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Science, Technology, and Reparations
$18.94
Book
Most people know something about Werner von Braun and the German rocket scientists and engineers whom the Americans brought to the United States after the Second World War. What virtually no one seems to know is that the plan under which they were brought -- Project paperclip -- was but once aspect of a much more comprehensive and systematic program of "intellectual reparations."
This program began in late 1944 with the limited aim of exploiting German scientific and technical know-how in order to shorten the war with Japan. As Allied armies swept across western Germany, teams of dozens of American experts -- drawn from government agencies, industrial and trade associations, and the universities -- visited hundreds of targeted German research institutions, technical schools, and industrial firms. They interviewed personnel, examined processes and products, took photographs and samples, and demanded drawings, plans, blueprints, research reports, and documents of all kinds.
But the limited, war-related aims they began with quickly yielded to the tempting opportunities for industrial and technological plunder in virtually every area of German expertise, including wind tunnels, tape recorders, synthetic fuels and rubber, color film, textiles, machine tools, heavy equipment, ceramics, optical glass, dyes, and electron microscopes. Ostensibly, the information gathered was to be made, in Secretary of State George C. Marshall's words, "available to the rest of the world." In practice, however, much of it was transferred by the scientific consultants and document-screeners directly to their own firms and for their own purposes.
This story has never before been told, and the author's meticulous but highly readable account is based on over ten years of research in German and American public and private archives, many of them previously unused.
One of the most striking revelations in the books is the vast scale of the "intellectual reparations" program. At the Moscow meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in 1947, V.M. Molotov, the Soviet Union's Minister of Foreign Affairs, charged that the United States and Great Britain had taken over $10 billion in reparations from Germany in the form of patents and other technical knowledge. Secretary of State Marshall angrily denied the charge, but no precise evaluation was ever issued by the U. S. government. On the basis of his research, the author concludes that the $10 billion figure dismissed by State Department functionaries as "fantastic" is probably not far from the mark.
General Lucius D. Clay, the American Military Governor in Germany, eventually succeeded in having the program shut down in the interests of German economic recovery, but he failed in his efforts to have an evaluation made in monetary terms to establish a credit to Germany's reparations account. Nevertheless, the popular American belief that the United States took no reparations from Germany needs to be drastically modified.
The exploitation program had a negative effect on the early resumption of postwar German research and economic recovery. In the long run, however, the American exploitation program furthered an extensive network of American-German scientific, business, and industrial collaboration, and it contributed to the American climate of opinion that insured West Germany's participation in the Marshall Plan. Throughout the book, the author has used case studies to illustrate the program -- its nature, extent, and impact upon the Germans and Americans.
John Gimbel is Professor of History Emeritus at Humboldt State University, California.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following original edition:
Title Science, technology, and reparations: exploitation and plunder in postwar Germany
Author John Gimbel
Edition illustrated
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1990
ISBN 0804717613, 9780804717618
Length 280 pages
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A German Community Under American Occupation
$17.83
Book
This is the first comprehensive attempt to study the impact of American occupation upon a German community. By examining documentary sources and personal papers from the occupation period and interviewing a great many Germans and Americans directly associated with the military and civil administration of the town of Marburg, the author has written an illuminating case study of the occupation as a whole.
The study discloses several significant paradoxes: the effect of some military government policies necessarily doomed other military government policies to failure; military government encouraged decentralization and practiced centralization; the American democratization program encouraged and produced institutions and agencies that Germans used to undermine basic occupation policies; undemocratic methods were often used to promote a democratic ideal.
Perhaps the most important failure of the occupation authorities was their refusal to identify themselves with the German liberal and moderate forces that might have aided in the reconstruction of the kind of postwar Germany that the Americans sought to establish. These forces had an important stake in the results of the occupation, but no concessions or rewards were offered to obtain their active support. Instead, the occupation authorities chose to remain positively neutral during the struggle for power and status that liberals and moderates engaged in against leftists and Communists on the one hand, and conservatives, nationalists, and ex-Nazis on the other.
The author states that "The effect of American efforts was to disillusion the occupation's most loyal supporters and to bring forth people who disagreed with Americans about the extent and intent of denazification...; people who disagree with Americans about municipal and county government codes, the nature of the civil service, the structure and purpose of education, the proper political party organization and proper electoral procedures, the extent of industrial disarmament, the value of grass-roots political activities, and many other things."
Two striking conclusions emerge from the study. One is that American occupation policies fundamentally contradicted each other and thus were impossible to apply with any degree of success. The other is that in failing to achieve their stated objectives, Americans restored German self-respect at the expense of American policy and prestige.
Mr. Gimbel is Assistant Professor of History at Humbolt State College, California.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following original edition:
A German community under American occupation: Marburg, 1945-52
John Gimbel
ISBN 0804700613, 9780804700610
259 pages
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