When was that? Hass completed his PhD at the Humboldt University in Berlin in Zoology and was tied-up with his last expedition film until war's end. At the beginning of the War he wasn't drafted into the Wehrmacht because he suffered from vascular disease in his feet.
He served in the Kriegsmarine from 1943 until the end of the war. He pioneered a diving program utilised for infiltrating allied ports and sabotaging ships as well as for intel gathering. He worked with Drager in the development of the O2 rebreather for this purpose and designed all the photo gear as well. The knowledge gained during this time resulted in the Rolleimarin housing a few years after the war.
Contrary to the story spun in later years, he was not just some poor Austrian chump that got drafted at gunpoint by the Nazi war machine. By 1943 he was fairly famous, financially stable, and somewhat influential. Due to his film making career, he was also able to travel freely, which was not the case for most Germans during the war. He could have easily avoided doing this or simply left Germany.
In my book, he's in the same company as Wernrer von Braun and other Nazis that through one skill or another successfully reinvented themselves after the war. Sure, he was no war criminal... I'm not saying he should have been hung at Nurenberg... but let's at least call a spade a spade.
His conservation record was also quite atrocious even by the (lack of?) standards of the day. Sure, contemporaries like Custeau also commited "atrocities" like using oceanic whitetips for rifle target practice after baiting them to the surface... but at least Custeau didn't wait until his 80s to embrace a conservationist philosophy whose necessity became self-evident decades earlier.
Wartime politics aside, Mr Hass lived a life of unabated exploitation of our oceans and only late in his life did he "come about" -- Of course, he gets credit for "seeing the light" at all, but overall, IMHO, this man was no hero to our marine environments.
