I think we have reached peak Germanophilia. I met a guy recently who thought, or rather just assumed, that rocket pioneer Robert Goddard was a German. I said no, Goddard was an American. He said, “Well, sure, he was nationalized after they brought him here in Operation Paperclip.”
Er, no, Goddard was born in Worcester Massachusetts in 1882 and actually died just before the end of World War ll.
Among other things, Goddard flew a gimballed nozzle rocket in 1937, a technology that Wernher von Braun and his team did not master and apply until they had been in the US for 10 years.
How is it that pop culturists know all about von Braun and Paperclip but have never heard of Goddard or Frank Malina or Jack Parsons or Hsue-Shen Tsien? Their work at JPL (another historical secret) led to such crucial technologies as high impulse solid and hypergolic (self igniting) propellants that von Braun had never seen before Paperclip brought him to this country.
I am of course aware of the German rocket engineers and their contributions. Giving them exclusive credit for the US space program, as conformist pop culture does, is not historically accurate and denigrates the achievements of many many others and indirectly reinforces notions of genetic superiority.

It is propaganda, pure but not so simple since it seems to serve several conflicting agendas at once. It is popular with those who want to smear the space program as the work of Nazi criminals as well as to Nazis themselves who want to trumpet their own alleged superiority, and to more benign but still arrogant and jingoistic commercial operations.
I get a little annoyed hearing a lecture about “superior German engineering” from someone who doesn’t know how a garage door opener works.