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Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War
During the Second World War, German science and technology posed a terrifying threat to the Allied nations. Combined with Germany's generations-old reputation for excellence in science and engineering, these advanced weapons, which included rockets, V-2 missiles, tanks, submarines, and jet airplanes, gave troubling credence to Nazi propaganda about forthcoming "wonder-weapons" that would turn the war decisively in the Axis' favor. After the war ended, the Allied powers raced to seize "intellectual reparations" from almost every field of industrial technology and academic science in occupied Germany. It was likely the largest-scale technology transfer in history.
In Taking Nazi Technology, Douglas M. O'Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators recruited from industry, military branches, and intelligence agencies invaded Germany's factories and research institutions. They seized or copied all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land―including that of their allies.
Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed―and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did and when they did, still matters today. O'Reagan argues these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself. A deeply researched comparative history of the American, British, French, and Soviet efforts to control and exploit German science and technology amid fierce internal and external competition, Taking Nazi Technology is the first history to capture the whole picture of this crucial period at the dawn of the Cold War.
In Taking Nazi Technology, Douglas M. O'Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators recruited from industry, military branches, and intelligence agencies invaded Germany's factories and research institutions. They seized or copied all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land―including that of their allies.
Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed―and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did and when they did, still matters today. O'Reagan argues these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself. A deeply researched comparative history of the American, British, French, and Soviet efforts to control and exploit German science and technology amid fierce internal and external competition, Taking Nazi Technology is the first history to capture the whole picture of this crucial period at the dawn of the Cold War.
281 pages, Hardcover
First published June 4, 2019
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156 people want to read
About the author
Douglas M. O'Reagan
2 books1 followerDouglas O'Reagan earned a PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014, and since then has held academic/research positions at UC Berkeley, Washington State University, and MIT. His work focuses on the history of science/technology, espionage/intelligence, diplomacy, and business history.
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October 20, 2022
When most people hear “taking Nazi technology,” their first and perhaps only association is Operation Paperclip, featuring Werner von Braun, his V-2 rocket, and the subsequent Saturn V that took men to the moon. But Taking Nazi Technology is a book about the sweeping efforts of the Americans, British, French, and Soviets to seize technology that went well beyond rocketry to cover the whole of the Industrial base, from automotives to chemicals to textiles. Although this is a less sexy topic, it gives O’Reagan space to analyze what it means to “take” technology.
As it turns out, taking technology is easy (kind of); integrating it is hard. Just as stealing answers to a calculus exam does not yield an understanding of calculus, so the Allied nations’ seizing of German documents, industrial equipment, and even people was often not correlated with success. What did work was sustained, on the ground contact with German scientists, including visiting factories and embedding trainees into German research centers. The Allied powers (mis)understood this to various degrees, and their approaches to technology appropriation differed based on resources available and ideology.
French Approach
O’Reagan finds it was the French who best understood science and technology as profoundly embedded in society and were therefore the most successful in benefitting from Nazi technology. Granted, their industrial capacity and technological baseline were lower than the other Allied powers, so there was more to be gained. The French approach differed in that it was more benevolent to Germany, adopting a Marshall plan ideology of sorts. They kept German laboratories intact and didn’t grab scientists en masse, noting that the “milieu around a scientist, including personal contacts, is so essential that a top scientist or technician displaced in another country… is practically rendered sterile (pg 90).” France was primed to go this route in a way other countries were not, as it had practice collaborating with the Germans; investments in Franco-German scientific institutes and business relationships came more naturally.
Regardless of whether the French uniquely understood the interconnectedness of a technology ecosystem, they didn’t have the resources to pursue any other policy. They were aware of their inability to exert total control over their occupied areas, box out infringing Allied powers, import and integrate scientists, and write thousands of reports. This worked out for the French. As O’Reagan writes, “a role at the heart of western Europe was worth more than boxes of reports and miles of microfilm (pg 98).”
