Barbaric!

Reuters via Yahoo 'reports' below.

Can you believe that 25,000 dead slaves only got 1 sentence???

Also, failed to note that Borntraeger became a war
criminal the second he forced the POW to work.

Also, failed to note that the Von Braun team
should have been tried at Nuremburg.

And, that Russia retaliated for our use of the
scientists by keeping U.S. POWs in their Gulags.

I don't think Cliff has any understanding of the "moral ambiguity."

July 26 11:11 AM ET

German WW2 Rocket Site Highlights a Moral Maze

By Clifford Coonan PEENEMUENDE (Reuters) -

Engineers crouching in a bunker at Testing Site Seven at Peenemuende Rocket Command October 3, 1942 cheered as the V-2 rocket blasted off. The space age had begun, but so too had a complicated moral puzzle.

``This place was heaven and hell. It shows the whole moral ambiguity of technology,'' says Dirk Zache, director of a new museum at the controversial site.

The black and white rocket thrusting into space from the small town in northeast Germany was the first step in a process which would result in the marvel of a man walking on the moon.

Yet the same process rained death on the cities of London and Antwerp during World War Two.

``The engineers said they only wanted to go to the moon. But the real goal here at Peenemuende was to carry one ton of high explosive to London,'' says Zache, a 37-year-old historian.

Zache is busy expanding the museum, which is situated in the rocket research facility's power station and opened in March. The next section, dealing with post-war rocket technology, is due to open in August.

``Here you can study Nazism in miniature. Peenemuende was built to bear witness to the ideology of National Socialism. Moral ambivalence is everywhere. The technicians had a conductor, who played Mozart's Coronation Symphony in the evenings in the Luftwaffe hall,'' says Zache.

The head scientist was Wernher von Braun, who was the most famous of 100 Peenemuende engineers taken to Huntsville, Alabama, after the end of the war to work on the U.S. space program which led to the first moon shot in 1969.

``Science contains no moral dimension in itself,'' von Braun once said, but Zache strongly disagrees.

``The big question for us here is how to communicate the horror,'' he says.

BIRTHPLACE OF SPACE TRAVEL

Standing at Testing Site Seven, which today is a closed-off, isolated swamp on the Baltic coast strewn with concrete, it is hard to imagine how space travel could have begun here among the tangled trees and missile parts.

Insects smash into the van window as we approach the site and our inspection of the rubble at the birthplace of the space age is done at high speed as flies and mosquitoes swarm around.

``I've seen astronauts from NASA and British journalists stand here with tears in their eyes. This is where it all started,'' Zache says.

Peenemuende was built to carry out Hitler's dream of building a rocket powerful enough to bomb targets in Britain, Holland and Belgium, without endangering aircraft and crew.

Many of the buildings were designed by Hitler's favorite architect Albert Speer, and propaganda minister Josef Goebbels said the rockets should avenge the bombings of Dresden, Pforzheim and Darmstadt.

While the scientists referred to the rockets as the Fi103 and the A-4, Goebbels milked the development for propaganda value, calling them ``Vergeltungs'' (Revenge) rockets. The V-1 and the V-2 were born.

V-1 rockets, were the first generation of flying bombs developed at the site. The squat, often unreliable weapons were nicknamed doodlebugs after the sputtering sound they made. The next generation, called V-2s, looked more like the rockets familiar to us from the space race.

``These rockets were silent. The only time you heard a V-2 was when it exploded,'' says Zache.

POTATO SCHNAPPS FOR FUEL

The rockets were fueled by potato alcohol and oxygen and it took 30 tons of potatoes to power the rocket for one minute.

The two varieties of missile killed nearly 9,000 people in Britain and nearly 6,500 in Belgium during the war.

Peenemuende was a hive of activity in its heyday, before a major RAF bombing raid in 1943, the biggest British mission of the war, destroyed large sections of the facility.

The rockets were tested there until 1945 and fired at Britain from launch pads on the French coast.

Researchers have found evidence that tests were carried out to fire rockets from submarines, while a chilling speech by the camp commandant, Walter Dornberger, shows where the rockets were headed next.

``The crowning of our work will be the American machine, a two-stage rocket which will cover the distance between Germany and the United States in around 30 minutes,'' Dornberger wrote in a speech for a visit by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

The first plans for the U.S. rocket landed on Dornberger's desk in 1943 and the museum contains exhibits of fantasy cartoons from the era, showing Brooklyn in flames.

The rockets were built by slaves and forced laborers in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in the Harz mountains. Around 25,000 slaves died in the construction process.

EARLIER MUSEUM SEEN AS UNCRITICAL

After the war, the Russians took over and soon the East German airforce was flying Mig fighters out of Peenemuende.

Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the site was taken over by the German army. An initial museum was set up by a former East German air force officer celebrating the development of the rocket but it was slammed for its uncritical approach to the facility's past.

The seeds of the current museum began after a dispute in 1992 about how best to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the beginning of space travel.

``England, Holland and France said you can't celebrate the dawn of space travel when the rockets had fallen on their heads,'' says Zache.

In 1994, a plan to set up a space travel theme park on the site alarmed historians and the regional and federal government became involved. Soon moves were afoot to set up the current museum.

Kurt Borntraeger, an officer in Peenemuende during the war, is a regular visitor to the site.

``You can't say it was all bad. Look at the technical achievements. I'm still proud of what we did in incredible circumstances,'' says Borntraeger, who came to Peenemuende after time on the Eastern Front.

``I built a prisoner of war camp for Soviet prisoners. We had to prod them with bayonets to make them work hard to build defenses, but when the bombings came we didn't lose a single POW,'' says the now elderly officer.

Rocket science and missile technology remain contentious issues, as seen by the dispute over experiments to develop President Bush's national missile defense system.

Standing in the somber final room in the Peenemuende exhibition, Zache points to the sole exhibit: a pile of rocks and stones which he says stands as a fitting testament to the days when the technicians ruled at Peenemuende.

``At the end of the day, all that's left is rubble.''

A German V-2 rocket is seen in this undated 2001 file photo, at a museum
in Peenemuende, north Germany, where the first rocket into space was fired.
The rockets were the first step in a process that would lead to a
man walking on the moon, but would also result in thousands
of deaths in London and Antwerp during World War Two.
REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann - Jul 26 9:33 AM ET

A German V-1 flying bomb, or "doodlebug", from 1944 is seen in this undated 2001 file photo,
at a museum in Peenemuende, north Germany, where the first rocket into space was fired.
The rockets were the first step in a process that would lead to a man walking on the moon,
but would also result in thousands of deaths in London and Antwerp during World War Two.
REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann - Jul 26 9:33 AM ET