like, what are we? What's the point? Like, it was exciting. We beat them. And then people kind of went back

about their days. Yeah, it was, we'd accomplished the mission. There's no reason to keep funding it because we did what we needed NASA to do. It kind of seems like to me, and this kind of ties together in a real world sense. So he knew Disney. So Disney, Walt Disney and him kind of consulted on a couple things. Yeah, they were, they had some like-minded views about a couple different things. Yeah. So kind of like, if you ever see like the early concept drawings of certain things at Disney, like Tomorrowland is very like futuristic and space and all that kind of stuff so Walt like i think Walt Disney had kind of a taste for that and so with warner von Braun also being like god yeah we should i want to try to go to mars he had these other ideas for like orbiting space stations they would

basically be able to house like thousands of people they would be like either like half circles or circles and they would spin in a way that would produce gravity kind of like the space station does now yeah except if you were to it almost looks like his renderings almost look like a disdaintings almost look like a drawing for like a right at a theme park. Like they're very like futuristic looking and everything. Well he was, he had like rough sketches of what the national or international space station ended up looking like, didn't he? No, his were more like what you would consider like fantasy.

Like if I, if you were like, hey, draw me a space station, I'm not drawing you and I've never seen one. I'm not drawing you what our space station looks like. No, I could. Because it just looks like a bunch of like tubes and pieces just all. clam together with a bunch of satellites all over it. It's just a ring? No, it's not even a ring.

It's like, I'm trying to think of like a connectuset. Like remember like the connector sets? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a ring, but like just a bunch of like modules that kind of go out at different angles and it just kind of stretches out away from itself. Huh. And all the little corridors are like, you know, you're floating through them. Yeah.

I'm thinking if I'm thinking space station you want to draw me one, I'm thinking like something big that you're walking. through halls and you're thinking death star probably a little less death star more like a ring shape or something yeah i don't know i'm not thinking what ours looks like so i don't think that because we hadn't had one at that point i think there was still some like fantastical element to what it could be but yeah so he wants to go to mars and everything like that he's not wanting to quit but he does end up retiring from nassan in 1972 after he left nassie he moves to dc and became the vice president of engineering and development and aerospace company called Fairchild Industries in Germantown, Maryland.

Unfortunately for him, after doing all that service, well, I guess not unfortunately when you look at his whole bunch of life, but in 1973, he was having just a routine physical examination, and he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. So he had been retired for one year before he found out that he had had kidney cancer. And then how long did he live with it before he died? He died on June 16th, 1977. Okay. So he had a little bit of a run. He did a lot of speaking tours after that.

He had renounced at some point the Nazis and said that what had happened weren't great. I think that that occurred pretty, that would have had to occur pretty early on after he came over here. I heard him talking something and it was at a point where he must have been here for a while because his speech pattern wasn't like a normal American speech pattern, but the pronunciation of words was. Because I think Germans have a different speech pattern, not like the originate in words, but the way that like the cadence that you see words.

I think his focus, and I think this is his fundamental human flaw, I think his focus was always on just wanting to be this guy that launched something into space, and he was willing to go ahead and compromise where he could and even places that he shouldn't have he was willing to go ahead and compromise

to go ahead and meet his goals he would go ahead and step out and put himself in situations where he was yeah he would tell himself I'm making these weapons that are killing people but you know he even has a quote

and I think the quote was the rockets they work perfectly they just landed on the wrong planet yeah the destination was wrong. Correct. He's like the rocket city, he's like it launched perfectly. So

that right there just shows that he was able to compartmentalize and say, yeah, maybe out of sight out of mind. I'm not seeing these victims or anything like that, but my creations will go ahead and usher humanity to the stars. Like maybe he thought that space was supposed to be this thing where we reached off

our planet and colonized or something, but can you mention how disappointed he would be now? And he's like, you guys still aren't like going to the moon and stuff? Yeah. He's, He would have been pissed. Like we don't have a moon base? We're not there yet. I think part of his

kind of reckoning with his mortality too because in the end before he did pass away, he got decently into the civil rights in America. He was pushing for more people of different colors and different races and creeds and genders

to be a part of the space program, to be a part of these different things that he saw where the people that were on the ground that were doing the calculations that the African-American women they did a movie about them that did all the math to

