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 happen. This was, by no means, a safe and pleasant
job. Most of the 'targets' had, more or less, been subjected to bombing or
devastated during the fighting; the Germans were still counter-attacking; there
were mines and unexploded ammunition everywhere; and the just 'liberated '
Germans were not always friendly or co-operating. Some of the intelligence men
lost their lives or were wounded and all were living and working under
conditions that were not better than those for the soldiers. But why the hurry,
could this information gathering not have taken place later?
One reason why not was the lack of
intelligence concerning the state of atomic bomb development in Germany. The
Allies did not know that Hitler, not wanting, or not being able to recognize the
revolutionary potential of atomic weapons, did not favor, and, therefore,
support financially, the development of these bombs on the level that would have
assured success. There was also talk later on that German physicists like Werner
Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, and their staffs, who had been in the forefront of
atomic research prior to the war, were hesitant to deliver the all-destructive
power of the atom into the Führer's hands and kept stalling. Furthermore, some
of the most brilliant minds had left Germany and Europe for the United States
during Hitler's persecution of the Jews and were now working for the Allies.
True or false: the West did not know what was really going on and how far the
German research had advanced literally until the last days of the conflict when,
with the capture of Heisenberg, they finally could breathe easier.
What was known to the Allies was that
the German chemists had developed highly toxic and deadly gases and biological
cultures, that these were already being used to kill Jews and other
'undesirables' by the thousands, and that there would be a good chance that
Hitler would use these poisons at the end of the war to destroy his enemies and
what was left of his own people. To secure and study these weapons and,
possibly, find antidotes, was another reason for the rapid deployment of the
intelligence troops.
Thirdly, it was expected that the war
against Japan, especially following the Allied invasion of the Japanese
homeland, would be a bitterly fought and long-lasting battle costing many
casualties on both sides. Where there any weapons in the German arsenal that
could be quickly adapted for use against the Japanese?
Finally, the development of German
miracle weapons had to be based on advances in research and development by
Germany's industry and research facilities from basic to advanced levels and the
results of that research had to be made available to American and Allied
companies for their exploitation and use, especially during the period of
conversion from wartime to peacetime economy.
The
Collectors
The teams collecting military and
industrial information and documents were made up of small groups of military
and/or industrial specialists, working independently. They were recruited from
military or Government laboratories and from American and British companies and
were experts in their fields. Knowing the state of development in their
specialties in their own countries, they were able to judge whether German
development was superior, inferior, or just useful. All teams reported to their
own field agencies; their reports were generally classified "secret" until after
the capitulation of Germany and of Japan respectively. There seems to have been
little coordination or cooperation between the individual agencies and, to the
dismay of German factory owners and what was left of their technical staffs,
many of the targets were visited by several teams and more than once, and, what
one team left behind, the others took. The most important agencies working in
Germany and their 'fields of interest' were the following: (1)
OSS, the Office of Strategic Services
- identified targets of strategic and industrial importance and provided this
information to other agencies which then sent investigative teams.
EEIS, the Enemy Equipment
Intelligence Service - actually located German and Japanese equipment, such as
new aircraft, tanks, binoculars, ammunition, metalworking equipment, etc. for
evaluation and to instruct Allied personnel in its use. Later, the staff was
used to evaluate German industrial equipment in general.
ALSOS Mission - This group, composed
of military and counter-intelligence specialists was charged with a specific
mission: to determine the state of atomic bomb development in
Germany.
FIAT, the Field Intelligence Agency,
Technical - was established to investigate German industrial development during
1939 - 1945 primarily in the American Occupation Zone. Headquartered in
Frankfurt, it was the 'collecting' arm of the Technical Industrial Intelligence
Committee (TIIC).
CIOS, the Combined Intelligence
Objectives Subcommittee - was made up of American and British specialists to
examine German industrial targets. The reports issued by this group are the CIOS
and JIOA (Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency) document series.
TIIB, the Technical Industrial
Intelligence Branch (later: TIIC, Technical Industrial Intelligence Committee) -
was established as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but transferred to the
Department of Commerce in January 1946. Its task was to look into every segment
of the German industrial landscape and obtain any information that might be of
interest to American companies. During 1946 TIIB sent over 400 investigators
into Germany. Many of these industrial experts traveled at their company's
expense, sworn in as temporary Government employees without compensation. TIIB
arranged with the Army for their transportation and for their living and working
quarters in Germany. In return, the investigators agreed that their findings
would be fully reported in writing to TIIB and that these reports would be made
public.
