The man didn't poof into existence in middle age at Cape Canaveral.

The only reason that rifle isn't just another Winchester is that it was owned by a famous Nazi rocket scientist.

If you had one of Hermann Goering's Smith and Wesson revolvers that he acquired late in his life, you wouldn't insist that his role in the Luftwaffe was irrelevant to its provenance, right?

If you had a letter Albert Einstein had written at the end of his life, would you ask people to disregard that early stuff he did in physics?

Of course Wernher von Braun was a brilliant engineer, but it's silly to pretend that he was saving kittens and children and volunteering at the women's shelter in Peenemunde.




Fascinating link, thanks. I'd never heard of that.

Read a book decades ago, wish I could remember the title, about how Russian, British and US teams were racing each other just behind the front lines to grab German scientists and technology. A lot of the stuff I remember reading about, I recently saw in the new Air and Space Museum Annex outside Washington.

he is a traitor plain and simple

I had written up more but it is getting late and I will go now to bed.

He took the easy way out. He full well knew what was going in his factories. He was the one asking for mire labor and such.
In order to have such a job position you have to be in the Party and follow the party line - if not you are out or even dead.
He was a Nazi and a German that had very good work ethics as many Germans have. He was able to capitalize on this to stay a life if not they perhaps would have killed him or turned him over to the Russians.


I have more but will go to gad - hopefully this will not stir up to much sh...

good night

Anyone else notice the inscription says "best wishes on OUR birthday"?

Either Erik shares WVB's birthday or the engraver goofed.

Highly doubtful we'll ever be on Venus.  The temperature, crushing pressure, and poisonous atmosphere, make it very inhospitable.



Cool gun, if it really belonged to von Braun.





 

To heck with the moral posturing. A nice weapon with a great history. Thanks for sharing.

I would love to hear more about what your bitching about.  I suppose in your fantasy world Werner had no involvement in WWII.

He was German, and worked for the German .gov, how does that make him a traitor?   He was an enemy scientist, then he was captured, and he became one of our scientists.

And?  You are trying to use the "argument from authority" logical fallacy, and like all logical fallacies, it fails.



The facts are clear: He was a rocket scientist and engineer, he had no more information on the topic than the rest of us (actually he had less information than we do now, so infact, we are better informed than he on the topic) and his credentials give him no more authority on the topic than the rest of us.



In short, your statement proves nothing and I'm not even sure why you chose to bring this up in this thread.
As for the rifle in the OP:  WANT!!!!!!!!!
 

I remember reading that Hitler felt that God was on his side.
go figure.

Perhaps you shouldn't have posted this in GD.  

Cool find!

Ever listen to Bob Newhart's Werner Von Werner rocket scientist bit?  Funny stuff.

I wouldn't waste a lot of time arguing about information from a website called "Creation Safaris".

But a thorough dissection of that provenance isn't necessary.  It's Werner von Braun's rifle.  If someone doesn't know who that is, they can be told in two sentences.  A long monologue about Nazism, Christianity, and creationism is not necessary.

It was told in three words: Nazi rocket scientist.

Are any of those words neither accurate nor eminently pertinent? What would be the point of ignoring his primary claim to fame?

What would your two sentence description be?

As far as WVB's history after he left Germany, I can add this:  

-my wife graduated from Gymnasium Werner von Braun (sort of an honors high school in the German system).  

I can't tell you when the school was named after him.  However, I understand they are debating changing the name to something else (point being: anything else other than WVB).

Interesting rifle & interesting historical discussion.

That just means it was actually used - cool beans!

Its GD...ignore it or call for the lock

I.  WVB was jailed by the Gestapo for 2 weeks - he wanted to build space ships, rather than weapons.  They also thought hw wanted to escape




II.  He was awarded an honory SS officer's rank by Himmler, probably as a way to offset Roman Numeral I, and for progaganda purposes.  Something he neither solicited or had any influence over.




III  ... which he delayed and minimized as much as he could ...



IV.  Gotta cite for that?  Because what I've read says that he argued for better conditions for his prisoner workers, and was threatened for doing so.



V.  Got a cite for this one?

You have surpased fail-boat on this - you have a whole fail-armada going on ...

von Braun was a genius - pure and simple.

Thank God we got him and not the communist scum.

My would-be grandfather in law (were he still alive today) worked with him at NASA.  

Genius.  Really, really cool piece, OP.

Cool gun.  Makes me want to watch October Sky.

