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A lenghty but very interesting piece of writting.
Theft of German Scientific Research Fueled Post-War Technology Boom
"TO THE VICTORS BELONG THE SPOILS" is an American saying (attributed to Andrew Jackson) and, regrettably, an occasional American practice as it was in the case of "the Great Patent Heist of 1946." It was made official policy in World War II by President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9604, also known as the "License to Steal," which permitted agents of the U.S. government to execute the greatest robbery in world history: the theft of German intellectual (scientific) property. What technology the Americans and Soviets stole has, in fact, fueled some of the greatest scientific advances of the modern era.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Daniel W. Michaels
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, almost three-quarters of a century after World War II, as the fear of arrest and punishment for denying the received version of the causes and consequences of World War II as established by the victorious Allies diminishes, more and more Germans are investigating Allied behavior before, during and after the war. Aside from the "holocaust," which remains immune from critical studies, almost any aspect of the war, however embarrassing to the victors (e.g., the strategic bombing campaign), may now be studied without fear of retribution.
In this new spirit, Friedrich Georg has published a study of Allied postwar policy regarding the disposition of German intellectual property, especially the modern and futuristic patents of Nazi Germany. Georg finds that the Allies, chiefly the Americans and the Soviets, simply confiscated all patents, designs, inventions etc they could lay their hands upon -military, industrial and commercial - regardless of international law or the Geneva Conference. Once in the United States or Soviet Russia the German inventions were "reinvented" and stamped "Made in the U.S.A." or "XXXX."
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.
Even before the war ended, Vannevar Bush, America's scientific advisor, recommended that the activities of the Combined Intelligence Operations Subcommittee (CIOS), a joint Anglo_American intelligence-gathering operation, be expanded to include the exploitation of German technical information of an industrial nature as well as of strictly military matters. 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.
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 herafter 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. (Gimbel 27)
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 fromThe 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 sisceptible of direct military use. An army of occupation can only take possession...of property belonging to the state. (Gimbel 172)
The theft of intellectualproperty 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.
Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the German Federal Republic, wrote in his Memoirs:
At the end of 1948 the director of the American office for technical services, Mr. John Green, gave the press a report on his activities, which were concerned with the exploitations of German patents and industrial secrets. What strikes one in this report is the fact that AMTORG [Moscow's foreign trade organization] was the keenest purchaser. During one month alone the Russians bought more than 2,000 Wehrmacht reports on secret German weapons, for which they paid $6,000. According to a statement made by an American expert, the patents formerly belonging to IG Farben have given the American chemical industry a lead of at least 10 years. The damage thus caused to the German economy is huge and cannot be assessed in figures. It is extraordinarily regrettable that the new German inventions cannot be protected either, because Germany is not a member of the Patent Union. Britain has declared that it will respect German inventions regardless of what the peace treaty may say. But America has refused to issue such a declaration. German inventors are therefore not in a position to exploit their own inventions. This puts a considerable brake on German economic development. (Adenauer 429)
Adenauer denied reports in the British zone of occupation press that he had characterized Allied measures regarding German patents as sheer robbery:
I had said nothing of the kind....I had mentioned the view of leading foreign politicians that the German patents were extremely valuable. My speech was intended to point out that German inventors still did not enjoy international protection of their rights and that this constituted a notable obstacle to German recovery. (147-51)
Years later, in 1953, the chancellor pressed President Dwight Eisenhower to resolve the question of the use of trademarks owned by German nationals before the war. Some progress had been made in restoring trademarks to their previous German owners, and Adenauer received assurances that no furhter German assets or trademarks would be confiscated or liquidated and that restitution would be "considered" at some later date. (That date has not yet arrived.)
The United States also promised to review the situation concerning German ships, with an eye to possibly returning them to German control.
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 investtigations 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. (Georg, 157)
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 neing the mother of invention, German chemists undertook to provide substitutes for Mother Nature's shortcomings. Most sysnthetics served well. Some, like ersatz coffee (Kaffee-Ersatz), fell short of general acceptance.
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, metaluurgy, 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.' America's Bill Gates met with Zuse in 1995 and now displays Zuse's picture in his office at Microsoft.
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.
In May 1955 Paris Agreement, the Allies, aware of the impropreties involved in their seizure of German industrial secrets, made the German Federal Government agree to renounce all claims or objections to Allied actions during the occupation:
The [German] federal government shall in the future raise no objections against the measures which have been, or will be, carried out with regard to German external assets or other property, seized for the purpose of reparation or restitution, or as a result of the state of war, or on the basis of agreements concluded, or to be concluded by the Three Powers with any other Allied countries, neutral countries or former allies of Germany. (Georg 338)
It is clear from the above provision that the Allies, chiefly the United States, still maintain the right to monitor German industry by means of the 'Echelon' eavesdropping program and other intellignece aganecies. The fruits of this ongoing surveillance are sent, among other destinations, to U.S. and Israeli recipeients. (Georg 345)
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 conclusion, author Friedrich Georg warns that successive countries in history have for a time enjoyed a leading position in world power, only to see the baton pass on to competing nations, America too must guard its vanguard position. In order to ensure its status as the world's superpower today, the United States will have to maintain an innovative scientific, engineering and technological base. China, Georg believes, 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.
***************************************
DANIEL W. MICHAELS was for over 40 years a translator of Russian and German for the Department of Defense, the last 20 years of which he was with the Naval Maritime Intelligence Center. He is the author of various scientific reports and is a contributor of book reviews and articles to geographical and historical periodicals. Born in New York City, he now lives in Washington, D.C. area.
