That’s from the Tom Lehrer song, actually.
And since a good number of German scientists did manage to escape and not work for the Nazi war machine, the ones who stayed are fair targets.
“That’s from the Tom Lehrer song, actually.”
Tom Lehrer used the faked quote after Mort Safer used it in his comedies before 1960. Before Mort Safer used the fictional quotation, various forms of the fictional quotation were used in private jokes.
“And since a good number of German scientists did manage to escape and not work for the Nazi war machine, the ones who stayed are fair targets.”
Your headlong fanaticism to find fault is ignoring the historical realities. Only a small fraction of the German scientists, about 1,500, escaped the NAZI regime; and they were nearly all Jews who needed special assistance to evacuate and emigrate by foreigners in 1933. Only some 70,000 Jews succeeded escaping before the war, and many of them were later taken captive in the conquered nations during the war and killed. Wernher von Braun’s family was not Jewish, so they were unlikely to be eligible for immigrant visas. If Wernher von Braun fled Germany by himself, his family and colleagues not eligible for immigration visas were certain to be punished by imprisonment in the concentration camps or worse.
Many of the Germans who fled Germany to Britain were later imprisoned in an internment camp on the Isle of Man during the war. While imprisoned in these internment camps, they were at risk of being assassinated by NAZIs imprisoned with them.
“the ones who stayed are fair targets.”
To understand how illogical and offensive that remark is just consider how you are no less a fair target for choosing to stay in a nation where the government is making it lawful for millions of lives to be aborted in abortion clinics. Why have you not emigrated to another nation just as you insist Wernher von Braun should have done to avoid being “a fair target”?