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elspethdixon Aug. 3rd, 2012 02:10 pm)
elspethdixon Aug. 3rd, 2012 02:10 pm)Dear 1960s journalist guy:
Do you think you could take a second or two out of your (admitedly justified - it was a brilliant engineering achievement and the basis for both the American and the Soviet space programs) fanboying of the V-2 rocket to mention how sad it is that thousands of people died building them?
The V-2 bomb, for the uninitiated, was the first long-range ballistic missile, and holds the dubious honor of being one of the only weapons to kill more people in its construction and development than it did in combat. This isn't because it was ineffective as a weapon, either. It's because the factory that produced it was run using slave labor from concentration camps. Over 12,000 people were worked to death building bombs in underground facilities. The 7,500-some people killed when the Nazis bombed London and Antwerp with them is less than 2/3rds that number.
Heinrich Himmler tried to have the V-2 program's chief engineer executed for stating that he thought space exploration would be a more interesting use of rockets than bombing people, because the ideological purity of the people who were building super-advanced terror weapons for him was apparently more important than actually having those weapons. On the one hand, if more rational people hadn't talked him out of it on the grounds of "we, uh, kind of need this guy," over 20,000 people's lives would have been spared in the long run. And we also might never have gone to the moon.
Do you think you could take a second or two out of your (admitedly justified - it was a brilliant engineering achievement and the basis for both the American and the Soviet space programs) fanboying of the V-2 rocket to mention how sad it is that thousands of people died building them?
The V-2 bomb, for the uninitiated, was the first long-range ballistic missile, and holds the dubious honor of being one of the only weapons to kill more people in its construction and development than it did in combat. This isn't because it was ineffective as a weapon, either. It's because the factory that produced it was run using slave labor from concentration camps. Over 12,000 people were worked to death building bombs in underground facilities. The 7,500-some people killed when the Nazis bombed London and Antwerp with them is less than 2/3rds that number.
Heinrich Himmler tried to have the V-2 program's chief engineer executed for stating that he thought space exploration would be a more interesting use of rockets than bombing people, because the ideological purity of the people who were building super-advanced terror weapons for him was apparently more important than actually having those weapons. On the one hand, if more rational people hadn't talked him out of it on the grounds of "we, uh, kind of need this guy," over 20,000 people's lives would have been spared in the long run. And we also might never have gone to the moon.
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