re: What would’ve happened if Britain had surrendered in WWII?

But they were light years ahead of us in rocketry. We don’t get to the moon without Von Braun and his Nazi scientist comrades.

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So in that respect, Operation Paperclip wasn't the evil scheme that some make it out to be.

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Who says it was an evil scheme? Seizing the intellectual property and competent personnel of an enemy is an age old tradition. Who cares that they were nazis? They were brilliant men who happened to live in Germany when the Reich rose to power, and used that situation to do what they did best.

People get caught up in the “good and evil” of things and lose the pragmatism. In war, men commit all sorts of inhuman acts on all sides. Painting it in black and white is the folly of those who would moralize what is ultimately who can slaughter the most.

There are only 2 types of people in history. The conquerers and the conquered.

The Germans were launching V2 rockets at Britain by the end of the war. The technological advances from 1939 to 1945 were astounding.

Well they should return their microwaves and all the other tech resulting from operation Paperclip. The Soviets would have snatched them up if we didn’t and lord knows how that may have turned out

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LOTS of people think it was an evil scheme and believe that many, most, or all ,of the beneficiaries of the Paperclip Conspiracy should have been tried as war criminals.

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Von Braun was heavily rumored to have hung Jews in his down time. He was a Nazi and if he were still alive he would have gone to trial for war crimes. I couldn’t imagine being a Jewish scientist working around him.

And what good would that have done? What he and others accomplished for the US far outstripped any evils they may have done in wartime.

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And what good would that have done? What he and others accomplished for the US far outstripped any evils they may have done in wartime.

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The rumor is he hung the 5 slowest Jews in his factory to encourage the others to work faster. If the rumors are true about him, he was a monster, and the US to this day try to cover his arse for the evil sociopath he was. If he had 50 less IQ points, he would have been hung after Nuremberg.

I'm late to this discussion, but that would be my answer. The Soviets certainly had a role on the eastern front, but had the UK abstained from the war, Germany would have probably won.

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but von braun seems like he was 100% for the nazi cause, believed to have committed actual and legitimate war crimes, and only switched sides out of necessity. want to acknowledge what he did for our country? fine. but i am in the position of "he would have easily done so for hitler" which makes you irredeemable in my book

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Ever listen to Dan Carlin’s Wrath of the Khans?

Excellent podcast that goes over the Mongol conquest. And Carlin puts forth a great point. We can learn about the Ghengis Khan and the mongols, how they killed entire cities of people, by hand, down to the dogs. How they would pile bodies so high that they would remain there stinking for years to come.

Atrocities...yet we can study them objectively, even admire their tactics and prowess. Because the millstone of history has ground the connection to their victims to dust. Then he makes the argument that a historian, far in the future, might study the third Reich in a similar sense.

That it is only the recency of WW2 that produces such visceral reactions to an objective, removed look at that global conflict.

And understandably so. Men still live who fought in that hell.

But that shouldn’t prevent us from being able to detach ourselves from the morality and the emotion of it all and look at it like we do so many other historical atrocities. History is a wheel of blood and slaughter. We stand on the backs of rapers and reavers.

We cannot apply modern morality and social mores to history. It’s asinine. Men are a product of their times, and though we may live in a relative Pax Americana , reaching it was a legacy soaked in blood and monsters.

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once again. i am usually a big believer in this. i draw the line with nazis though

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Why, exactly? This fascinates me. The Mongols, Soviets, Red Chinese...they all had higher death tolls than the Nazis.

And look, i’m not some Nazi-lover. It was a horrific regime in regards to human loss and several men from my childhood were injured fighting them and the Japanese. But it intrigues me as a student of history that so many people have this view towards the Germans and not, say, the Japanese or the Soviets. Hell, you see college kids with Hammer and Sickle T-shirts and no one bats an eye. Lenin has a statue in Oregon I think.

I simply try to look at the role of Great (not meaning good) Men of history and understand them in a broad, objective sense, rather than one rooted in some sense of morality. Because my study of history has shown me the folly of that. Great men are rarely good.