I recently remembered that line from the movie “The Right Stuff”. And it got me thinking… Through “Operation Paperclip”, towards the end of WWII the US got their hands on a bunch of German rocket scientists, which were instrumental in developing the US missiles and space program. Many of them had a… rather checkered past (one of them, if I am not mistaken, was even accused of having carried out human experiments in the camps during the war).
But I haven’t found information about “their” Germans, the ones taken by the Soviet Union to assist in their own missiles and space program. Who were they? Did the Soviets also organize an equivalent of “Operation Paperclip”?
As an aside… What about the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese? I have read that, in spite of the horrendous atrocities they perpetrated, the main leaders of Unit 731 were left basically unmolestedby the Allies in exchange for all the information they had gathered in their experiments… and that most of our current basic knowledge of hypothermia and how to deal with it was learned from the “work” of Unit 731 :eek:
Though I’m not really sure what your exact question is about the rest.
Some of the Paperclip guys were Nazi party members, but even these weren’t complicit in many crimes. Arthur Rudolph was stripped of US citizenship and deported over use of slave labor, though I think there might’ve been someone worse though search isn’t helping me.
I have found the name of the German who was recruited by the US for work in the space program and was accused of carrying out human medical experiments (some of them lethal) during the war. It was Hubertus Strughold.
My question regarding the Soviets was whether there was some famous individual who ended up working for them (like Wernher von Braun ended up working for the US). It seems, however, that the Soviets kept a tight lid on who exactly they took (and it seems that they used much more coercion on “their Germans” than the US did on “theirs”). My Google-Fu is too weak to ferret out any information on this respect.
Finally, about Unit 731, basically what I was wondering is whether there is any truth to those two things I read about – that the leaders of Unit 731 were given immunity by the Allies in exchange for the results of their human experiments on bacteriological and chemical war, and that the basics of how to deal with hypothermia that underlie current treatments for it were developed by Unit 731.
I can’t speak to Japanese experiments, but certainly the Nazis did ‘experiments’ in hypothermia at Dachau. The value of their results has been an area of continued debate: were the study designs even valid? Given the gross ethical violations, should they be referenced even if they are valid? Some have tried to mine useful data from the atrocities; others say the whole should be discarded both for scientific and moral reasons.
I worked for a guy who started his engineering career at Edwards AFB in the early 50’s and he told me we used Nazi data from human test for things like ejector seat stresses on the human back.
The Soviets had Operation Osoaviakim. It can be seen as part of the effort by the Allies to strip the Germans of their best people and technology before Germany could re-arm.
Yes, full immunity in exchange for the results. In fact, not only were they not prosecuted but rather became important member of politics and industry in Japan.
L.P. Beria was placed in charge of the Soviet effort to make a bomb, replacing the rather ineffectual Molotov in 1944. Among the scientists who were ‘invited’ to be guests of the Soviet Union were Nicholaus Riel, Manfred von Ardenne, Gustav Hertz, and Peter Adolf Thiessen.
Yeah, I think that was the guy I was thinking of, sounds familiar at least.
Sort of. Japanese government and military personnel were given a rather wide amnesty beyond certain individuals. So they weren’t unique in some sense, but yes, immunity was granted in exchange for giving the US/West data and not the Soviets.
If there is any way to make a room full of ex-Nazi scientists look better, it’s to put them in a room with mass murderer and serial rapist Beria.
Helmut Gröttrup was probably the leading german rocket engineer working for the Soviet rocket program. The rest of the german rocket engineering team were engineers and technicians involved with mass production of the V2, not design.
The Soviets had a more advanced program anyhow, due to the presence of Sergei Korolev - they did not need significant design input into their rocket program.
So to answer the OP - the US had the “better” germans, but the Soviets had Korolev.
The entire ‘Operation Peperclip’ was only around ~1500 people. The Soviets took more than that just in the Rocket Science group. As well as scoring most of the documentation and the production facilities.
And Sergei Korolev was a great Russion program director (good management is itself a rare skill, Sergei Korolev was apparently outstanding). Perhaps his greatest contribution was his management of his team of German rocket scientists.