bring the... I haven't heard of it to be a space shuttle to the moon. What is it called? It was something... The movie's called Hidden Figures. Okay, gotcha. And they were one of the biggest elements of us actually making it to the moon because they were running the equations

and doing the numbers like you said to be able to make sure that we could make it there. Do you think at the end of his life, like, depending on when he started doing this stuff and everything like that, I'm saying he could have done it before he found out he was dying, whatnot. But do you think it

comes to a certain point of his life where he's like, I feel like I've accomplished maybe everything I could regarding like space, you know, maybe the technology's not there for what I want to do? Like, I'm thinking too big, so I'm going to retire. And at that point, he's like, I still have

some, you know, moral making. up to do and so he's like I I didn't help these people that were being victimized before because I was trying to do this other thing I was trying to do my own selfish thing do you think he felt that was something that he was doing to try to make up for what he didn't do in the past there could have been a chance and I think that it's a possibility it's more of a genuine thing or an ease your conscience thing I think it was something to ease his conscience because the amount of things that they lied about to come over here and the amount of things that they downplayed

as far as what they didn't see and as far as what von Braun didn't see you can't walk down a tunnel that was built by dead slaves and they're sitting there right next to you and not know the magnitude of what you're doing. I also don't think that you can be a member of the SS and not be aware,

at least on a peripheral sense of what's going on. You have to definitely be able to go ahead and turn a blind eye to everything that's going on to be able to do this. So I do feel like he probably felt like he needed to go ahead and make some type of amends. Yeah. It doesn't, doesn't, I don't think he made enough of one again, but, you know, it's one of those things where it's just, it's such a weird, just even topic or situation. Like it's, there was no, there's no precedence. Yeah, and morally, I mean, there's nothing that he could have done to come back from where he went.

when you push the limits so far to get what you want, there's no oops, sorry, hey, maybe I need to fix this because what you've done is done. And this is something that kind of brings into the second burning question that I have for you is one of the things that America, I don't know if they used it as a coping mechanism or what, or maybe a justification for what they did. but there's a term that they used that was coined basically for this, and it was called Intellectual Reparations. Okay. And instead of a country losing a battle, which war seems like the craziest thing in the world to me now, because if you win a war, you still lost something.

And if you lose a war in such a manner that they did, you still have a certain infrastructure, You still have land, you still have people, you still have a population, you have an economy. Even if it's a tanked economy, you still have an economy. So declaring victory is really only you lost less than what the people that lost the whole thing. There's a song about it. It's a war. Yeah.

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. That's exactly what it is. as stupid as that is, no one, you know, even going to, that's why no one can ever go to war if you have the

even slightest belief that you're going to lose. Because when you win, yeah, like, your whole outlook is that you're going to go ahead the immediate horrible effects that you're going to go ahead and experience

because of that war. What you're going to gain in the long run is going to significantly outweigh that. Or you're just a psycho. Yeah, you have to believe that you're going to win it. And in the end, if you don't, when you are paying financial reparations or one thing, I want to say that it was billions of dollars that Germany had to pay out after the first one. Overall, yeah.

And then you run into giving up the land that you took over as a reparation to the different countries to be divided out. And you lost some of your land. Well, no, you lose a lot of freedoms throughout your country. Berlin Wall and dividing Berlin and everything like that. I mean, you're... The one that I run into when they talk about intellectual reparations is you're not

taking... We had a little conversation before this about it, but you're not taking paperwork. You're not taking documents. Well, it is that. But you're taking the ideas. It definitely is, I'm sure. Von Braun tried to have somebody that was still back in Germany, go to that abandoned

mind, and he threw all that paperwork to bring those things back so he had it. It was a ton of stuff too, wasn't it? Like a literal ton. I know. They told, as soon as they found the American side, they told them where it was and they went back and got it. Okay. So they went and got all that information. That's how they were able to hit the ground running so much.

But yeah, when you're talking about intellectual reparations, you're basically thinking about like, it's information. and in this situation, information, it's in any form. So it's information being kept inside a human. So people fall into that. Your currency at that point. At least that's what America called you. When they said intellectual reparations, you were the guiding factors.

