[In the summer of 1945, Nazi scientists began arriving in the United States, recruited to work in the US government and eventually its space program as part of Operation Paperclip. But they weren’t the first American Nazis by any means, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a weekend post on an interesting and fraught recent cultural representation of Paperclip.]
On three
striking lines from Tom
Lehrer’s satirical song about the Nazi-turned-American
scientist.
1)
“Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown/‘Ha,
Nazi, Schmazi,’ says Wernher von Braun”: As I’ll discuss at greater length in
the weekend post, what was perhaps most striking about Operation Paperclip
wasn’t that it brought Nazi scientists to America, but that it did so so
quickly and openly. Von Braun, the scientist single-handedly responsible for
the V2 rocket that
killed a great many Londoners in the final year of the Blitz (among other work
he did for Hitler’s Nazi regime), was among those initial arrivals in the
United States in late September 1945, less than 5 months after V-E Day. He would
go on to be a prominent public spokesperson as well
as scientist for NASA and the Space Program, appearing for example on three Walt Disney Man in Space TV shows. Clearly von Braun was able to immediately
and consistently laugh away his service to Nazi Germany, and so, it seems was
the US government.
2)
“Like the widows and cripples in old London
town/Who owe their large pension to Wernher von Braun”: But not all Americans
were as willing or able to laugh that history away, as Lehrer’s early 1960s
song illustrates. There’s no shortage of contenders for the song’s most biting
couplet, but I would have to go with this one, especially as it follows “But
some think our attitude/Should be one of gratitude.” Obviously those who have
been permanently and fatally affected by von Braun’s rockets would show him no
gratitude—and Lehrer here links “us” and “our attitude” to those London
casualties. The first line in this verse, “Some have harsh words for this man
of renown,” really drives home the point—after all, in 1945 what von Braun was
renowned for was designing killing machines, and it was then that the US
decided to not just spare him from post-war trials and punishments, but to
bring him to America and make him an integral, acclaimed part of our own Cold
War efforts.
3)
“Good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von
Braun!”: All of this adds a great deal more to Lehrer’s spoken introduction to
the song, which asks “what is it” that helped America advanced in both the
nuclear and space races. “Well,” Lehrer replies, “it was good old American know
how, that’s what, as provided by good old Americans like” von Braun. While of
course immigrants to the US are indeed American, von Braun’s immigration took
place, again, just a few months after he was employed by and making weapons for
the US’s wartime adversary. Yet while on that level Lehrer’s description of him
as a “good old American” could be read as ridiculous, I would say that the true
satire lies deeper—that our willingness to abandon morality or ethics in
pursuit of scientific and Cold War “victories” was and is, indeed, all too
defining and foundational of an American trait.
Last
NaziStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?
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