lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on May 13, 2006 17:39:56 GMT -4
William Torbitt is the pseudonymous author of Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970). When the book was published the author claimed he was a lawyer working in the southwestern part of the United States. […] In Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal Torbitt claims that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a "fascist cabal... who planned to lay the blame on honest right-wing conservatives, if their first ploy, to lay the blame on Oswald and the Communists, was not bought." Torbitt argues that a Swiss Corporation named Permindex engineered the assassination. Also involved included Defense Industrial Security Command, organized by J. Edgar Hoover and William Sullivan. Torbitt claims that DISC agents included Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby with Louis M. Bloomfield of Montreal, Canada in charge. According to the author Permindex was comprised of: (1) Solidarists, an Eastern European exile organization. (2) American Council of Christian Churches led by Haroldson L. Hunt. (3) Free Cuba Committee headed by Carlos Prio Socarras. (4) The Syndicate headed by Clifford Jones, ex-lieutenant governor of Nevada. This group also included Bobby Baker, George Smathers, Roy Cohn, Fred Black and Lewis McWillie. (5) Security Division of NASA headed by Wernher von Braun. According to Torbitt, others involved in the assassination included Lyndon B. Johnson, Walter Jenkins, Fred Korth, John Connally, William Seymour, Robert McKeown, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Lee Harvey Oswald, Ruth Paine, Michael Paine, Gordon Novel, and Clint Murchison. www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKtorbitt.htm
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Post by twinstead on May 13, 2006 21:21:56 GMT -4
my goodness. It's not so often I get to see a masterpiece of conjecture and non sequiturs like this.
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Post by sts60 on May 15, 2006 23:32:15 GMT -4
Torbitt argues that a Swiss Corporation named Permindex engineered the assassination. Also involved included Defense Industrial Security Command, organized by J. Edgar Hoover and William Sullivan. Torbitt claims that DISC agents included Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby with Louis M. Bloomfield of Montreal, Canada in charge.
According to the author Permindex was comprised of: (1) Solidarists, an Eastern European exile organization. (2) American Council of Christian Churches led by Haroldson L. Hunt. (3) Free Cuba Committee headed by Carlos Prio Socarras. (4) The Syndicate headed by Clifford Jones, ex-lieutenant governor of Nevada. This group also included Bobby Baker, George Smathers, Roy Cohn, Fred Black and Lewis McWillie. (5) Security Division of NASA headed by Wernher von Braun.
According to Torbitt, others involved in the assassination included Lyndon B. Johnson, Walter Jenkins, Fred Korth, John Connally, William Seymour, Robert McKeown, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Lee Harvey Oswald, Ruth Paine, Michael Paine, Gordon Novel, and Clint Murchison.
Hey! I want in too! (Raises hand) I was in on the assassination! (Youngest member of the team, at, oh, -5 months.)
I mean, everybody else was in on it. I felt left out.
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Post by PhantomWolf on May 16, 2006 2:31:00 GMT -4
I just wanted to know when he resigned from the position of Head Rocket Designer and become the Head of Security. Seems a demotion to me. He must have been a busy man though, I mean between designing rockets, fixing the F-1 engines, collecting moonrocks from Antartica and Canada, assassinating JFK. It's a miracle he got anything done. No wonder he had to single handedly hoax Apollo too.
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Post by asdf on Jun 18, 2006 21:33:23 GMT -4
Wasn't von Braun and his team Nazis from WW11 brought to the states and given asylum and lots of green. That's probably the start of this whole conspiracy.
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Post by Halcyon Dayz, FCD on Jun 19, 2006 2:58:58 GMT -4
Von Braun only cared about his rockets. He never showed any sign of being politically motivated. Him being an SS-officer was just opportunistic. Him being involved in a plot to kill Hitler would still be out of character, but a lot more believable. But he would have told us about it. Wasn't von Braun and his team Nazis from WW11 brought to the states and given asylum and lots of green. That's probably the start of this whole conspiracy. You have just heard about this theory, no evidence has been presented, and you already buy it hook, line and sinker? Don't you have any critical thinking skills whatsoever? If written without forenames it is capitalised as Von Braun. Although, knowing the German infatuation with titles, they no doubt used to address him as "Herr Sturmbannführer Dr. Freiherr von Braun".