Yeah, you're something we can use. To me, it doesn't seem like it holds up when you say it. you think about exactly what it is. But at the same time, it is invaluable. It is something that is important in a way because, A, you don't want it to stay. You don't want to leave those people in that country because obviously, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. It wasn't necessarily that we had fooled the second time around to see a Second World War because it wasn't just about Germany. but we probably left a lot of scientists

and a lot of very angry people in Germany after the first World War. Correct. You also left a country that was going to have horrible feelings. Yeah. Because they had lost so much. You know, you're not saying to help them rebuild. You're like, well, we're taking this and you guys rebuilt yourselves later. And so... To castrate their, basically, for lack of a better term,

to castrate their top intellectual officials. Yeah. Does seem like something that would be important. Exactly. And then again, that low confidence, that low sense of, you know, pride in your country is what leads to somebody coming in being like, get up. Get up. We can do this. Like, we're going to be powerful again. Everyone rallies behind him. But I think when it comes to, see, my thing on the intellectual reparations is how, what was our intention in that? That's what for me is the biggest thing. Like, the optimistic part of me wants to say, we're taking these people. so that we can be a preventative shield by using this technology to make sure no other wars happen. We're the good guy. If everybody, if anybody in the room is going to have a gun, it's going to be us. Yeah.

Because we know how to use it. We haven't started these last two world wars. We're new. We have a good system in place. You know, we helped jump in to win the last two world wars. We should have this. we're not going to discuss it with you that we're going to have these guys in this capability

you're just going to need to go ahead and trust us because we're going to be the ones that are capable of using it and that's the other crazy thing or the other side of it saying oh we're going to have this because we're going to need this when we go against anyone else

we're going to be able to want to bully people that's exactly what we're we wanting to use that as a shield or were we wanting to use it as a spear. Well, and you have to think if you are doing it for the right reasons, it's not going to be something that you do in secret. You're not going to be pulling a boat up next to another boat to offload these people. Or moving these people around the country so people who don't know who they are. Yeah. Not telling your allies about who you have. We're shuffling these people around who at this point in the country, there's no record of them being here. There's no,

no understanding of what we have besides anything outside of our borders. Like if, and I'm not saying 1,500 people is a lot, but then that also means when you boil it down, you want to think now, okay, this is people's grandparents' generation. Yeah? Okay. Which means that there could be 1,600,

you know, there's people that have died and everything like that, so not 1,600, but there are still a lot of these people who could still be alive. And, like, who are their families? I'm not saying that in a bad way, like, go after him, get him. It's just crazy to think about that part of your American story heritage could be my grandma was a Nazi scientist and was brought over here and forced to work on a rocket project.

And then she eventually got free, met my father or met my grandfather and had my parents and had me like, or you're going through your, your grandpa just died and you're going through a box. because some of these guys on this Operation Paperclip, this P.O. Box 1104, this documentary, they talked about how some of these guys that got brought into this camp were still wearing their nots uniforms. They literally just snagged these guys and literally put them non-stop on transports back to the United States.

Didn't even change their clothes. That they would come in in their uniforms. So they have medals, they have accomplishments, they have... Correct, but I'm sure, as a German scientist, more so the scientists, They're not going to keep that stuff. But still, what if you had pictures? Or what if you had correspondence or letters

because you were keeping in touch with these other German scientists? And you guys talked about regrets from the war or something that happened. And your grandkids these and it's like, what the, like what the fuck? Like pop, pop, pop, pop is a Nazi? It would be tough to see that. It would be worse to see that there were no regrets,

that there was a justification for what was happening. Yeah. There was a justification of what had happened. I mean, Von Braun didn't start his family until he was in this country. He didn't start his family. He was given permission to fly back to somewhere in Germany to marry his first cousin. I mean, I guess they wanted to keep the blood as pure as possible,

especially after what they had just talked about being over in Nazi Germany. But he brought his first cousin back as his bride, and they had children in this country. They were first generation. I guess, well, that would make you a second generation, German-American? No, first generation, because I don't think they count the generation not being, it's who's born in the country. Okay.