To make sure that individual
investigators did not use information obtained from German companies for their
own or their company's exclusive use, two men from competing companies were
teamed up. Furthermore, the reports submitted were reviewed for completeness by
TIIB staff and the American military government. Overall, TIIB staff selected
from the 3.5 billion pages collected from the files of German industry about 3.5
million which were considered of interest to United States industry. The
documents chosen were filmed in Germany, the rest were left there. In addition,
TIIB brought more than 300,000 pounds of German equipment and product samples
from Germany, in addition to the 200 tons of materials captured by the Army and
Navy, which was also turned over to civilian agencies for study and testing
after the military had completed its studies (2).
Navy Technical Mission, Europe
(Japan) - original a portion of the ALSOS Mission, was assigned to investigate
German (and Japanese) advances in synthetic fuels and lubricants of interest to
the Navy. U.S. Naval Technical Oil Mission in Europe: Production of Synthetic
Fuels by the Hydrogenation of Solid and Liquid Carbonaceous Materials (PB
27701).
TOM (Technical Oil Mission) - A
non-military group sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Mines, was made up of
American and British petroleum experts and charged with investigating the
industrial production of synthetic fuels and lubricants from coal using the
Fischer-Tropsch method. The Bureau and American industry actually built
petroleum manufacturing plants according to German specifications after the war,
but the glut of petroleum available then made the program uneconomical. In the
1970's, however, faced with a petroleum embargo, the Republic of South Africa
developed the SASOL synthetic petroleum plant using the Fischer-Tropsch
synthesis. Working under different economic constellations, it is still in
operation today. U.S. Government Technical Oil Mission. Index. Microfilm.
Reel.... (LC call number: Z6972.U6)
The Documents Research Center, A-2,
United States Air Forces in Europe - was "organized for the purpose of
collecting and processing all captured German air documents. The organization
was moved to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, in 1946 where the project is being
continued by the Air Documents Division, Intelligence, T-2. While the Research
Center was still in Europe it was estimated that between 1,000 and 1,500 tons of
German air documents eventually would be collected. The final screened library,
however, and the collection which is now at Wright Field consists of
approximately 220 tons. These documents are in the process of being cataloged,
indexed, abstracted, translated and analyzed." (3).
The Library of Congress was to have
received a complete copy of the filmed material but only about one third of the
total output was sent. The archival copy was turned over by the Air Force to the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and can be consulted at its Garber Facility in
Suitland, MD. The copy retained by the Library of Congress cannot be used in
modern reader-printers which tear the microfilm copies into small segments. All
books and journals from the same haul were turned over by the Air Force to the
Library of Congress where they were examined and new items incorporated into the
general collections. Duplicates were made available to other libraries or
discarded, if not claimed. The reports are indexed in a multi-volume Desk
Catalog of German and Japanese Air-Technical Documents (Z5063.A1U6). Some of the
air documents were also made available to the Publication Board of the
Department of Commerce, re-issued and made available to the public as PB
documents.
The United States Strategic Bombing
Survey - studied the effectiveness of the Allied bombing effort on targets in
Germany, as well as German-occupied France, Belgium and the
Netherlands.
The Library of Congress Foreign
Mission - was sent to gather books and journals published in Germany (and the
rest of Europe) and not available for purchase through normal channels once the
war had been declared. Up to that point German literature could still be
obtained either directly from the sources or by way of neutral countries
(Sweden).
The
Targets
Any company having in some form
contributed to the German war effort (and who had not, no matter how large and
small) or having research information or products that would be of interest to
Allied manufacturers, was considered a 'target'. Much information on German
industries had already been compiled and made available to the Allied air armies
by the United States intelligence agencies. Further targets were research
institutes, universities, military laboratories, testing ranges and supply
depots, Government agencies like the Reichsforschungsrat (The National Research
Council), even concentration camps (sites of medical research using humans as
test objects), the Reichspatentamt (Patent Office), the
Reichsluftfahrtministerium (Air Force Ministry), the Wehrmachtwaffenamt (Army
Weapons Agency), their subordinate departments, research/test facilities, etc.
