Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon

[emad]

By Andrew Walker
BBC News


Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost.


The end of World War II saw an intense scramble for Nazi Germany's many technological secrets. The Allies vied to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble of the Thousand Year Reich for themselves, while preventing others from doing the same.

The range of Germany's technical achievement astounded Allied scientific intelligence experts accompanying the invading forces in 1945.


Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology and hardened armour were just some of the groundbreaking technologies developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops and factories, even as Germany was losing the war.

And it was the US and the Soviet Union which, in the first days of the Cold War, found themselves in a race against time to uncover Hitler's scientific secrets.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4443934.stm

[nashville_brook]

1. my favorite part of the article:

Added to this, the large number of still-secret Paperclip documents has led many people, including Nick Cook, Aerospace Consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly, to speculate that the US may have developed even more advanced Nazi technology, including anti-gravity devices, a potential source of vast amounts of free energy.

[GAspnes]

2. cynical realpolitik

David Jones: The Russians put our camera made by *our* German scientists and your film made by *your* German scientists into their satellite made by *their* German scientists.

-- Ice Station Zebra

While I have my doubts about the anti-gravity device, it is certain that WW II Germany searched frantically and almost-effectively for a technological edge to counter the American ability to produce a plane a day, a ship a week, arm and train a million new soldiers a year, year after year.

Huntsville, Alabama was picked for the post-war military base housing von Braun and other Nazi scientists because it's 4 hours from anywhere. Paperclip was cynical and probably illegal but I don't judge too harshly the men who had to choose between closing a possibly fatal technology gap and post-war justice.

[NNadir]

3. German nuclear technology was far less advanced than advertised.

One big problem is that most of the physics involved was defined there as "Jewish Physics." In fact nuclear science was never really taken all that seriously in Nazi Germany.

The "success" of the German rocketeers notwithstanding, I think that the more that science is politicized, the less successful it is, a fact with huge bearing on the modern United States.

I would imagine that the Germans ultimately represented a short cut of a few years for the Americans. Denied access to Von Braun and the other Penemuende war criminals, the Soviets nonetheless beat the United States into space. They may have not maintained their initial advantage over the United States, but no one can argue that they had a very credible and successful aerospace program.