American and British Approach
Of the Allied nations, the U.S. and U.K. relied most heavily on document copying to obtain German knowledge. When faced with billions of pages of available documentation, they chose to take the haystacks and worry about finding the needles later. As Mark Twain said, “if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Wanting to keep the original documents intact, the U.S. and U.K. resorted to copying as much as they could via microfilming with the goal of summarizing and distributing the findings as consumable reports. It was a herculean task.
First, teams of experts were sent to a factory or lab to select what should be copied from the hundreds of thousands or even millions of available pages. Selections were microfilmed, shipped, and processed. Translation was a frequent bottleneck, although several successful translation businesses were started during this period and drove down the cost of translation. (A fascinating second order-effect of aggressively translating German research into English was that it accelerated the transition to English being the language of science, which was not the case pre-WWII). Finally, a report was written and assigned a classification designation. The classifying of information is its own battleground, and the tendency to over-classify was alive and well in 1946.
Had it been more difficult to copy documents, the U.S. and U.K. would have been forced to develop a more discriminating process for selecting documents, and ironically, more material and insights may have been dispersed faster.
Soviet Approach
Unsurprisingly, the Soviets’ approach to taking technology yielded the grand-scale absurdity characteristic of Stalin. Operation Paperclip pales in comparison to Operation Osaviakhim. In October 1946,
The following anecdote describing how the V-2 scientists were rounded up would have fit perfectly into Iannucci’s hilarious The Death of Stalin (2017), a black comedy chronicling the frenetic political machinations immediately following Stalin’s death. Unfortunately the film’s action doesn’t get rolling until 1953 (naturally).
The theater of the absurd continued with the Soviets’ massive industrial seizures, where they lifted not just equipment but entire factories on the order of thousands for transport by rail to the Soviet Union. Equipment was broken en route and ended up rusting in depots. When it did reach its destination intact, written documentation for how to assemble was lacking (or in German!). Despite these struggles, “there is little question that artifacts and raw materials taken from Germany formed the basis for the Soviet rocket program (pg 107).” Notably, the historical consensus is that the German contribution only resulted in a few months saved.
American Approach Revisited
O’Reagan reaches the contrarian conclusion that the United States benefited little from unfettered access to German technology. He concedes von Braun was a unicorn critical to the Saturn V, but that’s as far as he’s willing to go:
The United States’ aggressive push to absorb as much German technology as possible was a policy motivated in large part by a desire to deny the Soviets, and even the other Allies, access to knowledge. It was less about what the Americans would gain than what the Soviets would lose. Look no further than the hundreds of German scientists who sat idle in American barracks while the Air Force struggled to find businesses who wanted them. But even here, it seems the Americans didn’t deny the Soviets all that much, as they were well on their way to developing an atomic bomb with or without German “assistance.”
Why Taking Nazi Technology Matters Today
O’Reagan’s major finding is that sustained contact with the people and processes that collectively form the intangible “know-how” for a given technology is necessary to successfully transfer and innovate on it. This has profound implications for how we replicate progress and foster innovation, and it goes a long way in explaining America’s hollowed-out manufacturing base and fragile supplier ecosystem. Despite innovations in computing, AI, and robotics, manufacturing knowledge is concentrated in the heads of people who learned the trade at a young age via an apprenticeship model, and who usually lack a college degree. When this knowledge is not passed on, it dies. When the small business that went made a critical piece of the B-2 bomber retired, the U.S. Government released an RFP to reverse engineer the parts (frightening).
As the number of critical but unfilled manufacturing jobs increases, there is no guaranteed and inexorable march towards automation to save us (contrary to popular belief). Failed startups like Plethora, which raised over $30mm and was founded by very smart people, are case in point. Encoding know-how is hard, and automating parts of the factory will require more venture money and government investment towards those companies and technologies showing the most promise.
O’Reagan’s book also has something to say of the inverse: how do we prevent and punish theft of technology? One silver lining is that industrial espionage in the form of document pilfering, while not desirable, may not pose much of a threat. What does pose a threat is having well-networked American technologists working for the opposition. The Biden administration understands this! Its recent U.S. export control rules prohibit U.S. citizens from supporting China’s semiconductor development, handicapping Chinese access to critical American know-how. It will force American executives in China to choose between their job or their U.S. citizenship. The move caught industry off-guard and is widely considered to be the most punitive American action taken against Chinese industry in recent years, inclusive of Trump’s tariffs and blustering rhetoric.
