Image: Adapted from energiaproductions/YouTube "But von Braun brought the liquid-fueled rocket to life, and in what for the time was huge scale." "Yes, in the interwar period we had had Robert Goddard ," remarked Rafeeq McGiveron, a history and literature academic who has written about Rocket Ship Galileo. America was "lucky enough" to snap up Wernher von Braun, the man credited with inventing the V2, and his hardware would go on to aid the first American in space. After the war, countries scrambled to get their hands on it. An estimate says that over 2,700 people in Britain were killed when these missiles were launched at the country during in the 1940s. Nazi Germany played a huge part in launching the race to space thanks to the V2 rocket, which describes as "awesome" and the BBC called "a terror weapon." The missile had the capability to reach more than 50 miles above the Earth, virtually making it the first space rocket. "The Nazis are the only real-world enemy of the US widely perceived to have been a technological equal or even a technological superior." "The received American narrative of every conflict from the Spanish-American war through the Iraq and Afghan Wars emphasizes our superior (even science-fictional-for-the-time) technology," Van Riper said in an email. Before we were in a race with the USSR to get to space in the 1950s, we were in competition with other countries to get rocket technology from Germany. Bowdoin Van Riper, who co-edited the book Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield. The greatest threat for the United States during the war was the Nazis' penchant for technology and science, said historian A. It might not have happened but it could have happened. Not in a "playing mahjong on the Moon" kind of way, but in drawing upon societal fears of the group's technological capabilities and the post-war aftermath. The "space Nazis" motif is specifically common, though, because it's realistic and definitively world-ending. Considering the atrocities of World War II occurred less than a century ago, it's an easy and effective emotional pull. It's basic storytelling, and accessible to readers, especially since the Nazis are some of history's most terrifying and notorious villains. Some of these stories are more realistic than others, but all play upon alternate histories. "…they reinforce the suspicion that we may not be finished with the Nazis, or that they may not be finished with us." The manga The Legend of Koizumi has the prime minister of Japan battling Hitler on the Moon in a game of mahjong. The 2014 video game Wolfenstein: The New Order borrows heavily from Dick's work in terms of narrative and features an entire level where you infiltrate a moon base. Dick, the Nazis, having won WWII, have colonized Mars and Venus. In The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. One of the earliest instances of this trope is in Rocket Ship Galileo, a 1947 young adult novel by Robert Heinlein, which features three teenagers who travel to the moon and discover a secret Nazi base. People love putting Nazis in space, especially when it comes to science fiction.
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