It was not always easy to find the
targets - many had been destroyed by bombing or during combat, their documents
burned, looted, removed for or from safe storage; owners, managers, scientific
personnel killed, drafted into the armed forces, dispersed, relocated; roads and
rail lines impassible; the population frightened, uncooperative, hostile: 'After
what you have done to us, why should we give you our family- company- and
commercial secrets? They belong to us, we will need them to rebuild...' In other
cases people cooperated willingly, often for the chance of getting food,
cigarettes.
Sometimes several visits and some
arm-twisting was needed to get the Germans to deliver documents, information,
and sometimes it just took a good dose of Yankee ingenuity. Theodore von Karman,
a world famous aeronautical scientist, who was a member of one of the teams
looking for information on German experimental aircraft, describes his
experiences at an aeronautical research facility near Braunschweig that had
escaped Allied detection and bombing because it was so well camouflaged that
nobody knew it existed. The team had gone through the trashed, chaotic
laboratories, looking, but finding very little, when, suddenly, on a desk in a
corner someone noticed a scale model of the swept-wing bomber, a type of
aircraft that nobody had ever seen before. They reasoned that were there was a
model, there must also be documentation, like wind tunnel, testing, and design
data. But no matter where they looked and whom they interrogated, the records
could not be located. Finally von Karman, who had been a student at nearby
Göttingen University before the war, resorted to a ruse:
I had with me a sergeant assigned to
Intelligence. Frank Tchitcherine was of Russian origin, and in fact had been
related to the first minister of education in the Kerensky government of Russia.
As we were walking to our automobile with the director, I said in English, which
I knew the director understood:
'Listen, Tchitcherine, we are through
here. I think now it is time to notify Russian Intelligence to take
over'
Russian Intelligence was nowhere in
the vicinity. But I knew that the Germans were terrified of the Russians and
that this might stir them into action. I was right. The next day the director
called in Tchitcherine and took him to a dry well. He looked inside. It was full
of documents.
Among them were the papers describing
the sweptback wing and providing considerable wind-tunnel data which showed
clearly that the sweptback plane had superior speed properties near the speed of
sound. These data were the first of its kind. Schairer quickly wrote to his
Boeing associates to stop work on the Mach 1 transonic plane with the straight
wing which they had designed, telling them of his find. He microfilmed the data
and used them when he got back to Seattle to design the B-47, the first U.S.
sweptback bomber....
In going through the papers, Ted
Toller, one of my former assistants who was on a committee involved with these
documents, came to me one day and said that he had found a very interesting
report. The title, as translated by the English-speaking German sergeant, was
'The Resistance of Undernourished Bodies.' Troller wondered what this title was
doing in a collection of aerodynamics material. So he looked up the author and
found it was von Karman. It was a translation of my 1931 paper 'The Drag on
Slender Bodies'.
The documents revealed that the
Germans had conducted a variety of interesting research at Braunschweig. For
instance, they had run studies of the effect of wind on human beings and shown
that the human being can take velocities up to 550 miles an hour. They also had
developed an emergency pressure suit fixed up with a cylinder of oxygen like
those used in USAF life rafts. If a plane flying at 70,000 feet loses pressure,
the pilot can jerk a ribbon and re-pressurize himself. All these items were
valuable to the United States." (4)
The Loot
I am not sure that there was, in the
end, an exact accounting of how many documents/pages were taken from Germany, or
if that was at all possible. Some documents contained more than 1,000 pages,
others, like patent applications, only one.
Von Karman, in the source already
cited goes on to say that "some 3,000,000 documents, weighing 1,500 tons were
sifted and microfilmed in Europe; eventually they formed the basis for the
collections of ASTIA, the Armed Services Technical Information Agency, " now the
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). The Annual Report of the Secretary
of Commerce for 1946 (5) talks about 3,500,000 pages that TIIB selected. If one
adds the documents brought to the United States and processed at Wright Field,
and those deposited at the Library of Congress, then the number of pages becomes
astronomical.