Effectively integrating German technology was neither easy nor obvious, and O’Reagan’s book puts a point on why we must continue to study what enables and blocks technological progress.
--
Read this and other reviews at https://kinetic.reviews
As it turns out, taking technology is easy (kind of); integrating it is hard. Just as stealing answers to a calculus exam does not yield an understanding of calculus, so the Allied nations’ seizing of German documents, industrial equipment, and even people was often not correlated with success. What did work was sustained, on the ground contact with German scientists, including visiting factories and embedding trainees into German research centers. The Allied powers (mis)understood this to various degrees, and their approaches to technology appropriation differed based on resources available and ideology.
French Approach
O’Reagan finds it was the French who best understood science and technology as profoundly embedded in society and were therefore the most successful in benefitting from Nazi technology. Granted, their industrial capacity and technological baseline were lower than the other Allied powers, so there was more to be gained. The French approach differed in that it was more benevolent to Germany, adopting a Marshall plan ideology of sorts. They kept German laboratories intact and didn’t grab scientists en masse, noting that the “milieu around a scientist, including personal contacts, is so essential that a top scientist or technician displaced in another country… is practically rendered sterile (pg 90).” France was primed to go this route in a way other countries were not, as it had practice collaborating with the Germans; investments in Franco-German scientific institutes and business relationships came more naturally.
Regardless of whether the French uniquely understood the interconnectedness of a technology ecosystem, they didn’t have the resources to pursue any other policy. They were aware of their inability to exert total control over their occupied areas, box out infringing Allied powers, import and integrate scientists, and write thousands of reports. This worked out for the French. As O’Reagan writes, “a role at the heart of western Europe was worth more than boxes of reports and miles of microfilm (pg 98).”
American and British Approach
Of the Allied nations, the U.S. and U.K. relied most heavily on document copying to obtain German knowledge. When faced with billions of pages of available documentation, they chose to take the haystacks and worry about finding the needles later. As Mark Twain said, “if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Wanting to keep the original documents intact, the U.S. and U.K. resorted to copying as much as they could via microfilming with the goal of summarizing and distributing the findings as consumable reports. It was a herculean task.
First, teams of experts were sent to a factory or lab to select what should be copied from the hundreds of thousands or even millions of available pages. Selections were microfilmed, shipped, and processed. Translation was a frequent bottleneck, although several successful translation businesses were started during this period and drove down the cost of translation. (A fascinating second order-effect of aggressively translating German research into English was that it accelerated the transition to English being the language of science, which was not the case pre-WWII). Finally, a report was written and assigned a classification designation. The classifying of information is its own battleground, and the tendency to over-classify was alive and well in 1946.
Had it been more difficult to copy documents, the U.S. and U.K. would have been forced to develop a more discriminating process for selecting documents, and ironically, more material and insights may have been dispersed faster.
Soviet Approach
Unsurprisingly, the Soviets’ approach to taking technology yielded the grand-scale absurdity characteristic of Stalin. Operation Paperclip pales in comparison to Operation Osaviakhim. In October 1946,
Soviet troops and NKVD teams rounded up about three thousand German scientists, engineers, craftsmen, and other technical specialists, along with their families and possessions, and placed them on trains heading east… nearly every major firm in a war-related industries were impacted, including Carl Zeiss in Jena, BMW Strassfurt, Leuna, Siebel Works, Junkers, and Schott (pg 110).
The following anecdote describing how the V-2 scientists were rounded up would have fit perfectly into Iannucci’s hilarious The Death of Stalin (2017), a black comedy chronicling the frenetic political machinations immediately following Stalin’s death. Unfortunately the film’s action doesn’t get rolling until 1953 (naturally).
Helmut Gottrup and two hundred of his colleagues working at the Mittelwerk rocket facility were invited to a party with a Soviet general, after which they were informed they and their families would be on trains to facilities in the Soviet Union the following morning (pg 110).
