As college basketball season comes to a close, Jacksonville State and Liberty play for a Conference USA title and a trip to March Madness on Saturday night. The championship game, like the entire CUSA Men’s Basketball Tournament, will take place at Propst Arena in Huntsville, Alabama.
Propst Arena is located inside of the Von Braun Center, which is named after an actual Nazi.
I was previously unaware of this bizarre college basketball tie to World War II prior to this week. Now that I know, I will never forget. And I would imagine that it will be the same for you from this point forward!
Jacksonville State and Liberty finished the regular season as the top-two seeds in the Conference USA so one of the two best teams will represent the conference at the NCAA Tournament. However, that is not the focus of this article so I digress.
All nine CUSA Tournament games were played at the Von Braun Center from Tuesday to Saturday. The Von Braun Center is named after Wernher von Braun. Wernher von Braun was a German-American rocket scientist who lived from 1912 to 1977.
Conference USA played its men’s basketball tournament at an arena named after a former Nazi.
Although von Braun ultimately served in a high-ranking role for the United States Army, he got his start for Nazi Germany. The German Army caught wind of a budding rocket scientist at the Berlin Institute of Technology and recruited him to join them in 1932. Von Braun continued his guided missile work for the Nazi regime throughout World War II, and met with Adolf Hitler more than once. In fact, he was formally decorated by the führer on two separate occasions, including being awarded the Iron Cross.
Wernher von Braun also engaged in the brutal treatment of prisoners at concentration camps, allegedly. Former Buchenwald inmate Adam Cabala wrote:
… also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof. Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his frequent stays at Dora. Even the aspect of corpses did not touch him: On a small area near the ambulance shed, inmates tortured to death by slave labor and the terror of the overseers were piling up daily. But, Prof. Wernher von Braun passed them so close that he was almost touching the corpses.
— Adam Cabala, via Das Konzentrationslager Mittelbau Dora: Ein historischer Abriss
Von Braun denied any knowledge of such behavior. I find that hard to believe.
Nevertheless, U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. later approved the transfer of Wernher von Braun and his specialists to the United States in 1945. He played a key role in the U.S. Space program after World War II, including the moon landing in 1969. His role as the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center helped to establish the foundation for United States dominance in space exploration. It was quite the redemption arc at the tail end.
Huntsville is known as ‘Rocket City’ because of its pivotal role in the development of rockets alongside NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Thus, its main civic center was named after a pivotal figure in space exploration. The Wernher Von Braun Civic Center opened in 1975. It hosted the Conference USA men’s basketball tournament this week.
Even though von Braun came around in his later years, that does not change his past. Liberty or Jacksonville State will be crowned as the conference champion at a stadium named after a former Nazi.