I remember that when I came to the
Library in 1957, there were large green boxes, 'footlockers' 8 feet long,
stored, to the very ceilings, in the hallways and vestibules of the 4th floor of
the Adams Building, containing documents to be processes by the Air Information
and Air Technology Divisions under contract to the Air Force. One day they were
gone - "shipped back to Germany" and soon AID and ATD were abolished also. In
addition to corporate papers, there were interviews with plant/laboratory
personnel, photographs, blueprints, patents and patent applications (the
Secretary of Commerce talks of thousands of applications obtained from the files
of the giant I.G.Farben complex alone which had not even been filed with the
Reichspatentamt because of staff shortages everywhere) and much more. From these
mountains of materials the industrial teams prepared summary reports some up to
1,000 pages thick. To give an idea of the coverage it is interesting to look at
just a small selection of the important new discoveries which they contained:
One of the best customers for German
technical information were the American aircraft and airline industries. In
addition to general studies of the German air transport industry (PB 17920,
19717), there are studies on 'Plastics in the Aircraft Industry' (PB 1104, 4351,
27000, 58373), 'Aircraft Hydraulic and Fuel Systems' (PB 16684), 'Magnetic
Brakes for Propellers (PB 464, 4349), 'Helicopters' (PB 6339, 6340, 16712,
17544), 'De-icing of Windshields' (PB462, 23815, 23856, 31251, 40292, 58242);
then there are numerous reports on rocket fuels (PB186, 392, 405, 4284, 23815,
etc). In terms of military aircraft two reports are of interest: The Horton
Tail-less Aircraft (PB 260) possibly a forerunner of the stealth bomber, and
German High-Speed Airplanes and Design Development (CIOS XXXI-3).
In the area of construction the
Germans were forced, because of the devastating success of Allied bombings, to
put their most important factories underground. Immense tunnels running for
miles under the Harz Mountains in Thuringia were built by slave labor from the
nearby Buchenwald concentration camp at a horrendous cost in human lives to
house whole synthetic fuel refineries as well as aircraft and rocket assembly
lines. Obviously, such underground installations and their ventilation, heating
and cooling, sanitation, etc. systems were of great interest to the Bureau of
Mines and the mining industries, as well as the Defense Department, which was
preparing abandoned mines as 'safe places' for high Government officials in case
of future wars. (PB 25638, 25639, 27779).
Acetylene is one of the most
versatile intermediates for the generation of synthetic rubbers, plastics
(vinyl), and industrial alcohols, plus many other compounds. It is also highly
explosive so that its generation, transport and use must be subject to very
strict controls. German industry, depending greatly on acetylene, devoted much
energy and research to making it safe and expanding its use. (PB 188, 189, 377,
485, 517, 969, 1017, 4287, 7745, 7747, 23750, 25560, 28556, 44943, 46966).
Germany has not been blessed with
significant oil deposits; to fuel her war machine she depended on imports from
the Soviet Union and Rumania. When these sources were lost, she had to rely on
synthetic fuel derived from her rich coal reserves. The process, called the
Fischer-Tropsch Process, uses water gas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon
monoxide derived from the hydrogenation of coal, coke, or lignite and extra
hydrogen over catalysts at elevated pressures and temperature to generate
straight-chain hydrocarbons and waxes which can be further processed to yield
fuels, lubricants, facts, even some type of margarine. (PB 284, 288, 289, 373,
1279, 1291, 7745, 7917, 12624, 18911, 18926, 23750, 28883, 46390, 49196, 66130,
75817, 75845, 77706, 78242)
Plastics and synthetic fibers have
always spawned successful industries in Germany. Here are just a few examples of
many reports published in these areas: 'Plastic Plants' (PB 400, 403, 531, 979,
1069, 25642, 37784); 'Chemical Developments in the Synthetics Industry' (PB
1243); 'Soda Ash and Caustic Soda' (PB 7746, 7797, 27434, 40122); 'Dyestuff
Intermediates' (PB 82, 60945, 67569, 77672, 78269, 78276)
Solid fuels: Germany always has had
enormous supplies of coal in the Ruhr and, after the annexation of portions of
Poland in 1939, also control over the Upper Silesia coal deposits. Improving the
technologies of mining and processing coal was important for the war effort (PB
1827, 4322, 4323, 4345, 4461, 4462, 20579).
Sulfonamide: In wars past more
soldiers died of infections of their wounds than in actual combat. With the
beginning of the 20th century, great strides were made in the development of
sanitary methods and anti-bacterial agents. German doctors, chemists and
pharmacists had always been in the forefront of medical research. The
development of sulfonamide was no exception (that it was tested on human guinea
pigs in the concentration camps is another chapter). (PB 237, 248, 918, 77766,
80380 with 10 supplements)
One of the most dreaded diseases was
malaria and research to find effective drugs was really universal. The German
effort , except for the test methods, was significant (PB 237, 239, 246, 1101,
1718, 1859, 81613)
Some of the most cruel experiments
were performed in the field of aviation medicine by the infamous SS-doctor
Sigismund Rascher at Dachau Concentration Camp. Simulating conditions
experienced by a pilot shot down over the North Atlantic, he subjected inmates
to exposure to cold by immersing them in ice water to find out how long they
could survive and possibly have a chance for being rescued (PB250). Another
experiment involved pilots at high, oxygen-poor altitudes - when should they
pull the cord to inflate the parachute and how long could they free-fall before
losing consciousness? (same report).
