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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDiscussing Operation Paperclip now on Al Jazeera TV....
if anyone's interested....
postulater
(5,075 posts)melm00se
(4,993 posts)where the OSS recruited German scientists to deny their expertise from going to the USSR and prevent post war Germany from developing their military research capabilities.
seveneyes
(4,631 posts)Do they see it as a gain or loss?
randome
(34,845 posts)[hr][font color="blue"][center]Aspire to inspire.[/center][/font][hr]
Judi Lynn
(160,545 posts)Weekend Edition February 21-23, 2014
Of Empire and Government
Operation Nazification
by DAVID SWANSON
Annie Jacobsens new book is called Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. It isnt terribly secret anymore, of course, and it was never very intelligent. Jacobsen has added some details, and the U.S. government is still hiding many more. But the basic facts have been available; theyre just left out of most U.S. history books, movies, and television programs.
After World War II, the U.S. military hired sixteen hundred former Nazi scientists and doctors, including some of Adolf Hitlers closest collaborators, including men responsible for murder, slavery, and human experimentation, including men convicted of war crimes, men acquitted of war crimes, and men who never stood trial. Some of the Nazis tried at Nuremberg had already been working for the U.S. in either Germany or the U.S. prior to the trials. Some were protected from their past by the U.S. government for years, as they lived and worked in Boston Harbor, Long Island, Maryland, Ohio, Texas, Alabama, and elsewhere, or were flown by the U.S. government to Argentina to protect them from prosecution. Some trial transcripts were classified in their entirety to avoid exposing the pasts of important U.S. scientists. Some of the Nazis brought over were frauds who had passed themselves off as scientists, some of whom subsequently learned their fields while working for the U.S. military.
The U.S. occupiers of Germany after World War II declared that all military research in Germany was to cease, as part of the process of denazification. Yet that research went on and expanded in secret, under U.S. authority, both in Germany and in the United States, as part of a process that its possible to view as nazification. Not only scientists were hired. Former Nazi spies, most of them former S.S., were hired by the U.S. in post-war Germany to spy on and torture Soviets.
The U.S. military shifted in numerous ways when former Nazis were put into prominent positions. It was Nazi rocket scientists who proposed placing nuclear bombs on rockets and began developing the intercontinental ballistic missile. It was Nazi engineers who had designed Hitlers bunker beneath Berlin, who now designed underground fortresses for the U.S. government in the Catoctin and Blue Ridge Mountains. Known Nazi liars were employed by the U.S. military to draft classified intelligence briefs falsely hyping the Soviet menace. Nazi paperclipscientists developed U.S. chemical and biological weapons programs, bringing over their knowledge of tabun and sarin, not to mention thalidomide and their eagerness for human experimentation, which the U.S. military and the newly created CIA readily engaged in on a major scale. Every bizarre and gruesome notion of how a person might be assassinated or an army immobilized was of interest to their research. New weapons were developed, including VX and Agent Orange. A new drive to visit and weaponize outerspace was created, and former Nazis were put in charge of a new agency called NASA.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/21/operation-nazification/