Red Bull beverages produces a magazine called The Red Bulletin (which sounds like a communist publication, but never mind), billed as “news from the world of Red Bull.” It is the usual slick, vapid type of magazine filled with people and things that you’ve never heard of because you’re a grown up.
In the current issue they have profiles of four people they deem heroes: In the words of the subhed: “If boundaries were meant to be pushed, these men and women were born to push them.” The four are a female Turkish racecar driver, a NASCAR driver, Hugh Hefner and … Wernher von Braun.
The article mainly focuses on the second part of Dr. von Braun’s career when he guided NASA and America’s effort to reach the moon. Scant mention is made of his early years as chief rocketeer for Adolf Hitler. The only mention of his years as a Nazi and SS officer is the opening clause of one sentence
Just seven years after the last of his 1402 V-2 missiles had wreaked death and destruction on London during World War II, this Prussian-born minor aristocrat was informing, engaging and entertaining America with magazine explanations of how man might break free of Earth’s bonds.
After that, this blow job (that’s a technical phrase used by journalists who get stuck with assignments like this) for the deceased goes on ad nauseum with hard-hitting observations like
“He was a PR man’s dream,” says Mike Buckbee, NASA’s public affairs officer throughout its Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes.
No mention whatsoever is made of the N-word, slave labor or death camps or any other of that little unpleasantness from 1933 to 1945. Even NASA, von Braun’s former employer, has the decency to say
I have only one possible explanation for this surreal Sesame Street moment (“One of these things is not like the others…”). Red Bull was founded by one Dietrich Mateschitz, an Austrian. Austria, for those of you who don’t remember, was not conquered by Germany – it invited them in.
As usual, the estimable Tom Lehrer put it best:
(sings)
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown.
"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department," says Wernher von Braun.Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
Collateral Damage 
Hey, the Reds almost got him. He was sitting up there at the missile site, cramming both English and Russian while nursing a broken arm, ready to work for whomever showed up first. And, as Tom Lehrer noted – he was learning Chinese….
ah…. tom lehrer….. i just hope i wasn’t the only 7 year old dancing around to his records at home…. nice to have finally learned who all these people were later in life…
No, Ms. Cat, you certainly were not the only one. I know of at least one other: me. I learned so much from Lehrer as my mother would help me figure out who some of the people were and what he was referring to. Took me the longest time to understand why, at that time, Mass was the only state with “three senators.” RFK was a senator from NY.
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