The theater of the absurd continued with the Soviets’ massive industrial seizures, where they lifted not just equipment but entire factories on the order of thousands for transport by rail to the Soviet Union. Equipment was broken en route and ended up rusting in depots. When it did reach its destination intact, written documentation for how to assemble was lacking (or in German!). Despite these struggles, “there is little question that artifacts and raw materials taken from Germany formed the basis for the Soviet rocket program (pg 107).” Notably, the historical consensus is that the German contribution only resulted in a few months saved.
American Approach Revisited
O’Reagan reaches the contrarian conclusion that the United States benefited little from unfettered access to German technology. He concedes von Braun was a unicorn critical to the Saturn V, but that’s as far as he’s willing to go:
This is not a story, ultimately, of the United States getting a free lunch at Germany’s expense. Instead, it is a story of American firms having an unprecedented ability to study a long-standing rival, realizing that they had relatively little to learn, and moving forward as self-aware leaders in industrial research… The biggest shock was one of disappointment (pg 44).
The United States’ aggressive push to absorb as much German technology as possible was a policy motivated in large part by a desire to deny the Soviets, and even the other Allies, access to knowledge. It was less about what the Americans would gain than what the Soviets would lose. Look no further than the hundreds of German scientists who sat idle in American barracks while the Air Force struggled to find businesses who wanted them. But even here, it seems the Americans didn’t deny the Soviets all that much, as they were well on their way to developing an atomic bomb with or without German “assistance.”
Why Taking Nazi Technology Matters Today
O’Reagan’s major finding is that sustained contact with the people and processes that collectively form the intangible “know-how” for a given technology is necessary to successfully transfer and innovate on it. This has profound implications for how we replicate progress and foster innovation, and it goes a long way in explaining America’s hollowed-out manufacturing base and fragile supplier ecosystem. Despite innovations in computing, AI, and robotics, manufacturing knowledge is concentrated in the heads of people who learned the trade at a young age via an apprenticeship model, and who usually lack a college degree. When this knowledge is not passed on, it dies. When the small business that went made a critical piece of the B-2 bomber retired, the U.S. Government released an RFP to reverse engineer the parts (frightening).
As the number of critical but unfilled manufacturing jobs increases, there is no guaranteed and inexorable march towards automation to save us (contrary to popular belief). Failed startups like Plethora, which raised over $30mm and was founded by very smart people, are case in point. Encoding know-how is hard, and automating parts of the factory will require more venture money and government investment towards those companies and technologies showing the most promise.
O’Reagan’s book also has something to say of the inverse: how do we prevent and punish theft of technology? One silver lining is that industrial espionage in the form of document pilfering, while not desirable, may not pose much of a threat. What does pose a threat is having well-networked American technologists working for the opposition. The Biden administration understands this! Its recent U.S. export control rules prohibit U.S. citizens from supporting China’s semiconductor development, handicapping Chinese access to critical American know-how. It will force American executives in China to choose between their job or their U.S. citizenship. The move caught industry off-guard and is widely considered to be the most punitive American action taken against Chinese industry in recent years, inclusive of Trump’s tariffs and blustering rhetoric.
Effectively integrating German technology was neither easy nor obvious, and O’Reagan’s book puts a point on why we must continue to study what enables and blocks technological progress.
--
Read this and other reviews at https://kinetic.reviews
April 22, 2020
A friend had this book during a recent visit, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it during my stay. It’s many details and extensive footnotes demonstrate the thoroughness and knowledge of the author. For a casual reader like myself, the author ties in a number of interesting facts such as how English became the language of science and how the Marshall plan worked. A theme throughout the book is the post war gamesmanship among the US, England, France, and the USSR. Fundamentally a story about technology transfer, the author includes aspects of economics, ethics, nationalistic pride, fortune, and ties many of these to modern day Europe and the US. A good read, for sure.
June 17, 2019
Fascinating accounting of technologies developed and utilized from the Nazi's in World War II. Well researched and written, the book is interesting and educational. Thought provoking too.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews