The Great Patents Heist
One of the greatest ripoffs of all time was the theft of German patents after World War II
It is quite acceptable to American pride to acknowledge that immigrants have contributed to our prosperity and greatness. It's a little harder to swallow that a good deal of our scientific lead and prosperity - despite the ever-increasing burdens of non-skilled illegal immigrants and unproductive home-growns - has come from simply seizing German patents and inventions after World War I [the most prominent war booty which Woodrow Wilson seized in 1917 was the patent on aspirin, that "miracle drug"] and far more so after World War II.
There are those who claim the key to America's felicity has been its Jewish citizens. After all, this is now a "service economy" of stockbrokers and financial and entertainment services. Could America dispense with actually manufacturing or growing anything, and instead focus on the essentials like Broadway shows, Hollywood sitcoms and currency speculation?
The message of Bernt Engelmann's 1974 Deutschland ohne Juden, published in English by Bantam Books, New York in 1984 as Germany Without Jews, is clear: You Germans were mediocre until we Jews came, and now that we're gone, you have sunk back into mediocrity.
Engelmann cites endless lists of great Jewish MDs of German or Austrian domicile, several of whom, such as bacteriologists Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) and Robert Koch (1843-1910), won the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology (Ehrlich, 1908; Koch, 1905). Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), of dubious credentials, is one of Engelmann's prize examples.
Engelmann also slays entire forests with pages of printed paeans to forgotten Jewish playwrights, songsters, operetta producers, critics, publishers etc. How could one forget the immortal Meyerbeer? To the wary eye, it smacks of ethnic self-congratulation. One gifted Jew writes a piece, another publishes it, yet another reviews it favourably, a fourth sits at the box office counting out his money and a fifth takes his 10 percent as agent - an unconvincing proof that the nation of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven needed music lessons.
Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) and Karl Benz (1844-1929) invented the modern gasoline engine in 1878-1887. Other Germans took the lead in 19th-century chemistry and created the first contact lens (in the 1880s), X-rays (Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895), quantum physics (discovered in 1900 by Max Planck, 1858-1947), aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) and last (and least), saccharin in 1913. As for previous centuries, the Germans got no credit for inventing the croissant or "Kipferl," as the Germans call it, in Vienna to celebrate defeating the Turks in 1683; one notes the Turkish religious logo, the crescent (a baked good then snatched up by the French as the "croissant"). Equally, they receive zero credit for baking the first quiche, which in Lorraine and Rhinelander dialects ("Kisch") simply means "kitchen leftovers baked into a pie."
Baked goods aside, the facts reveal that the most creative period in world history may have been Germany between 1932 and 1945, and that much of America's scientific lead came from looting German patents by the ton, both in World War I and far more so after World War II.
And because Germany was so devastated after World War II, there has been a brain drain ever since of the top young German scientists - to Massachusetts and California for computers and genetics and to greater Los Angeles, Houston and Cape Canaveral for aerospace. As one German scientist remarked: "Since the war, we have not had the financing capabilities for basic research for the long-term future. That kind of serious money only the Americans have. In Germany, and in Japan, also, we do applied and clinical research for immediate applications. But to be on the cutting edge, the money and the positions are now in America and we have to go there. [1]
An astounding admission of the stripping of German inventiveness after the war came in an October 1946 article by C. Lester Walker in Harper's magazine. Entitled "Secrets by the Thousands," it presents some problems for the Be
rnt Engelmanns of this world who imply that German science in the 1932-45 period would have been "nothing without the Jews."
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In fact, the article suggests in deadly seriousness that German Chancellor Adolf Hitler had been right, from his point of view, to prolong the war to the last gasp. According to the deputy commanding general of Army Air Forces Intelligence, Air Technical Service Command, in a speech to the American Society of Aeronautical Engineers:
The Germans were preparing rocket surprises for the whole world in general and England in particular which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year.
Even without its brilliant Jewish minority, the Germans' "V-2 rocket which bombed London was just a toy compared to what the Germans had up their sleeve." They had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of production or development, using every kind of remote control device or fuse: radio, radar, wire-guided, continuous wave, acoustics, infrared, light beams and magnetism. And for power the Germans were years ahead in jet propulsion at both subsonic and supersonic speeds - even creating a "jet helicopter" wherein tiny jets spun the helicopter blade tips at blinding speeds.
Just as the war was ending, and President Franklin Roosevelt was ordering both Gens. George Patton and Dwight David Eisenhower to pull back and let "Uncle Joe" (Josef Stalin) have Berlin and Eastern Europe, the Germans had been readying their giant A-4 rocket for production. Forty-six feet in length, it weighed over 24,000 pounds and could travel 230 miles - rising 60 miles over the earth to a blistering top speed of 3,375 miles per hour. Its secret was a rocket motor running on liquid nitrogen and alcohol. It was either radar controlled or self-guided by a gyroscope. Since it flew faster than the speed of sound (by many times), it could not be heard before it struck.
Another rocket in the works was the A-9, still bigger at 29,000 pounds and equipped with wings. It had a range of 3,000 miles. Manufactured at Peenemünde, it arced into the sky at an incredible 5,870 miles per hour.
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But most Americans know about German World War II rockets. A few even know that in addition to the car engine the Germans also invented the jet and perfected the superhighway or Autobahn (the three most important inventions binding this vast country. Virtually no one knows that in Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio, in the Library of Congress and in the Department of Commerce in Washington, a "mother lode" of 1,500 tons of German patents and research papers were being mined furiously after the war. One gloating Washington bureaucrat called it "the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country's brain power."
Fortunately, it was for the benefit of the United States, which, having thwarted Hitler's crusade against the Soviet Union, had to take up the same gauntlet against a communism spread worldwide by the late 1940s.
The genesis of the project to grab German secrets was in 1944, when, amazed by German technology in everything from rockets and jets to Tiger tanks, a Joint Intelligence Objectives committee was set up to confiscate German inventions the instant they were obtained, even before the surrender, for use against Japan.
Even before reaching the German border, fascinating discoveries began to be made, including one with which every American is familiar: audio tape. The 1946 Harper's article shows the head of the Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch, in quaint excitement:
"...[p]ulling some brown, papery-looking ribbon off a spool. It was a quarter-inch wide, with a dull side and a shiny side. "That's Magnetophone tape," he said. [2] "It's plastic, metallized on one side with ferrous oxide. In Germany, that supplanted phonograph recordings. A day's radio program can be magnetized on one reel. [Then] you can demagnetize it, wipe it off, and put on a new program at any time. No needle, no noise or record wear. An hour-long reel costs 50 cents."
A Short History of Recording and Its Effects Upon Music by Michael Chanan [3] points out that even in the late 1920s, before the "12 darkest years of German history," [4] one Fritz Pfleumer had developed a plastic recording tape. It was launched commercially by BASF [5] in 1934. The idea was based on the film strip, and its original application was for dictation in an office environment. In Britain, a project funded by the great radio genius Guglielmo Marconi was attempting the same thing. (On D-Day, the Americans played audio tapes of combat loudly at various locations to try to throw off the German defenders.)
However, the great leap forward came when one A. M. Poniatoff, president of a small California company called Ampex (a trade name still familiar to the older generation), then wearing a U.S. Army uniform, helped seize German-held Radio Luxembourg in late 1944. Instantly grasping the gold mine in profits and quality which the Magnetophone tape represented, Poniatoff had the 3M Company rush the new tape into American production, and it swept the Los Angeles entertainment industry.
Its major breakthrough came in 1947 when Bing Crosby first used it to record his network shows. The crooner not only preferred the Magnetophone sound but invested heavily in Ampex. Later, movie soundtracks went onto audio tape as well, improving mixing and dubbing efficiency as well, and avoiding the infuriating mishap where a successfully shot movie scene had to be retaken due to sound defects. Ampex later went on to introduce the first videotape recorders in 1956 (all now but a memory, sacrificed on the altar of free trade with Japan).
The list goes on and on: synthetic mica, which increased American cold steel production by 1,000 percent; "the secrets for 50,000 dyes, many of [which] are faster and better than ours, colors we were never able to make"; milk, butter and bread preservation without chemicals; and refrigeration and air-conditioning for German U-boats so efficient that their subs could cruise from the Atlantic to the Pacific, fight there for two months and return to Germany without having to take on fresh water for the crew. In addition, there was the pilot ejector seat, the infrared rifle scope, and even the negative-air ionizer, which many Americans use for the fresh feeling it puts in the air, with claims of reduced blood pressure, allergy and asthma symptoms.
In addition to official government looting of Germany (what GIs always called "liberating"), there was also the personal looting bonanza exemplified by Robert Maxwell, financier extraordinaire, and at one time the most hated man in Britain. The great contribution of this Orthodox Jewish citizen, born Jan Hoch in what was then Czechoslovakia, was to found a scientific publishing empire in Britain, called Pergamon Press, based entirely on German research he had looted with British intelligence connivance. Maxwell came to dominate the British tabloid press and raided his own employees' pension fund to the tune of 90 million pounds. He finally perished mysteriously and nakedly in a plunge from his yacht in 1991 just a week after standing up to the Israeli secret police, the Mossad - who may have set him up in business in the first place. Interestingly, his main co-conspirator in the United States, Robert Rubin, formerly of Goldman Sachs, is now secretary of the treasury [6].
When not gunning down a surrendering German mayor armed only with a white flag (as he boasted in a Der Spiegel interview) or bribing British officers to invent his heroic war record (for which war record Montgomery personally pinned a medal on him), Maxwell/Hoch [7] was in the British Zone of Berlin in 1946 with the full backing of British intelligence, coercing the vast research findings of the Springer science publishing house from Springer's widow for pence on the pound.
Ultimately, after Maxwell stripped $94 million from the pension funds of the 5,000 employees of the Mirror Group, his U.S. financiers at Goldman Sachs were stripped of an estimated $250 million to settle their claims - whereupon Maxwell's body was fished from the sea by an astonished Spaniard, to be buried with full honors in Israel and hopefully forgotten. Far from exemplifying that the Germans were nothing without Jewish scientific help, his life suggested that one Jew could become a billionaire exploiting German ideas.
Which raises the justifiable question of the atom bomb, which European Jews did produce for America and German scientists did not provide in time for Germany.
In his magisterial Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler ("Conspiracy and Treason Against Hitler"), [8] Gen. Otto Ernst Remer details how anti-Hitler elements in the German scientific community maneuvered their own Werner Carl Heisenberg (b. 1901) into the key uranium-developing program at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (now succeeded by the Max Planck Institute of Physics). His clear mission, proudly proclaimed after World War II, [9] was to bureaucratically delay the German A-bomb project until the Allies had won the war. [10]
As just one example, munitions minister Albert Speer pleaded with Heisenberg and his fellow conspirator von Weizsäcker (brother of a later West German president) to name whatever money or materials they required after they claimed they had been held up by shortages. Von Weizsäcker's reply asking for "40,000 marks" caused Speer to stare in amazement, and to later confess that he had himself planned to propose 100 million marks for starters.
Not only did Heisenberg state explicitly to Der Spiegel, "We never tried to produce any atomic bombs and we are glad not to be responsible for having made any," he also admitted leaking the latest information on German uranium-splitting research to the half-Jewish Danish scientist Niels Bohr, who promptly informed his racial confreres in the U.S.
Thus, Germany did not lack the bomb because it lacked Jews, but rather because a handful of key scientists hostile to Hitler wormed their way into the German atomic program. Heisenberg had even admitted to a shocked Luftwaffe audience in 1942, after the devastating British 1,000-bomber annihilations of the port cities of Kiel and Lübeck, that Germany could produce a bomb with material "the size of a banana" (gesturing with his hands) to wipe out an entire enemy city, but then he caught himself and said this of course would be economically impossible. [11]
One of Gen. Remer's most interesting assertions is that just as the Americans were racing in the final days to convert German inventions for use against Japan, Hitler was sending a U-Boat packed with secrets to that same nation at Emperor Hirohito's explicit request.
In Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler, Remer first notes the criticism that propaganda minister Josef Göbbels had received for his "stand-fast, the miracle weapons are coming" message after Stalingrad. Ironically, while many of these weapons came too late to save Germany from its fate of occupation, government decapitation and dismemberment, Remer reports that a member of U-234 sent him the following:
In the spring of 1945 I was ordered to report to serve on U-234. The sub was a specially redesigned former mine layer of the type XB with 1,760 tons, 4,200 horsepower and a 52-man crew. The commander was [a] Capt. Fehler.
On March 23, 1945 the boat steamed out of Kiel toward southern Norway unsubmerged. On April 15, 1945 it dove at South Christiansand with an immediate goal of proceeding between Iceland and the Faroe Islands. The destination was Japan.
Our orders stated that we were to bring air force Gen. Kessler as a Luftwaffe attaché with his staff and technicians to Tokyo. The [emperor] had asked us to help build up Japan's air defenses with the weapons developed in Germany.
Also on board to this end were, besides the general, two air force officers, a navy anti-aircraft specialist, an underwater demolitions specialist, a low-frequency specialist from the staff of Prof. Küpfmüller as well as two Messerschmitt engineers (specialists for the construction of Me-262s) [12] and two Japanese frigate captains. One of them was [a] Capt. Tomonaga, who had collaborated with us in his capacity as a specialist for one-man torpedoes [13] when we were developing our own small combat boats.