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Post by PhantomWolf on Jun 19, 2006 3:45:48 GMT -4
Von Braun only cared about his rockets.
He was arrested and questioned because he was too interested in his rockets and not interested enough in doing what the Nazi's wanted him to do.
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Post by 3onthetree on Jun 19, 2006 6:08:04 GMT -4
For the record.
Arrest by the Nazi regime
There are three different versions of von Braun's arrest. André Sellier, a French historian and survivor of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, offers as good an explanation as any. Himmler called von Braun, an SS officer, to come to his Hochwald HQ in East Prussia sometime in February 1944. To increase his power-base within the Nazi régime, Heinrich Himmler was conspiring to use Kammler to wrest control of all German armament programs, including the V-2 program at Peenemünde. He therefore recommended that von Braun work more closely with Kammler to solve the problems of the V-2, but von Braun claimed to have replied that the problems were merely technical and he was confident that they would be solved with Dornberger's assistance.
Apparently von Braun had been under SD surveillance since October 1943 and a report on him and his colleagues Riedel and Gröttrup was being prepared. In it von Braun and his colleagues were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening that they were not working on a spaceship and that they felt the war was not going well (a 'defeatist' attitude). A young female dentist later denounced them for their comments and, combined with Himmler's false charges that von Braun was a Communist sympathizer and had attempted to sabotage the V-2 program, this led to his arrest. Kammler, highly dedicated to Himmler, was also instrumental in von Braun's arrest by the Gestapo.
The unsuspecting von Braun was arrested and on March 22 (or March 14[3]) 1944 and was taken to a Gestapo cell in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), where he was imprisoned for two weeks without knowing the charges leveled against him. It was only through the Abwehr in Berlin that Dornberger was able to obtain von Braun's conditional release and Albert Speer, Reichsminister for Munitions and War Production, convinced Hitler to release von Braun so that the V-2 program could continue
So he was denounced, Quite common in Nazi Germany.
However Von Braun claims to have only worn his SS uniform once yet he was promoted three times from SS-Untersturmführer through to SS-Sturmbannführer. Its pretty hard to imagine someone being promoted three times while refusing to play dressup in the scary deathshead uniform.
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lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on Jun 19, 2006 15:17:09 GMT -4
ASDF did bring up a legitimate point though, Von Braun’s cooperation with the Nazi regime what ever motivated it is a black mark upon the man. He was obsessed with rockets and best case scenario is that he collaborated with a regime that murdered 10 – 20 million people in death camps and initiated a war that killed millions more in order to pursue his dream of building one. As part of this collaboration he aided the war effort of that regime and utilized slave labor. A historian estimated that ‘about 10,000 of the prisoners died of malnutrition and disease.’ In a letter he discussed choosing the slaves. www.space.com/news/spacehistory/vonbraun_020813.html He admitted to visiting the camps and being aware of the conditions. history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/excerpts.html According to a source quoted in Wikipedia "[...] the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun also saw everything that went on every day. When they walked along the corridors, they saw the prisoners' drudgery, their exhausting work and their ordeal. During his frequent attendance in Dora, Prof. Wernher von Braun never once protested against this cruelty and brutality." and "On a little area beside the clinic shack you could see piles of prisoners every day who had not survived the workload and had been tortured to death by the vindictive guards. [...] But Prof. Wernher von Braun just walked past them, so close that he almost touched the bodies." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_Von_Braun Reuters spoke to several camp survivors, one of whom compared it to hell. www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/buchenwald/press/reuters-040395.html I know to most buffs of the space program he is a hero but I feel he deserves to be condemned for his Nazi past more than praised for his contributions to space exploration. Many German intellectuals chose to leave Germany during Hitler’s reign he chose to say and cooperate with the Nazis and use concentration camp slave laborers.
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Post by PeterB on Jun 20, 2006 19:25:25 GMT -4
Wasn't von Braun and his team Nazis from WW11 brought to the states and given asylum and lots of green. That's probably the start of this whole conspiracy. I don't know whether they were given a lot of money, but they certainly were given a lot of opportunity to launch rockets. Yes, Operation Paperclip is one of the less savoury aspects of American policy with regard to Germany, but it's not as though they were alone in this. After all, the Soviets scoured what was left of Peenemunde for material and engineers. Their German engineers played a similar role in the development of Soviet rocket technology as the Americans' Germans. But to say that the Moon Hoax originates with Operation Paperclip is absurd. Are you now going to tie President Truman into the conspiracy?
