Comment Re:White Werhner von Braun may be many things... (Score 1) 165
Issues with this:
1) Just because von Braun may have had a hand in picking some workers does not imply he was fully aware of the conditions in Mittelwerk (location of the underground factories). Do you think he approved of his "hand-picked" technical workers being worked to death?
2) It's not like those slave laborers would have had blissful, easy existences in WWII Germany had they not been building V-2s. They were doomed in any case. There is nothing von Braun could have done about that. And Mittelwerk was used for other industry also, notably V-1 production, too, with which von Braun had no connection.
It was a horrific situation all around, but von Braun didn't set it up and he didn't have the ability to change it once it was in place. Could he have pressed for better conditions -- maybe, but probably to no avail. And von Braun had an uneasy relationship with the authorities; he got arrested once during that time and barely got out of that himself so he wasn't exactly a man with a lot of leverage to challenge the Nazi system by then.