Theft of Nazi Scientific Research

When World war II ended, America's elite determined that the United States would not lapse back into it's prewar depressed state, but rather would revitalize its economy and have a first-class military and industrial establishment. To this end, Germany's advanced military hardware, aeronautical and industrial secrets would simply be confiscated and transplanted in America.

And, then some idiot will say, "Yeah, but the United States invented the Atom Bomb - we weren't that backward!"

Do names like Einstein and Oppenheimer sound like American names to you assholes?

In August 1945, President Harry Truman, acting under the adage that "might makes right" issued Executive Order 9604 ordering the release and distribution of confiscated German scientific and industrial information (technologies, inventions, methods, processes, equipment etc.) to the U.S. civilian economy. It was literally a license to steal.

Stealing is nothing new to American capitalists - they stole the whole country from the Indians! And, then there is Bill Gates who bought DOS (the basis for Windows) from a drunk for $2000. God forbid, that an American capitalist would actually do any work.

President Truman's Executive Order 9604 provided for: "The release and dissemination of certain scientific and industrial information heretofore or hereafter obtained from the enemy, including all information concerning scientific, industrial and technological processes, inventions, methods, devices, improvements and advances heretofore or hereafter obtained by any department or agency of this government in enemy countries regardless of its origin, or in liberated areas if such information is of enemy origin or has been acquired or appropriated by the enemy."

As the American military began to occupy Germany, they initially concentrated on locating and securing advanced German military hardware used in the war. In the summer of 1944 the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff created military-civilian teams, called the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee (JIOC), which was to follow the invading armies and uncover Germany's military, scientific and industrial assets. "Field Intelligence Agencies, technical" units (FIAT units) scoured the countryside for German economic assets. While the U.S. military had no qualms about confiscating German military hardware, they hesitated and eventually refused to engage in the wholesale seizure of German commercial and industrial assets, considering such action not within their authority. More than a few honorable U.S. Army officers, led by Gen. Lucius D. Clay, interceded with civilian occupation policymakers on behalf of the Germans to stop the looting.

Concerning the legality of the U.S. confiscations of German property, William G. Downey, chief of the Army's International Law Branch in the Judge Advocate General's Office, quoting extensively from The Hague Convention rules on the seizure of private enemy property, wrote: "It is a generally recognized principle of the international law of war that enemy private property may not be seized unless it is susceptible to direct military use. An army of occupation can only take possession...of property belonging to the state."

The theft of intellectual property is not new, but the extent and ruthlessness of what the "wannabe" superpowers did in Germany from 1945 to 1948 was unprecedented. The United States and the Soviet Union literally stole the entire extant store of German patents, designs, inventions and trademarks. Germans who were not forthcoming in informing the U.S. Occupation Forces of the existence and location of such records could be imprisoned, punished and even threatened with death for "insufficient reporting." To ensure that the Allies would have an insurmountable head start in exploiting the patents, the Germans were even forbidden to use or refer to their own inventions after they were confiscated. The German Patent Office was closed by the Allies and not reopened for several years. When it did reopen, the first number assigned was 800,001, indicating that some 800,000 original patents had been looted by the Allies. As a result, in the immediate postwar years, with Germany prostrate and robbed of its intellectual property, America and Russia soon emerged as the two superpowers in a bipolar world.

Not bad for two backward nations.

Although Americans today find it hard to believe that this country was once a laggard nation in science and industrial innovations, it was, until the hostilities broke out in late 1941. America under President Franklin Roosevelt had failed to pull the country out of the doldrums of the depression, and while the economy, after having been put on a wartime basis, was unsurpassed in its volume of production, its products, including wartime hardware, were inferior to those of the German war machine. Mass production-quantity rather than quality-characterized American manufacturing.

Even during the war the United States was not particularly noted for major breakthroughs in pure science or innovative technologies. The National Science Foundation brought this deficit in American capabilities sharply to the attention of the government in a 1946 report indicating, among other factors, that up to that date the United States had been the home of only four Nobel Prize winners in chemistry as compared to 37 recipients in Europe, eight U.S. winners in Physics to 39 in Europe, and six in medicine, to 37 in Europe. Most of these prizes were awarded to Germans and Austrians.

While military analysts the world over now recognize the superiority of German World War II hardware, few, however, are aware that German scientists had done much of the basic scientific pioneer work in the development of many postwar industrial technologies and products for civilian use. In consumer goods and medical advances, Germans under National Socialism were enjoying color TV and color photography a decade before the American public could buy it's first black-and-white sets. The Nazi government had modernized the road system in Germany in the 1930s with the Autobahn, and Volkswagen had begun to produce the 'Beetle' so that all citizens could afford to own an automobile. It was not until the 1950s, under President Eisenhower, that the United States undertook the construction of a modern highway system.

German scientists established a link between smoking and cancer in the 1930s, but fierce resistance of the American tobacco companies prevented the American people from having access to this knowledge until 20 years after its discovery. They studied the effects of positively and negatively ionized air on health conditions, developed performance-enhancing drugs, and introduced other innovative and therapeutic treatments that are common practice today everywhere. During the war Germans had also developed a synthetic blood plasma (capain), a blood liquid substitute (periston), and synthetic penicillin, 'substitute 3065.'

The revolutionary birth control pill, whose discovery was announced in the United States in 1951, also had its origins in investigations conducted in the laboratories of Gottingen University, Germany, in the 1940s. Chemist Carl Dierassi, who emigrated from Vienna to America shortly before the war, worked with pharmacologists Gregori Pincus and John Rock to introduce 'Enovid' on the American market, protected by a U.S. patent, in the 1960s.