The commies got some pretty good ones, too. They were well ahead of us in the Space Race for quite a while.

I see you're familiar with his edited post-war resume. I think those guys used a standard form. That's why the satiric paraphrase "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London" was used in his biopic.

If you really want the answers to your questions, it's as easy as reading his Wikipedia entry, and then going through the bibliography at the end.

A couple little snippets for you:

"Von Braun claimed he "never saw any kind of abuse... (but) von Braun wrote a letter to Albin Sawatzki, manager of the V-2 production, admitting that he personally picked labor slaves from the Buchenwald concentration camp... Robert Cazabonne, another French prisoner, testified that von Braun stood by and watched as prisoners were hung by chains ...  (another prisoner said) 'Without even listening to my explanations, [von Braun] ordered the Meister to have me given 25 strokes...Then, judging that the strokes weren't sufficiently hard, he ordered I be flogged more vigorously'..."

"'von Braun has said: 'I was officially demanded to join the National Socialist Party....  I had no alternative but to join'... That claim has been often disputed because in 1940, the Waffen-SS had shown no interest in Peenemünde yet.[20] Also, the assertion that persons in von Braun's position were pressured to join the Nazi party, let alone the SS, has been disputed.[21] When shown a picture of him behind Himmler, Braun claimed to have worn the SS uniform only that one time, but a former SS officer at Peenemünde told the BBC that von Braun had regularly worn the SS uniform..."



You may be misunderstanding me. I think the rifle is a treasure with a fascinating provenance. I'm just not willing to pretend it's all rainbows and butterflies.

In case you think I'm being unreasonably judgemental, or that I'm unfamiliar with the subject of post-war high-ranking Germans, here's a pic of my great uncle, for whom my dad is named. You can't really make out the red general's tabs, but the Knights Cross is unmistakable.

married his 18yr old cousin

Wikipedia?  Seriously?





Dark Side Of The Moon much?

"Perhaps the most problematic part of this biography is the way in which Biddle uses testimony from former Dora concentration camp prisoners. After quoting a Dora camp survivor who testifies that von Braun gave direct orders to abuse him, Biddle explains that some historians are weary of using this type of testimony as evidence.  He then calls these reasons into question by stating that they are based on standards that ‘tend to work against the dispossessed’ (pp. 124–6). While that is unfortunately sometimes the case, it does not mean that these standards should be dismissed. Issues such as being ‘remove[d] in time from the original event, lack of corroboration, and the possibility of mistaken identity’ (p. 126) do create valid doubts. Biddle proves this point when he alludes to the fact that we have to contend with the testimony of the presumed perpetrator as well as the accusers and hold them to the same standards. Unfortunately, Biddle oversimplifies the realities of dealing with these kind of testimonies in context of the Nazi past today when he claims that ‘Historians must ultimately decide whether to believe a man who spent the rest of his life keeping Dora in the shadows or those who spent theirs trying to shed light on it’ (p. 126). Besides the fact that it is not an historian’s job to make these kinds of decisions, this statement is based on true/false and right/wrong binaries that do not represent the complexity of human experiences. Biddle can obviously not resist the temptation to do what many of us would like to do, but know does not reflect reality: He wants to judge what and who is right and what and who is wrong and therefore simplifies where it suits his needs."

This review pretty much calls it for me ...

How about putting a silencer on it? It'll be a "Game Changer".

Well, I suppose it's theoretically possible that multiple eyewitnesses are mistaken and an SS Sturmbannführer "never saw any abuse", and "never wore the SS uniform - oops, you have a picture of me in it with Himmler! Well, I only wore it that one time, honest". Maybe he even felt badly about the thousands of London civilians killed by the V-weapons that he was the primary architect of.

Most SS men who survived the war had similar recollections. Hard to believe Germany came so close to winning when none of the Nazis would even wear their uniforms and all they really wanted was to save kittens and baby ducks.

For the same reason he throws stupid crap like that into other threads.

Got a reputable bit of research that backs you up?  If you want to go by unsupported, unchallenged eyewitness testimony, then we can go talk about Big Foot, fairies, UFOs, ghosts, skinwalkers, etc...

Oh, look! Is that a Bigfoot in an SS uniform to Himmler's left?

WVB's Nazi resume pales in comparison to the amount of good he did for America and Humanity when he worked for the Americans and NASA.

As someone who lives a couple miles or so from the Von Braun Center, that's a cool find!

Thanks for posting.