Metallurgists in Germany were far
ahead of their American counter-parts in the field of magnesium and magnesium
alloy production and processing; the reports were much in demand by American
companies (PB 204, 18930, 18948, 29663, 23748, 44675, 49828, 94315)
One curiosity is reported in the
literature that simply begs to be repeated: Among all these high-technology,
war-related products and efforts, there appears a lonely teddy bear and other
stuffed toy animals manufactured by the Steiff Company, which was the target
investigated by a British specialist on behalf of a British
manufacturer.
Evaluating the
Loot
The activities of FIAT and the
'acquisition' of German industrial know-how are best described in a unique book
by John Gimbel: "Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder
in Postwar Germany." It is 'must-reading' for anybody studying or interested in
the years immediately following World War II in Europe. It is the only attempt,
to my knowledge, of reporting the efforts of trying to put a price tag on what
was taken. In summary, Gimbel refers to a meeting early in 1947 in Moscow of the
Council of Foreign Ministers, established by the victorious nations to deal with
problems arising from inter-zonal relations and the question of German
reparations.
Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister,
"argued the case of his government's claim against Germany for 10 billion
dollars in reparations, reportedly stating that Great Britain and the United
States had already received considerable reparations from Germany in the form of
patents and other technical know-how. 'Press reports say that these reparations
amount to more than ten billion dollars' Molotov said" (6). (In true Soviet
fashion, and true to the old Communist maxim that 'what is yours is mine and
what is mine is none of your business' Molotov did not mention that the Soviet
Union had already taken from her occupation zone literally everything that was
not nailed down, and if it had been, they took that and the nails, too. For
example, the Russians dismantled vast stretches of the rail system in East
Germany, the locomotives, passenger- and freight cars, the rails, the ties upon
which the rails rested, and then the gravel upon which the ties had been laid).
"General Marshall", Gimbel continues, "the American Foreign Minister, in
response stated: 'We have used United States scientists to obtain information on
German science, including patents, all of which information is being published
in pamphlets and made available to the rest of the world. As a matter of fact,
Amtorg, the Soviet Purchasing Agency in the United States, has been so far the
biggest single purchaser of these pamphlets. The pamphlets cost a nominal fee to
cover printing and administrative expenses. No ten billion in reparations is
involved." (7).
But once raised, the question of the
value of the German industrial information obtained by Britain and the United
States would not go away. Early estimates ranged from $10 million to $275
million. It was General Lucius Clay, the American High Commissioner in Germany,
who kept on raising the question and prod the War-, Navy-, State-, and Commerce
Departments to come up with a 'realistic' figure. General Clay was not against
the official position of the United States that America should not pay the
Germans for the industrial know-how taken; on the other hand he felt strongly
that the value of this information should be counted towards the reparations
that would be imposed by the victors on the Germans. Years of political
maneuvering between the U.S. Government departments involved produced no
results.
The Departments of the Army and the
Navy did submit data; Commerce declined, saying that the true value could only
be assessed five to ten years down the road when it became known what American
industry had done with the information; State refused to comply outright saying
"that such an evaluation would serve no practical purpose except 'to keep the
American conscience clean'... The FIAT material should not be valued for
reparation purposes. The discussants had essentially three reasons: First, given
the hundreds of tons of documents and materials held by the Commerce Department,
the task of sorting and evaluating separate items with the staff that could be
assigned to it would be physically impossible. Second, the material was not only
for the United States, and it would be doubtful that other countries would agree
to charge their reparations accounts similarly. Third, reparations was an
integral concern and properly the subject of an international agreement."
(8)
John Gimbel tried to make his own
evaluation of the know-how taken from Germany. Using statements made in public
or in writing by U.S. Government officials and industrialists directly involved
in evaluating and/or using the information contained in the German documents, as
well as reports from the political and trade press, he arrived at a value of $ 5
billion for the U.S. take. By doubling this value to account for the British
'acquisitions' he arrived at - surprise! - the $10 billion mentioned by Mr.