Germany, like Japan, was and remains one of the 'have-not' nations, small in size and wanting in natural resources. The development of synthetic (ersatz) products of all kinds was essential to German existence, especially in wartime. Necessity being the mother of invention, German chemists undertook to provide substitutes for Mother Nature's shortcomings.

One of the largest hauls of classified information harvested by the Allies came from laboratories and plants of IG Farben, a syndicate with close American ties that held an almost complete monopoly on chemical production. Chemistry of course was the foundation for the creation of most synthetics. The enormous IG Farben Building in Frankfurt, which housed records of estimable value, was 'miraculously' spared during World War II bombing orgy, proving that better bombing accuracy was possible if the Allies had wished it. The vaults of the Farben Building contained secret industrial information on, among others, liquid and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics, drugs and dyes. Secret formulas were obtained for over 50,000 dyes, many faster and better than those in the democracies.

Several U.S. Army officers stationed in the Farben Building after the war commented that the value of the files and records confiscated would alone have been sufficient to finance the war.

In the digital world, for example, German prewar and wartime scientists had been at the cutting edge of important developments, from the quartz clock, semiconductors, silicon technology and transistors to the first computer. Among others, German researchers Herbert F. Matere and Heinrich Welker, working with Zeiss, Siemans and the Kaiser Willhelm Institute for Silicate Research, were the first to develop the process for the industrial production of integrated circuits and transistors.

The culmination of these advances in solid-state physics and digital instrumentation in Nazi Germany was the wartime development of a pioneer computer, the Z4. Engineers Konrad Zuse and Helmut Schreyer in Berlin developed these earliest computers. Zuse's laboratory and earlier models of his computer, dating from 1937, were destroyed in bombing raids during the Battle of Berlin, but in the immediate postwar era Zuse was able to rebuild a fully operational Z4 by 1949, several months before the debut of the U.S. Eniac. Zuse is also credited with having developed the first programmable computer language, 'Plankalkul.'

Of foremost importance to all industrial nations, and to Germany in particular for the war, was the need for a reliable source of energy to power the factories, heat the homes, and fuel the ships, planes and vehicles of the nations.

Germany possessed coal but not oil. German chemists met the challenge quickly and successfully through the development of both the Fischer-Topische and the hydrogenation methods of converting (liquefying) coal into oil and, from the oil, to make lubricants and gasoline. In the course of the war these plants were gradually being moved underground to protect them from bombing. After the war the Allies confiscated all patents and records on the design and operation of the hydrogenation and Fischer-Topische plants and forbade the Germans from using existing plants or developing new ones, making them dependent on imported oil. For example, 10% of Marshall Plan had to be used to buy American oil.

Germany is also said to have invented a distillation process for the separation of gasoline from oil by the use of audible frequency vibrations. Self-sufficiency in power generation is essential to the sovereignty and independence of all nations. So important is the power factor that the planned Berlin_Baghdad-Basra railroad is said to have been as decisive for the British declaration of war against Germany in World War I as the development of the Fischer-Topische and hydrogenation processes in Germany was for the British declaration of war in World War II. As long as Britain and France controlled the Near East oil fields, Germany would never be granted free access, nor would the Allies want to see Germany gain oil independence through its newly developed conversion processes.

In the matter of nuclear power, German scientists in Berlin were making feasibility studies of the possible uses of nuclear energy to propel ships and submarines as early as 1941. Moreover, the possibilities of employing nuclear reactors to power land vehicles were also being explored.

To list just a few of the many technological advances of consumer interest, German industry developed synthetic mica, synthetic sapphires, Diesel engines, plastics, rayon-weaving machines, the cold-extrusion process, UV milk pasteurization, fruit juice sterilization without heat, food preservation techniques, magnetic tape, infrared night vision aids, laser guidance and so on. The patents, test models, and prototypes of all of the above were simply taken and exploited by their new proprietors.

By the time the war ended, Germany had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of development and production as well as every conceivable experimental and operational guidance and triggering systems (radar, radio, wire, continuous radio waves, acoustic, infrared, light beams, and magnetics) for its war effort. The 'rocket' that launched the United States into superpower realm was German. The Soviet Union also copied the German weaponry but largely ignored consumer products.

(Gee I can't believe it's not butter.)

It is of course impossible to determine exactly how much the confiscation, sale, and the industrial exploitation of the German patents enriched the United States and Israel in dollars. Prof. John Gimbel, in his book Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, estimates the 'intellectual reparations' taken by the U.S. and the UK alone amounted to about $10 billion.

In 1952 the publisher Herbert Grabert ventured an estimate of $30 billion. Converted into 2008 dollars these estimates would amount to hundreds of billions. If the loot taken by the Soviet Union were also taken into account, the sum would likely approach $1 trillion. An infusion of this amount into the U.S. economy over a period of years easily explains U.S. postwar prosperity.

In other words, everything you think you know is bullshit.

Who is on top today?

China and (you guessed it) Germany. History has seen successive countries for a time enjoy a leading position in world power, only to see the baton pass on to competing nations. American capitalism is famous for ignoring the fact that future dominance is based on education and research. They believe that only the elite should be educated. We are witnessing the results of this stupidity today. China is currently in the best position to overtake the United States in that the Chinese have talent, the drive, the geography and most importantly, thanks to globalization, the wealth (in U.S. dollars) to buy whatever they require.

In order to ensure its survival in the world of tomorrow, the United States will have to maintain an innovative scientific, engineering and technological base.

And, that's the Truth!