Our cargo consisted of 12 steel cylinders, of the sort used for storing in mines, containing comprehensive microfilm material on the latest developments in German offensive and defensive weaponry, especially in rocket and rocket defense [anti-rocket rockets; TBR ed.] warfare, as well as our research findings in the areas of high- and low-frequency technology, and finally a decisive contribution to the development of nuclear energy and atomic warfare.
After passing through the Straits of Iceland and 28 days submerged at an average depth of 260 feet, a message reached us in the night of the 12th to the 13th of May [14] during snorkel travel, in which Grand Admiral [Karl] Dönitz ordered us to capitulate. At this point in time we were located in the middle of the Atlantic, southeast of the banks of Newfoundland.
The order to our captain was couched in a very personal tone, telling him to hand the U-boat over without destroying its valuable cargo. [15] After 12 hours of debate and reflection, Capt. Fehler decided in harmony with Gen. Kessler and after informing the two Japanese frigate captains that he would be carrying out Dönitz's order and surface to surrender. The two Japanese officers took their own lives before the boat surfaced.
Eight hours later, U-234 was taken as a prize of war by the American destroyer Sutton and brought to the U.S. Navy base at Portland, Maine.
The American officers and officials who subsequently interrogated us were evidently horrified over the contents of our U-boat. They criticized us for supposedly having no idea how valuable our cargo was. At the end of July 1945 the officer in charge of the investigation team declared to me that the microfilm evidence and the testimony of our technicians had proved that in decisive technical developments, we were "100 years" ahead of the United States.
Which raises the nagging question of where all these continual "UFO" sightings come from, which began a few short years after World War II - and the capture of German high tech. The same government which gave us the Warren Commission cover-up, the public silent treatment of the Israeli assault on the USS Liberty, [16] and a blithe nonchalance about the social significance of the Black/White/Asian racial differences proven in the best-selling Harvard study The Bell Curve, seems anxious to keep the public in the dark about all such "unconfirmed" sightings. [17].
It is at least interesting that it was just two years after the seizure of "50 tons" [18] of German aerospace and physics papers that the first major UFO story, the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico incident, broke. After all, what has fascinated researchers ever since (particularly government skeptics monitoring Area 51 at Groom Lake, north of Las Vegas) is things the Germans were working on: spacecraft which use new, tough, but lightweight materials, make 180 degree turns at Mach 4 without spilling the drinks and generally defy the laws of gravity, perhaps by the use of gyroscopes within gyroscopes.
It is well known that the German SS sent expeditions to Tibet, reputedly a land of mind-over-matter marvels - in the late 1930s. [19] The purpose was both to delve into evidence of Indo-European origins in the Himalayas and secret techniques used there, possibly including anti-gravity levitation. What ties this together with Europe, ancient America and Egypt is the finding of blond mummies or Nordic remains in or near many sites of architectural miracles.
As anyone who has seen the excellent programs on Egypt on the cable History Channel, can testify, both the people living in ancient Egypt and the rulers of Macchu Picchu were doing virtually gravity-defying feats in constructing their pyramids and temples.
One can only speculate as to what secrets the Germans may have revived or discovered anew during the Third Reich, and which are now being utilized by the current government in Washington. It is well known from excavations of blond mummies in Egypt and in South America by Thor Heyerdahl as well as the statements of Mexican Emperor Montezuma (welcoming the Spanish "back" as their fabled "white gods") that some sort of ancient white scientists or advanced physicists were involved with the origins of these cultures. Even the Chinese admit the existence of red-haired, blue-eyed tribes constantly infiltrating into ancient China (of which pictorial evidence is presented in a recent National Geographic). The great teacher Confucius himself (roughly 551-479 B.C.), of the noble K'ung family, was said to be a man of unusually tall stature for a Chinese, and Genghiz Khan (A.D. 1167-1227), the Mongol conqueror, had red hair and green eyes.
But the historical blackout continues. The government appears to be willing to hint that "aliens" from outer space are behind all this high tech. God forbid it should turn out that ancient Indo-Europeans were doing these things thousands of years ago, or especially Germans researching without the benefit of the Jews in the Third Reich.
Notes:
[1] In Anton Zischka's Und war es ein Wunder ("And It Was a Miracle") we read: "If the surely not oversensitive Nazis had retired [with pension!] a total of 1,628 professors when they took power, the victims of the [Allied] anti-Nazis numbered no less than 4,289 professors and instructors, who received no pension whatsoever. As the newspaper Christ und Welt calculated in 1950, the Nazis dismissed 9.8 percent of their university teaching staff, the Allies 32.1 percent. Almost every third German professor lost his teaching or research post through the will of the victors. In Germany as a whole it was every second professor... In accordance with Control Commission Directive No. 24 of January 1, 1946, a total of 373,762 persons were found inappropriate for any public service or economic activity above that of manual laborer." Quoted in Remer, Otto Ernst, Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler ("Conspiracy and Treason against Hitler"). See below (Note 9).