Molotov.
But this did not conclude the
question of the value of the intellectual know-how derived from German industry.
In late 1946 and early 1947 various German initiatives were started to evaluate
the German losses. Up to this point the Germans had only been repaid for copying
costs of the documents, obviously a ridiculously low sum. But the German efforts
also failed as most companies, even those hardest hit, refused to cooperate for
tax reasons. In other attempts the reported data could not be reduced to common
denominators to yield meaningful results.
Only after the new West German
Government had agreed to forego any tax investigations that might evolve from
the reporting, did industry finally comply. A report, issued by the
Notgemeinschaft für Reparationsgeschädigte Industrie (Emergency Union of
Industries Damaged by Reparations) in February 1951 "estimated the total value
of the patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property ('geistiges Gut')
removed from Germany to be somewhere in the range of 10 to 30 billion
Deutschmarks (DM) not Reichsmark, the currency used in Germany prior to its
devaluation of 1949, or between $4.8 and $12 billion" (9). What was the actual
value? If we consider that the Library of Congress still receives requests for
copies of the German materials, more than 50 years after the War, primarily in
the areas of dyestuffs, plastics, fuels, and, more recently, for the location of
industries, test ranges for guns and ammunition, storage depots of chemical,
biological, and explosive weapons (for the purpose of localizing and sanitizing
toxic soils) then, maybe, the Commerce Department was right when it insisted
that the value should be based on the usefulness and actual use by American
industry over an extended period of time?
Other Foreign
Documents
Obviously, the main interest in
foreign information was concentrated on the German collection: its size, the
immediacy of collecting and processing, the language (many American scientists
and engineers still had studied German in college), the fact that German
industry before the war had been a main competitor of many American companies,
and that the Germans were renowned for the quality of their research. This also
explains why Germany was investigated so thoroughly.
From the very beginning, the
situation involving Japanese information was different: not many people could
read Japanese and the systematic investigation of Japanese industries did not
begin until much later, giving the Japanese industrialists a chance to sort out
what they wanted to give and what not. Also, as the mountains of German
documents, along with materials from U.S. and British sources started to pile
up, the Japanese documents were somewhat neglected. In his Annual Report for
1947 the Secretary of Commerce stated:
In addition to data from Germany,
and documents from American sources, the (Bibliographic and Reference) Division
(of the Office of Technical Services) is beginning to receive materials directly
from Japan. Some of it consists of up-to-date technological studies prepared by
Japanese nationals on subjects of interest to American industry. Many wartime
and pre-war Japanese publications have also been received during the past year
from the Washington Document Center. This Center is the Washington processing
office which was set up to handle materials gathered in Japan by the military
forces. Although much material has already been received, a large part of it is
now out of date and of little value. We have been assured, however, that
valuable documents from this source will reach us during the coming year.
(10)
The Secretary continues:
The Belgian Government has
voluntarily contributed scientific reports to the Division. In addition,
extremely important material has been received from Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Hungary, South Africa, Italy, and France.... The excellent relations
which OTS through this Division, has had with the British in the exchange of
reports is noteworthy. At present the British Intelligence Objective
Subcommittee, commonly known as BIOS, maintains a liaison office in Washington.
Our work with this office might well be cited as a fine example of international
cooperation. The British have generously provided large quantities of their
printed reports and with single microfilm copies of any of their manuscript
reports which were requested. They also provide a special reference service for
this Office and for American business firms. We, on our part, provide a similar
service for the British. (11)
What Happened to the Documents?
We must not forget that the
collectors were dealing with mountains of material and that only a very small
fraction was processed and filmed. Thus the question has remained ever since
"What happened to the rest?" It is still being asked today, especially if a
researcher is interested in, let's say, a particular camera made by the Leitz
Company and he is looking for the user manual. In my search for the answers I
have, over the decades, talked to many people some of whom had been in the
collecting and processing effort. "You cannot imagine, unless you had been
there, how many documents and single pages were scattered all over the floors,
crammed into shelves, stacked from floor to ceiling, falling over, spilling, it
was utter chaos," I was told. The filming was often equally wild: page after
page the documents were pulled through the machines , with quantity rather than
quality being the determining factor by untrained machine operators who did the
best they could under the circumstances. Quality control was non-existent. The
result was that some film rolls contain almost in their entirety, only blurred,
useless images. Also, when specialists wrote reports, let's say on the 'German
Optical Industry' the supporting documents were, unless the were deemed
important enough to be registered individually, discarded; the same happened to
translated documents.
