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Add Bayer to the list. The names may surprise you and you may still do business with these companies.
If you really want to go down a rabbit hole have a look at who was in charge of those companies at the time and whose descendants later played a part in the leadership of America. It can feel a bit chilling.
It's not uncommon for businesses to play both sides of a lucrative war.
I remember in third grade what a big deal was made of Werner VonBraun and he was our new scientific hero. No one ever told us he had come from Nazi Germany. Must have seemed confusing to those who had actually been in combat.
One thing is being overlooked in this thread. In 1945, the Germans had developed rockets. Not very good ones, and not very accurate, but they were functioning rockets. The US was the only country close to producing a nuclear bomb. True, there was some help from the UK scientists, and we thought the Germans were closer to building a nuke than they were, bu the US was the only country close to testing one.
The Red Scare was already a thing.
With Germany's defeat close at hand, the basic question was who got to take the German rocket scientists. Would it be the USSR, or would it be the United States. If the US hadn't taken the scientists, the Russians sure would have done so.
It turned out to be good for the US military and the US space agency.
One thing is being overlooked in this thread. I 1945, the Germans had developed rockets. Not very good ones, and not very accurate, but they were functioning rockets. The US was the only country close to producing a nuclear bomb. True, there was some help from the UK scientists, and we thought the Germans were closer to building a nuke than they were, bu the US was the only country close to testing one.
The Red Scare was already a thing.
With Germany's defeat close at hand, the basic question was who got to take the German rocket scientists. Would it be the USSR, or would it be the United States. If the US hadn't taken the scientists, the Russians sure would have done so.
It turned out to be good for the US military and the US space agency.
the ussr got the propulsion people
the usa got guidance people..hence ussr gets first good rocket up
I think the U.S. government and its actors did not just behave pragmatically toward those Germans out of a larger shift in political priorities (though that was a big factor), but also because actual exposure to those Germans by default normalized the relationship. You work with someone, talk to someone, you realize you might not be so different after all. That's going to put the relationship on a totally different footing pretty quickly.
Were that the case, we would expect to see that attitude shift affect broad sections of Germans. But it didn't. For example, the rocket scientists were specifically exempted from the rigors of denazification early on. Nazis whose talents lay in, for example, building bridges or ships weren't rounded up and brought stateside en masse, because their talents weren't in critical fields at which they significantly surpassed outshone American knowledge.
In addition, the decisions to take the useful Nazis and put them to work rather than through de-programming wasn't done by American guards chatting with them and discovering that they were just ordinary folk. The order to bring von Braun and his staff to the United States came directly from the United States Secretary of State. It was coldly practical, not the product of some sort of commiseration.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mensaguy
One thing is being overlooked in this thread. I 1945, the Germans had developed rockets. Not very good ones, and not very accurate, but they were functioning rockets. The US was the only country close to producing a nuclear bomb. True, there was some help from the UK scientists, and we thought the Germans were closer to building a nuke than they were, but the US was the only country close to testing one.
A couple of things:
The Allies discovered in November 1944 that the Nazi atomic bomb program had essentially gone nowhere. As they pushed into Alsace, they were entering territory not just conquered by Germany but which had been formally annexed, and they were beginning to round up various German scientists in significant numbers. It was then from interrogating several of them that they realized the reality of the bomb (or lack thereof). This wasn't been happenstance, as there was a group (the Alsos mission) specifically assembled for precisely5 this purpose. They were also looking into the German chemical and biological weapons programs.
Also, the UK must be given their due. They were part of the Manhattan Project. While Manhattan did not formally launch until 1942, nuclear scientists of the two countries began sharing notes in 1940, and the U.S. physicists discovered that the Brits were further down the road and had more technical expertise to bring to the table. The American industrial base and financial wherewithal was indispensable to the atomic bomb project, but British knowledge made the end result of a bomb happen much sooner than it otherwise would have.
And don't forget Canada, as they two were part of Manhattan.
This was common knowledge back in the 1950s even to this schoolboy who was following Disney’s TV show on Space with Von Braun.
The US lagged slightly behind the USSR in developing large ballistic missiles in the 1950s because military applications were not high on Eisenhower’s list like they were for the Russians. Ike was pushed reluctantly into expanding the Space program afterthe big propaganda coup the Soviets pulled off with Sputnik. The Russians had been more “Space travel†aware than the US even prior to WW2.
Of course the 1960s brought about a reversal in the “Space Raceâ€, culminating with the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969.
10 May, 1946 - preparing a captured German V-2 rocket for launch at White Sands, New Mexico:
There is an unintentional bias or two in previous posts.
First, it is well documented that VB and his team actively SOUGHT being picked up by the U.S. forces rather than the Russian ones. It isn't that the U.S. was smarter than the Russians, it isn't that the U.S. made that choice. VB felt that his work would be better appreciated and working and living conditions would be better in the U.S.