So your parents would be immigrants, your first generation. So you would have two parents that were German immigrants that created US citizens? Most likely, at very most, their second generation or maybe third generation. Because if you figure that it was that long ago that he came in, 47 he marries her, brings her back, they have kids right away, say 20 years, they have another set of kids, 20 years another, you could be a third or fourth generation maybe. Yeah. But still, I mean, there's generations of, there's families, they have four generations of people

that are still alive. Like, yeah, and to be those kids and to be those grandkids and see, oh, this is the Werner von Braun Civic Center in Huntsville, Alabama. And you, what would you tell people? Would you say, yeah, that's my grandpa? Yeah, that's my dad. Deathbed confessions. You're all huddled around him in the hospital, and he's like, I have something to tell you guys.

I got it. I have to tell you this. He's like, before I came to America, I ran a, I was a guard at a prison camp and I had to kill people. Yeah. Or like, I had to witness this and I, my regret is not, I could have stopped it. Or I had to order this that resulted in the deaths of 12 people or like a bunch of, it's just. I was the last guy. to close the door on a gas chamber.

Yeah. It's something that I'm sure would probably be cathartic to get off your chest, but all you're doing is absolutely screwing up the minds of everybody that you just hold out. It's it's just great that that's a realistic

situation. Yeah. It isn't even realistic. It is just reality at this point. You have to come to a reckoning yourself of what your family did, which is something that I feel like is important. It's, you have to know, you know,

this guy might have been a good guy. He didn't do some great things, but then he also tried to do some good things. Yeah. When it was most convenient for him, he tried to do the right thing. That's true. So, I mean, at the very least,

you could say is that he did, he did some horrible stuff. He participated in some just horrific, and he was, participant in the worst thing to happen as far as war crimes go in the country. He was part of the Nazi party. Yeah. Outside of other genocides that have gone unpunished, this probably has to rank right up.

Oh, yeah. And then spends the majority of the rest of his life doing what he always wanted to do in a selfish way. And then at the last part, trying to go and make up for it. So at least, I mean, I guess he tried. I don't know what that's worth to anyone or anything like that. But yeah, it's, it also makes you think from the kids standpoint, everything like that, did his children ever feel, because I'm sure they would have had more information?

Did his children feel that they ever had to do something to atone for the family as well? Yeah. And that's one thing that listening to a lot of interviews from the generation after the children, there was kind of a hard reckoning because they wanted to believe, the participants wanted to believe that what they did wasn't something that they voluntarily did. They wanted to believe that this was something that they were told to do, and anybody in that situation would. So as you move on and learn more about the topics from generation to generation,

the grandkids are going to see, hey, I understand that Popop said that he didn't have a choice, but he he had a little bit more of a choice he had a choice to go out a hero or to... He could have tried to escape. Yeah. That's one of the

kind of jumping back to when he was arrested. That's one of the reasons, too, that they used to arrest and detain him is that apparently he had his own government plane. He was a licensed, or I don't know if he had to have a license, but he was actually a pretty accomplished pilot. So he would fly his own plane

to like meetings across Germany and everything. So one of those things that they were worried about is After this SS spy overheard him talking about not having Faith that the war was going great They thought he might try to go in getting that plane and bounce for Britain You think they only gave him enough fuel to get to like the The state or the country lines after that probably They put a governor on him to make sure that he could only fly so far

What if I run into weather and I got to like fly around? They're like don't fly around Find somewhere to land man Seems like an easy answer. Just don't do that. So, yeah, this whole thing just kind of, it makes me sit here and kind of think about, like, what's the justification and what's the limit of that justification? Like, what would somebody have had to have done

and had to have had to offer in return to just kind of be like, we know you did all this, we feel like you can do all this. like where's where's that there's not a line yeah and it's you always want to feel like you you always you know you were always the the white night and everything like that and when you really just go back and look into this stuff is just like everything in history is gray I think there's a smattering of black and white just a strip on each edge and then in the middle it's just gray you just like like you had written up there you know what are the ethic ethic issues related to the world crimes how do you say well we're not going to charge that these guys get charged with war crimes because of what they can offer and that's where it kind of falls into an issue of we're talking so much about what the the Nazis and the Germans did that we brought over did for america but america has just as much in a hand of how they got over here and how they were justified that

there were issues that you would run into where getting people back for the Nuremberg trials, getting people back to face these issues, they had legitimate concerns about letting these Nazi scientists and these Germans go back over for those trials because they were afraid that they were going to be abducted. They were afraid they were going to be taken back. At one point, I believe it was either Strughold or Ricky that

were going to stay in trial in Dashow. and one of the witnesses that needed to be questioned was going to be von Braun. Well, some of the higher-ups on the military base knew when the investigators were coming to do the investigations to see if they would be good witnesses for these trials. And every single time they showed up to do interviews, von Braun was off base doing something.