Military and Nazi Party documents
generally were brought to the United States, sorted, filmed, and eventually
returned to German archives. Books and journals were, supposedly, turned over to
the Library of Congress, but we are not sure that we actually received all that
was designated for the Library. According to Richard Eells, Acting Chief of the
Aeronautics Division, "the Library, by agreement with the Air Material Command,
Wright Field, has become the depository for all purely historical and
descriptive portions of this captured material. The preliminary winnowing of the
shipment from Wright Field yielded 9,114 aeronautical books, periodicals, and
ephemera. In addition, more than 18,000 items representing the literature of
related fields were turned over to the Library for its general collection. Some
of the confiscated libraries belonged to institutions that loomed large in the
history of the Luftwaffe: e.g., Junkers, Focke-Wulf, the Deutsche Akademie der
Luftfahrtforschung (German Academy for Aeronautical Research), the Deutsche
Forschungsinstitut für Segelflug (German Research Institute for Gliding), the
Flugfunkforschungsinstitut (Research Institute for Aeronautical Radio), and the
Reichsluftfahrtministerium (Air Ministry) itself." (12). During the past years I
have inspected about two thirds of the Library's aeronautical collection but
found but a dozen or so volumes having book plates ascribing them to the
libraries of the institutes just mentioned. This certainly does not add up to
the 12,000 books from the Junkers Aircraft Company Library alone that we
supposedly received.
It is interesting to note that
according to German newspaper reports (13) published after the war, the American
officer in charge of the team collecting the Junkers Library was none other than
Charles Lindbergh, who was no stranger to Hitler's Germany. Because of his
friendship with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and General Udet (he was later
accused of having been a Nazi sympathizer) many doors had opened to him in Nazi
Germany and he had visited and inspected the aircraft manufactured by Junkers
several times. We must also remember that the Allies had much respect for the
German Luftwaffe and that one of the stipulations of the German capitulation was
that she would never again build an air force. Therefore, all books and reports
in German libraries that could be used to re-build the Luftwaffe, were to be
removed from Germany. Now Dessau, where Junkers was located, was to be in the
designated Russian Zone - why would the Americans leave a library of such
importance to the Russians? So, what happened to these libraries?
Eells, in the article cited (14) also
mentions another important aspect:
A check of the Deutsche
Nationalbibliographie indicates that the Library of Congress has acquired many,
if not all, of the commercial aeronautical imprints in Germany during the war
years.
One of the strengths of the Library
of Congress before and for some decades after the War was its aeronautical
collection. Now, if we already had almost all of the books contained in the
Junkers and the other German libraries, we would have made the rest either
available to other interested American libraries, or, on demand, returned the
volumes to German archives (the disappeared footlockers?). Since the Junkers
Aircraft Company, located in the Russian Zone or the German Democratic Republic,
did no longer exist after 1945, who would have received the returned material?
The Russians?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bibliography
1. Library of Congress. Science &
Technology Division. Note of Karl Green. n.d.
2. United States Department of
Commerce. Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 34th 1946. Washington, DC : GPO,
1946: xxvi-xxvii
3. Eells, Richard. 'Aeronautical
Science. German Documents.' Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current
Acquisitions 3 (4) Aug. 1946
4. Von Karman, Theodore. The Wind and
Beyond. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co. 1967
5. United States Department of
Commerce. Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 34th, 1946. Washington, DC: GPO,
1946
6. Gimbel, John. Science, Technology,
and Reparations. Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. United States Department of
Commerce. Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 35th, 1947. Washington, DC: GPO,
1947
11. Ibid
12. Eels, Richard. 'Aeronautical
Science'. Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 3(4)
Aug. 1947
13a. "Junkers Bibliothek: Ein
verschollenes Objekt der Begierde" Mitteldeutsche Zeitung Dessau, 17 June
1995
13b. "'Bernsteinzimmer der Technik'
soll nach Dessau zurückkehren." Anhaltische Zerbster Nachrichten 24 March
1995
13c. "Fundgrube für Junkers Forschung
und die Bibliothekssuche in Amerika" Der Alte Dessauer, 28 April 1995
14. Eells, Richard. Ibid, 1947
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