Second, the slave labor enforced by the Germans on prisoners of war at the rocket factories was against the GC, but we conveniently forget that the U.S. still has slave labor. Prisoners of the state are, by definition, slaves of the state that are not allowed the rights of free citizens in wages or other compensation, among other things. A prisoner stamping out license plates for free or wages of five cents per hour was every bit as much slave labor as any other slave.
I would love to say that the U.S. treated prisoners of all kinds better, but we have our own horror stories like undocumented graves near mental institutions and prisons. If we treated prisoners better, a lot of that was a matter of degree.
Were that the case, we would expect to see that attitude shift affect broad sections of Germans. But it didn't. For example, the rocket scientists were specifically exempted from the rigors of denazification early on. Nazis whose talents lay in, for example, building bridges or ships weren't rounded up and brought stateside en masse, because their talents weren't in critical fields at which they significantly surpassed outshone American knowledge.
In addition, the decisions to take the useful Nazis and put them to work rather than through de-programming wasn't done by American guards chatting with them and discovering that they were just ordinary folk. The order to bring von Braun and his staff to the United States came directly from the United States Secretary of State. It was coldly practical, not the product of some sort of commiseration.
I'm not talking about the decision to put them to work, which was of course entirely pragmatic and driven by American national interest, but the fact a number of them became very integrated into polite American society. Wernher von Braun wasn't working under a false name in an isolated lab in the desert of New Mexico, he was a celebrated expert and 'pillar of the community'. That wouldn't have been possible if people who worked with him were merely reluctantly accepting his work contribution but otherwise ashamed of the association. The Americans accepted and even embraced those German experts because (1) they were good at their jobs but also (2) they fit seamlessly into polite American society in spite of their unfortunate past associations.
(And of course the very same thing happened with all the German experts and bureaucrats that started to work in the American-occupied zone in West Germany. The occupation forces within a brief time period started to accept the necessity of their contribution, and within a few years started to be actively on friendly terms with them.)
One thing is being overlooked in this thread. In 1945, the Germans had developed rockets. Not very good ones, and not very accurate, but they were functioning rockets. The US was the only country close to producing a nuclear bomb. True, there was some help from the UK scientists, and we thought the Germans were closer to building a nuke than they were, bu the US was the only country close to testing one.
The Red Scare was already a thing.
With Germany's defeat close at hand, the basic question was who got to take the German rocket scientists. Would it be the USSR, or would it be the United States. If the US hadn't taken the scientists, the Russians sure would have done so.
It turned out to be good for the US military and the US space agency.
The Russians did. As did the Brits.
The US procured the cream of the crop, but there were plenty of others to scoop up. And they were. It was German scientists who helped the Soviets build their own atomic bomb.
And it hardly stopped there.
Some years ago, 60 Minutes did a story on how many former Nazis were happily residing in ... Canada. They were quietly brought over because they had anti-Communist credentials. A Canadian journalist discovered it and found most of them listed in the phone book.
Von Braun was one thing, but most of the West dealt with some very unsavory characters.
Is not Paperclip fairly well known, if not by name then at least by substance?
That it surprises anyone is probably due to the misunderstood nature of World War II. That conflict was not fought to eradicate Nazism. Eliminating the Nazi government was the overriding goal of the war in Europe, not because of its Nazi nature but because it was so destabilizing and could not be convinced to stop invading other countries through normal political means, defensive postures, and offensive threats. What the Nazis did in Germany, including annexed areas before the outbreak of war, was considered abhorrent - but not worth the cost of military intervention. The war was not fought by the United States to save Poland or to stop the Nazis from slaughtering Jews and others. It was fought to eliminate the German threat to American interests.
Once this was accomplished, Nazi party members that had useful skills were potential assets. In an act of realpolitik, it was coldly weighed whether holding someone like Wernher von Braun to account for his actions was more or less practical than utilizing his talents for American ends. And von Braun's indifference to and/or willing embrace of slave labor possessed enough plausible deniability that his co-opting wasn't excessively problematic from a public relations point of view. The Soviets did the same thing, but being an authoritarian regime were able to hide it from their own people and conceal the details from international scrutiny.
None of this is a criticism of Paperclip or the U.S. motivation behind the war, by the way.
Right but it is a bit of an understatement to describe the reason for the US entrance into the war as a "German threat to American interests". In fact it was a immediate German threat to the sovereignty all of the Western world.
Hitler would never have stopped with Britain. Once he controlled all of Europe the effort to develop advanced weapons would have begun in earnest. Atomics were just in the preliminary research phase under Heisenberg during the War, but once all of Europe was part of the Third Reich, that research would have begun in earnest. With some of the best engineers and scientists in the world, Germany would have quickly solved that little physics problem.
There is zero doubt that megalomaniac Hitler would have used the bomb as an offensive weapon to make quick work of the USA. Just as we used it as a defensive weapon to make quick work of Japan.
Seems like rolling out the red carpet for the German scientists and engineers was the smartest thing we could have done at the time.
Last edited by GearHeadDave; 05-31-2021 at 07:52 PM..
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