Theft of German Scientific Research Fueled Post-War Technology Boom
"TO THE VICTORS BELONG THE SPOILS" is an American saying (attributed to Andrew Jackson) and, regrettably, an occasional American practice as it was in the case of "the Great Patent Heist of 1946." It was made official policy in World War II by President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9604, also known as the "License to Steal," which permitted agents of the U.S. government to execute the greatest robbery in world history: the theft of German intellectual (scientific) property. What technology the Americans and Soviets stole has, in fact, fueled some of the greatest scientific advances of the modern era.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Daniel W. Michaels
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, almost three-quarters of a century after World War II, as the fear of arrest and punishment for denying the received version of the causes and consequences of World War II as established by the victorious Allies diminishes, more and more Germans are investigating Allied behavior before, during and after the war. Aside from the "holocaust," which remains immune from critical studies, almost any aspect of the war, however embarrassing to the victors (e.g., the strategic bombing campaign), may now be studied without fear of retribution.
In this new spirit, Friedrich Georg has published a study of Allied postwar policy regarding the disposition of German intellectual property, especially the modern and futuristic patents of Nazi Germany. Georg finds that the Allies, chiefly the Americans and the Soviets, simply confiscated all patents, designs, inventions etc they could lay their hands upon -military, industrial and commercial - regardless of international law or the Geneva Conference. Once in the United States or Soviet Russia the German inventions were "reinvented" and stamped "Made in the U.S.A." or "XXXX."
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.
Even before the war ended, Vannevar Bush, America's scientific advisor, recommended that the activities of the Combined Intelligence Operations Subcommittee (CIOS), a joint Anglo_American intelligence-gathering operation, be expanded to include the exploitation of German technical information of an industrial nature as well as of strictly military matters. 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.
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 herafter 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. (Gimbel 27)
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 fromThe 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 sisceptible of direct military use. An army of occupation can only take possession...of property belonging to the state. (Gimbel 172)
The theft of intellectualproperty 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.
Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the German Federal Republic, wrote in his Memoirs:
At the end of 1948 the director of the American office for technical services, Mr. John Green, gave the press a report on his activities, which were concerned with the exploitations of German patents and industrial secrets. What strikes one in this report is the fact that AMTORG [Moscow's foreign trade organization] was the keenest purchaser. During one month alone the Russians bought more than 2,000 Wehrmacht reports on secret German weapons, for which they paid $6,000. According to a statement made by an American expert, the patents formerly belonging to IG Farben have given the American chemical industry a lead of at least 10 years. The damage thus caused to the German economy is huge and cannot be assessed in figures. It is extraordinarily regrettable that the new German inventions cannot be protected either, because Germany is not a member of the Patent Union. Britain has declared that it will respect German inventions regardless of what the peace treaty may say. But America has refused to issue such a declaration. German inventors are therefore not in a position to exploit their own inventions. This puts a considerable brake on German economic development. (Adenauer 429)
Adenauer denied reports in the British zone of occupation press that he had characterized Allied measures regarding German patents as sheer robbery:
I had said nothing of the kind....I had mentioned the view of leading foreign politicians that the German patents were extremely valuable. My speech was intended to point out that German inventors still did not enjoy international protection of their rights and that this constituted a notable obstacle to German recovery. (147-51)
Years later, in 1953, the chancellor pressed President Dwight Eisenhower to resolve the question of the use of trademarks owned by German nationals before the war. Some progress had been made in restoring trademarks to their previous German owners, and Adenauer received assurances that no furhter German assets or trademarks would be confiscated or liquidated and that restitution would be "considered" at some later date. (That date has not yet arrived.)
The United States also promised to review the situation concerning German ships, with an eye to possibly returning them to German control.
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 investtigations 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. (Georg, 157)
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 neing the mother of invention, German chemists undertook to provide substitutes for Mother Nature's shortcomings. Most sysnthetics served well. Some, like ersatz coffee (Kaffee-Ersatz), fell short of general acceptance.
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, metaluurgy, 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.' America's Bill Gates met with Zuse in 1995 and now displays Zuse's picture in his office at Microsoft.
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.
In May 1955 Paris Agreement, the Allies, aware of the impropreties involved in their seizure of German industrial secrets, made the German Federal Government agree to renounce all claims or objections to Allied actions during the occupation:
The [German] federal government shall in the future raise no objections against the measures which have been, or will be, carried out with regard to German external assets or other property, seized for the purpose of reparation or restitution, or as a result of the state of war, or on the basis of agreements concluded, or to be concluded by the Three Powers with any other Allied countries, neutral countries or former allies of Germany. (Georg 338)
It is clear from the above provision that the Allies, chiefly the United States, still maintain the right to monitor German industry by means of the 'Echelon' eavesdropping program and other intellignece aganecies. The fruits of this ongoing surveillance are sent, among other destinations, to U.S. and Israeli recipeients. (Georg 345)
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 conclusion, author Friedrich Georg warns that successive countries in history have for a time enjoyed a leading position in world power, only to see the baton pass on to competing nations, America too must guard its vanguard position. In order to ensure its status as the world's superpower today, the United States will have to maintain an innovative scientific, engineering and technological base. China, Georg believes, 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.
***************************************
DANIEL W. MICHAELS was for over 40 years a translator of Russian and German for the Department of Defense, the last 20 years of which he was with the Naval Maritime Intelligence Center. He is the author of various scientific reports and is a contributor of book reviews and articles to geographical and historical periodicals. Born in New York City, he now lives in Washington, D.C. area.
. Ideally instead of attacking US they shud've helped their German pals bring down the Soviet Bear.
