Seizing German Science after the Second World War

By Douglas O’Reagan, oreagan@gmail.com

Following the Second World War, the Allied Powers attempted the largest-scale technology transfer in history, aiming to take "intellectual reparations" from occupied Germany. The most famous case is America’s willingness to take in Werner von Braun and other German rocket scientists and physicians. Some of these physicians had been war criminals, experimenting on prisoners; the rocket scientists at minimum were willing to work in facilities staffed by enslaved laborers. In the rush to retain a monopoly on atomic weapons and gain every possible edge in a possible World War III against the Soviet Union, American policymakers pushed aside any moral qualms and hired anyone who might benefit others.

Less well known is that this story is just one facet of a much larger, international race for German science and technology of all kinds. In the wake of the war, the United States, France, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and to some extent other nations sought out not just rockets and jet engines, but also toy manufacturing, watch design, precision optics, forestry, chemicals, audio equipment, automobile engines, and many, many more areas. It was not even limited to just industrial applications. These nations sought out academic scientists throughout Germany, first to interrogate them about any developments that took place during the war, then to decide whether it was worth the trouble to deny scientific manpower to other nations.

This hunt for intellectual reparations, which happened in different forms in each of the Allied nations as they both cooperated and competed, is the basis for Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War, recently published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. These efforts were massive. The American program screened about 3 billion pages of materials from German factories and research institutes, selecting tens of millions of pages to be processed into reports and sold to US (and international) purchasers. British authorities sent hundreds of investigators to Germany, France aggressively controlled German institutes in its occupation zone, and the Soviet Union famously mass-kidnapped hundreds of German technical personnel in one swoop.

While these programs were far-reaching and ambitious, however, they often ignored an idea J. Robert Oppenheimer summed up in an interview in 1948: “The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.” Historian David Kaiser describes in Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics how in the Cold War era, physicists found it nearly impossible to figure out how to use Feynman diagrams unless they learned in-person from those who had themselves learned in-person. Articles were almost never enough.

Similarly, though the Allies had full control over occupied Germany, over and over again they found that reports and writings weren’t enough. Science consists not just of data and numbers, but also intangible skills, experience, and relationships. Taking German technology successfully meant working closely with Germans over a sustained period. Meanwhile, this sustained contact led to business relationships benefitting both sides. America benefitted in areas it hired German scientists, but West Germany, too, rebounded into once again being an economic and scientific power within a decade of this great technology heist.

Another big lesson from the hunt for German science for today, then, might be that we should be less concerned about leaked USB data drives, and more concerned with building scientific and business relationships across national borders. This means exchanging scientific personnel from undergraduate students through top scholars, and thereby exchanging our technical know-how. Even in the era of McCarthyism, such scientific knowledge exchanges were important diplomatic tools, as Audra Wolfe’s Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science convincingly shows. Recent threats to slash education and scientific visas, and generally limit the movement of people across America’s borders, in contrast, take all the wrong lessons from our history.

oreagan@gmail.com

References

[1] Douglas O’Reagan, Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War. Johns Hopkins University Press: 2019.

[2] David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics. University of Chicago Press: 2005.

[3] Audra Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science. Johns Hopkins University Press: 2018.