[2] Magnétophone is still the French word for an audiotape player.
[3] London, Verso Publishing, 1995.
[4] The mantra-like phrase every modern German schoolchild learns about the Hitler period.
[5] A German chemical giant, which nowadays has a large plant for adhesives and audiotape in North Carolina.
[6] See Maxwell articles in The Spotlight newspaper of Nov. 18, 1991; May 16, 1994; April 10 and May 1, 1995; and Feb. 3, 1997.
[7] And, briefly, Du Maurier, after a popular cigarette.
[8] Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler, Urteil des Frontsoldaten ("Judgement by a front-line soldier"), Otto Ernst Remer, general, retired, Verlag K. W. Schütz, Preussisch Oldendorf, 1981. Remer was a highly decorated combat officer, a ramrod straight old-style Prussian. Bearer of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves (personally presented to him by Hitler), he instantly thwarted the July 20, 1944 officers' putsch against Hitler once he had heard Hitler's voice on the phone stating that he was alive and how to proceed. After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, he founded the highly popular Socialist German Reich Party (13 percent of the vote), which the Allies banned. He had to flee Germany in the early 1990s and died in Spanish political exile in 1996.
[9] Der Spiegel, Nov. 24, 1952.
[10] No more unbelievable than people calling themselves "Americans" parading the streets of Washington, D.C. during time of war in 1968, screaming: "Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Viet Cong are gonna win!"
[11] Remer .
[12] The German 500-mph fighter-bomber.
[13] One intact example of such a manned torpedo may be seen at the Mystic Seaport museum in Connecticut.
[14] After the German surrender and the arrest of all its officials, including Hitler's successor, Grand Admiral von Dönitz
[15] Dönitz, who had been chosen as successor by Hitler because of his immaculate war record as well as his genuine National Socialist leanings, apparently felt that whatever his admiration for the fighting Japanese people, it would be better that the Americans get these secrets for use against the Soviets than for their ally (who had not notified Berlin before she attacked Pearl Harbor) to receive them in an obviously losing cause.
[16] U.S. Navy officers seem well aware of this outrage. The author spoke with a Navy captain (and, coincidentally, Mayflower descendant), who waved his hand and said, "Don't get me started."
[17] Which is the same as "unconfirmed sightings" of Vietnam-era American POWs, and the standard operating procedure when the Pentagon, CIA or White House has something to hide: "We will neither confirm nor deny..."
[18] Walker
[19] In fact, one expedition was trivialized into a movie, Seven Years in Tibet, about the real SS man Heinrich Harrer - played by Brad Pitt - and a young Dalai Lama.
"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 George has published a study of Allied postwar policy regarding the disposition of German intellectual property, especially the modern and futuristic patents of Nazi Germany. George 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 its 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 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. ~Gimbel, John. Science, Technology, and Reparations. Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1990. 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 of direct military use. An army of occupation can only take possession...of property belonging to the state. (Gimbel 172) 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. 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 further 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 its 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 being the mother of invention, German chemists undertook to provide substitutes for Mother Nature's shortcomings. Most synthetics 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, 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.' 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 improprieties 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 recipients. (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.
Uncensored History of World War II
Theft of German Scientific Research Fueled Post-War Technology Boom
Following the advancing Allied Troops into France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and, later, Japan, teams of military and industrial specialists came right on the heels of the combat units to collect documents and study German and Japanese military and industrial developments that had produced some of the major weapons used by the enemies especially towards the end of the war: the jet engine, the V-1 and V-2 rockets, high-speed aircraft, remotely guided mini-tanks to destroy combat tanks, one- and two-man kamikaze U-boats, and many more. Worse, there was talk of the existence of flying saucers, atomic bombs, chemical and biological ammunition, and other miracle weapons which Hitler or the Japanese were going to use during the end-phase of the fighting in order to wrest victory from the Allied Forces. The more desperate the situation became for the Axis Powers, the weirder the schemes that came to light: there was talk, for example, that the Japanese were building mini-bombers which could be stored on U-boats and thus transported close to the Central American mainland. Re-assembled on board and launched from the boat, these bombers were to destroy in a suicide mission, the gates of the Panama Canal and thus interrupt the shipping of essential war materials and supplies from the factories of the eastern United States to the Pacific theater of war. The American and British teams of military and industrial specialists following the combat troops were charged to find out what was actually there and what could, reasonably, be expected to
"Captured" German and Japanese Information and Know-How