The following communique landed near Davin Michael Stedman during our modern equivalent of a V2 blackout of London, the Coronavirus Quarantine of 2020. These words are reposted here with permission:
Hey Davin, did you know that I grew up with German Rocket engineers in Huntsville, Alabama? As a kid I used to play monkey bars on the Saturn V’s F-1 engines at the Space and Rocket center. Later, I worked at the observatory-planetarium they founded in the back of a state park.
As a teenager I had lived in Germany and my parents didn’t sugarcoat the facts. We went to see the death camps like Dachau in Bavaria. This enabled me to get into discussions with these scientists about how Hitler gained his power due to the economic depression in Germany between the world wars. A hysteria swept across that nation. My dad was a astrophysicist for NASA and I was totally immersed in it all while I was in high school.
Now, I’m reading a book entitled Dr. Space about Dr. Werner von Braun. I had only met him once. I would like to share what he said about meeting Hitler. “I met Hitler four times. When we met in 1934, he seemed a pretty dowdy type. Later, I began to see the shape of a man-his brilliance, the tremendous force of personality. It gripped you somehow…My first impression was here was another Napoleon, another colossal figure who had upset the world…At my last meetings with him, Hitler suddenly struck me as a unreligious man, a man who did not feel that he was answerable to anyone, that there was no God for him….He was wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god, the only authority he needed.” Does this sound familiar? Who does this describe?……
It’s a gas for me seeing all the names of these engineers I knew so well….A amusing story I read in this book was about a V-2 launch from White Sands New Mexico and crashed in Juarez Mexico near a graveyard. By the time the scientist arrived on scene, “Some enterprising Mexicans had set up a souvenir stand near the cemetery and were selling the missile pieces to tourist!” He continues,” THe missile engineers who went from White Sands to Juarez to inspect the impact crater, the story goes, found that the total weight of rocket parts offered as “genuine” souvenirs equaled that of at least three V-2s.” This made me blow coffee out my nose…..I wrote to my Congressman Mo (sea levels are rising because rocks are falling in the ocean), Brooks that to put up a Chinese made steel fence on the border would be a free scrap steel pile for the Mexicans-they are enterprising people who have survived many more centuries than us……….
My dad knew Von Braun. He used to come by my dad’s lab and ask questions. My dad is quoted in a book entitled, The Apollo Chronicles about the only time he saw Dr. Von Braun angry. Dr. Von Braun wanted a 16mm film brought back from Houston. It was the first film to show what the astronauts were doing on Skylab. My dad was the courier who brought it back from Houston late one night. They had edited the film with snippets that were backwards, upside down, run in reverse, and disjointed. Von Braun had hoped to use the film to convince congressmen to support him and more manned space flight. He was angry that his Exhibit A looked like a silly thing. This had been done because of a rivalry between the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and Johnson Space Center in Texas. Bureaucrats in Houston intentionally messed it up.
– Marc Parnell
