Appendix B: Letter on Moral Responsibility in Hitler’s Germany

Wernher von Braun gave serious attention to the following letter that he received in January 1971 while working at NASA headquarters in Washington. It came from a stranger, a resident of Long Island, New York. The misgivings expressed, and questions raised, by this concerned American citizen undoubtedly reflected those that others harbored about the former enemy rocket scientist who had emigrated from Germany.

Dear Dr. von Braun:

I cannot understand why you did not use your influence and stature in World War II to try and save the Jewish people.

Surely a man of your greatness must have comprehended the enormity of the wrong being done.

I respect your ability as a scientist but cannot yet respect you as a human being until given an explanation of your silence during those times. I am not a crank nor do I bear any malice towards you. But I would truly appreciate an explanation.

Sincerely,

Alan Fox

On January 22, von Braun wrote this extensive response, a copy of which was obtained from his Washington correspondence files.

Dear Mr. Fox:

In reply to your letter of January 11, I am giving you the following reply.

During the years immediately prior to the beginning of World War II it was obvious to anyone living in Europe that political persecution existed in several totalitarian countries. In the early years of Hitler’s regime in Germany this persecution took many forms but the most obvious was the vilification of the Jewish people in the Nazi press. Most thinking Germans saw this for what it was, creating a necessary scapegoat for the desperate unemployment rate to rally the masses behind the Hitler government. However, most including myself did not believe even in our most violent nightmares that this overt antagonism would ultimately lead to anything like Auschwitz (of which I heard for the first time after the war). Until the outbreak of the war, Jews were welcomed as officers and enlisted men in the German Army, and social contacts were widely maintained with Jewish friends.

I confess to no deep psychological thinking on this matter during these times. I thought that when the political objective of the anti-Jewish campaign had been reached a new scapegoat would be found. Stalin’s series of persecutions of the Kulaks, the Army officers (Tuchachevski, et al.), the Trotskiists, the Intelligentsia and the Russian Jews seemed to set a most likely pattern. During these years I was, of course, a young engineer with very little interest in politics, and rather engrossed in my studies on the potential of space flight and my rocket experiments. I felt very fortunate when I gained support for my work in the form of some money and facilities from the German Army. I did not have any more scruples in accepting this support than, say, the Wright Brothers may have had when they signed their first contract with the U.S. War Department.

In 1939, when war was declared, our rocket work was directed to producing weapons. Most of my time before and during the war was spent at an experimental rocket station at Peenemuende, a remote spot on the Baltic Coast. Our days were spent in designing, building, and testing.

I have often been asked how could I produce weapons of war, and I have read many essays on the moral aspects of this general question, which I guess is as old as war itself and thus as old as mankind. From my own experience, I can only say this: when your country is at war, when friends are dying, when your family is in constant danger, when the bombs are bursting around you and you lose your own home, the concept of a just war becomes very vague and remote and you strive to inflict on the enemy as much or more than you and your relatives and friends have suffered.

There was another aspect, too: our knowledge of what was happening in Germany and the world was rather limited by the Nazi propaganda machine. In private discussions with friends, one would occasionally discuss things like the existence of concentration camps, in which all kinds of opponents of the Hitler regime, including Jews, were held. But I do not remember ever having heard of a single incident of an atrocity, let alone of deliberate mass killings of civilians. If you find this hard to believe, you have merely to ask yourself how long after the event it was that you first heard about the massacre at Mylai in Vietnam, and this in a country with a free press eager to unearth unpleasant facts, rather than in one with a rigidly controlled press determined to protect tightly held state secrets and to withhold anything from public purview that Hitler wanted the population not to know about.

You ask me why I did not lend my influence to save the Jewish people. First, as I just said, I truly was not aware that atrocities were being committed in Germany against anyone. I knew that many prominent Jewish, Catholic and Protestant leaders had been jailed for their opposition to the government. I also suspected from the fact that I had lost sight of my own Jewish friends, that many Jews had either fled the country or were held in concentration camps. But being jailed and being butchered are two different things.

Secondly, while I may have been of some importance to the German Army’s rocket programs, I certainly did not wield any political influence over anyone outside of Peenemuende. I, myself, was arrested by Himmler and needed the influence of my commanding general to save myself.

As you know, the extent of the actual suffering and the criminal mass slaughter of the Jewish people became known to the world only many months after the hostilities ended, and it was only then that I learned of these things myself. I was deeply shocked and have ever since been ashamed of having been associated with a regime that was capable of such brutality. And, along with many millions of my former fellow countrymen who learned about these atrocities only after the war was over, I know that our generation must accept our share of the guilt for what happened.

Sincerely yours,

Wernher von Braun