Posted 1:05 PM by Gene

"Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun...." We forget a lot of Nazis helped us win the space race, and as the sordid tale of the great rocket scientist informs us not all of them were honorable. But at least some like Ernst Stuhlinger did have second thoughts:

In a 1995 article for The Huntsville Times, Stuhlinger called the Nazi era "extremely deplorable" and said he and other German rocket engineers were working with an eye toward spaceflight, not weapons, at the end of the war.

"Yes, we did work on improved guidance systems, but late in 1944 we were convinced that the war would be over before new systems could be used on military rockets. However, we were convinced that somehow our work would find application in future rockets that would not aim at London, but at the moon," Stuhlinger wrote.

It might be easy to dismiss these German eggheads for apologizing after the fact, but in the end they did win us a signal victory over Communism, a victory Hitler with his brute force of evil could never achieve.