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lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on Jun 20, 2006 21:49:03 GMT -4
Now to take the thread totally off topic I ask, 'could the US rocket program have advanced as quickly as it did WITHOUT von Braun and the other Germans? Please elaborate.
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Post by 3onthetree on Jun 21, 2006 1:42:24 GMT -4
But weren't they (The Soviets) supposed to be the bad guys. I can't speak for anyone else but for me thats when the Lies started, with Von Braun. Maybe thats where they ended too who knows. Thats the trouble with telling fibs, no one can tell when you stop.
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Post by Jason Thompson on Jun 21, 2006 7:10:46 GMT -4
Its pretty hard to imagine someone being promoted three times while refusing to play dressup in the scary deathshead uniform.
Even in the middle of a war? They were a little busy at the time.
I see little reason for von Braun to have lied about the number of times he wore his uniform when his promotions would be a matter of record anyway. Since he could not hope to conceal his rank in the SS, why would he bother to lie about the number of times he wore the uniform?
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Post by Jason Thompson on Jun 21, 2006 7:18:07 GMT -4
Many German intellectuals chose to leave Germany during Hitler’s reign he chose to say and cooperate with the Nazis and use concentration camp slave laborers.
Most of those intellectuals left Germany before war broke out. By the time von Braun was using slave labour to build his rockets, leaving wasn't really an option for someone in his position. He only got out at the end because the entire country was collapsing under a combined Allied assault from all sides and there happened to be some conveniently close American forces for his team to surrender to. What do you think his chances of getting out of Germany before then were? At the time most of Europe was under Axis occupation, and his facility was almost smack in the middle of it.
I don't want to defend his actions too much, but his later life indicates he was certainly not active in Nazi ideology, and he gained the respect and friendship of a large number of people. I think that counts for far more in the long run than the circumstances he found himself in under Nazi rule.
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lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on Jun 21, 2006 14:07:25 GMT -4
Many German intellectuals chose to leave Germany during Hitler’s reign he chose to say and cooperate with the Nazis and use concentration camp slave laborers.Most of those intellectuals left Germany before war broke out. By the time von Braun was using slave labour to build his rockets, leaving wasn't really an option for someone in his position… But he chose to stay before the war broke out. The Nazi regime revealed it colors from the very beginning actually even before it took power. With the Brown Shirts beating Jews, Leftists, Gays, Slavs etc no one in Germany was under any illusions about the Nazis. Could he have left during the war if he wanted to? It probably would not have been easy, perhaps he could have invented an excuse to visit Sweden or another neutral country. AFAIK there are no signs he wanted to leave, I never heard him claim that he did. I imagine if it was true he would have said so. There are also no signs he in anyway objected to the treatment of the prisoners or did anything to improve it. Got away from whom? I’ve seen no evidence he was in danger of being detained by the German’s again. He got out because of Operation Paperclip. He should at least have been detained, questioned and investigated for his role in crimes against humanity. How so? He must have been aware that his past was a sensitive issue, whether he felt that way or not it would not have made sense for him to spout Nazi like ideology while in the US. Did he ever speak out against what the Nazis had done? Did he ever express any regret for having cooperated with them? Perhaps his friends were like him and the people behind Operation Paperclip and felt the “ends justified the means”. Who were his friends? During the early Cold War era there were a lot of Rightwing anti-Semitic racists in the US esp. in the Deep South and esp. in military circles. I never said I thought Von Braun was a Nazi ideologue only that he chose to cooperate with the Nazis in pursuit of his dream and he did not leave when he had the chance. He did his job well enough to have been promoted three times. In the Human Factor Graham Greene posed an interesting moral question, who is worse a person who believes in the ideology of an immoral regime or a person who doesn’t believe in it but cooperates because it is advantageous or convenient for them? Perhaps to a certain degree he was worse that Hitler and Goring etc, they believed in what they were doing he cooperated with them because it was advantageous for him. I still disagree it was a situation he found himself in by his own choosing. Jason you obviously know more about his life than I do, convince me that your view of him is correct.
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