He was either on vacation, they had sent him somewhere else for work-related issues. so they knew that they had a golden goose and the more that he had to travel, the more that he had to go be a witness and stand up for these people and say, hey, I didn't see these things. Obviously, he was lying

and he would have to go over there and say that, but they were worried about losing the people that they brought over. Yeah, definitely. I wonder, I'd be curious to know because I didn't even read anything about this. I mean, you'd have to look into it specifically, but I wonder at what point

we actually disclosed to our allies that he was alive and we had him. Like at what point in here? And then at, you know, what do you say? Oh, you know, hey, we found out you guys got Von Braun. How'd you find out about that? Well, one of our guys saw one of your guys with him or anything like that. You know what? Yeah, we do have him.

Okay, well, we're going to need to, because of what he participated in, we're going to need to go and have him come back and everything. You're like, actually, we already got him over the United States. and to get him released and back over here is, you know, is really touchy. But hey, check this out. So, like, he's going to be working on some stuff and maybe we'll kick you some stuff too. Yeah. Like, how does, you know...

Well, somebody's like, hey, where the hell did you guys learn how to launch these rockets and get these things up in space? You were like, ugh. So you remember that Von Braun guy. Yeah, you guys are launching stuff that looks real familiar or real similar to that stuff that they were launching at us. Yeah. It's interesting how you came upon.

How did that come about? Do you have a new crop of guys or where it came from? And so many of these guys that we did bring over, Von Braun, the questions about the things that he did have kind of just stayed questions. I mean, it goes back and forth with what he saw, what he knew, what he alleges that he saw, what he didn't know about, that he says that he saw.

There are guys that we brought over that there weren't questions about, Arthur Rudolph is one of the guys that was a chief engineer in one of the factories. I don't remember if it was middle work, but I believe it was one of those camps. He was actually interviewed in the late 70s by OSI, which was the Office of Special Investigations. And he admitted on tape to the things that they were accusing him of as far as knowing how many people died in the factory. That's the slave labor. you get to the end of your life and you've got nothing like you just want to either clear your conscience or just say it to say it like how many times see things this happened with these like 1600 plus scientists well some of them probably didn't honestly some of them probably didn't see stuff some of them probably stayed in that factory all the time and were working on a gyroscope and never saw slave labor because that was their job yeah stay here they didn't have to see the camps but at the same time you

They heard about it. You had to have heard about it. You had to have heard about it. You had to know. And even in the least of it, you had to know of the concentration camps. You had to know of the slave labor. You couldn't just keep saying, like you show up to work. And every six days, there's somebody new working underneath you. And you're asking, well, where'd the last guy go? He's not going to tell you that he was murdered. You just kind of have to know at that point that there was something that was happening beyond that. all right man well how do you feel we did on this one we did good there's just so much more it's such a big topic to cover and it's as much as it is based in history in fact it's so much just based on opinion and emotion

this is something where you can't there's no we're not laughing because the emus are beating the shit out of the australians no and this is one of those things where yeah it's it's one of those things where you just realize how much gray there is and it's never the outcomes that we got

it's great that we we won the space race it's great that we got to the moon the different things that we've seen since as far as the technology that's grown it's great but the cost ethically just seems so questionable

and like we were talking about earlier I think we probably would have run into a lot of this stuff on our own eventually but it got kicked in the ass 10 years earlier because of the things that we gained. You think that the H-Man's meth guy was on the Osseberg list? Yes. He thinks the Germans made sure.

The guy that shot him up with steroids. That's going to be a whole episode to do itself. All right, man. I think we covered pretty much every nook and cranny of this. Yeah. I like this one. Yeah. I think we got a decent coverage on it.

I think we did a little bit of justice. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for listening. in. Tune in next week. We don't know what we're going to talk about yet. We'll figure it out, but it will be something interesting. You're going to love it. Have good day.