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[igotthisguitar]

Project Paperclip: Dark Side of the Moon
By Andrew Walker
BBC News

Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost.

The end of World War II saw an intense scramble for Nazi Germany's many technological secrets. The Allies vied to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble of the Thousand Year Reich for themselves, while preventing others from doing the same.

The range of Germany's technical achievement astounded Allied scientific intelligence experts accompanying the invading forces in 1945.


Wernher von Braun: Nasa icon and former SS officer

Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology and hardened armour were just some of the groundbreaking technologies developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops and factories, even as Germany was losing the war.

And it was the US and the Soviet Union which, in the first days of the Cold War, found themselves in a race against time to uncover Hitler's scientific secrets.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4443934.stm

[mindmetoo]

The stealth bomber is hardly a copy of a 1940s German design. It was well understood since the dawn of aeronautical science that the flying wing is the most efficient shape. It's a bit like how several cultures have all come up with the pyramid design. People will use this as evidence they must have talked to each other or space aliens shuttled between civilizations... No. When you build up and want to build high, the pyramid is the most obvious solution. It's how nature builds high.

There were many wooden aircraft in the British fleet, left over from WWI and between the wars, that were likewise "invisible" to radar.

It would seem a crime that Northrop, given this "stealth" plane, couldn't crank out a stealth bomber for the next 30 years if the Germans had managed such in half a decade.

Modern stealth owes far more to Soviet mathematics and American super computers than WWII era German wonder science.

[mindmetoo]

Now that I think of it, who here ever used the Paperclip word processor for the C64? Now thems was the days.

[igotthisguitar]

CIA suppressed Eichmann whereabouts: report
By David Morgan
Tue Jun 6, 9:10 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA suppressed the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to help protect high ranking West German officials from possible revelations about their own Nazi pasts, according to CIA documents released on Tuesday.



A March 1958 memo from West German intelligence informed the CIA that Eichmann, the senior Gestapo officer who oversaw Hitler's "Final Solution" to annihilate European Jewry, was living under the alias "Clemens" in Argentina where he had arrived seven years earlier, the documents show.

"It now appears that West Germany could have captured him in 1958, if it wished to," said University of Virginia historian Timothy Naftali, director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

"Newly released CIA materials suggest that in the highest levels of the Konrad Adenauer government, there was concern about what Eichmann could say if caught about those close to the chancellor."

He was speaking at a news conference where a government working group headed by the National Archives announced the release of 27,000 pages of CIA documents relating to the spy agency's ties to former Nazis, including war criminals.

The CIA also could have passed along the information to Israeli intelligence, which was ending its own search for Eichmann in Argentina when the U.S. spy agency received word of his whereabouts from West Germany.

It was not U.S. policy at the time to pursue former Nazis, who were still being recruited as Cold War spies against the Soviet Union.

The Israelis finally captured Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. He was tried in Jerusalem for crimes against the Jewish people, found guilty and hanged in 1962.

But Naftali said the CIA also helped West Germany to suppress part of Eichmann's diary that could have embarrassed Adenauer's national security adviser, Hans Globke, himself a former Nazi.

Eichmann's family had sold the Nazi fugitive's memoirs to Life magazine to raise money for his defense.

West Germany officials asked the CIA to help suppress the document.

"The CIA explained that they could not stop publication but persuaded Life (magazine) to delete the one reference to Globke in the excerpts the magazine was planning to publish," Naftali said.

"The CIA, which worked closely with Globke, assisted the West Germans in protecting him from Eichmann," he said.

About 8 million pages of documents from agencies that also include the FBI and the Defense Department have been declassified under the disclosure act.

The working group established by the disclosure act is also examining federal government affiliations with war criminals from Imperial Japan.

The CIA had previously released more than 1.2 million pages of documents relating to former Nazis in compliance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.

The historians, who examined newly released CIA documents, told a news conference that America's use of war criminals in Cold War intelligence mainly produced unreliable information, sometimes with disastrous consequences for U.S. interests.

"We have not found any evidence that hiring these tainted individuals brought little other than operational problems and moral confusion," Naftali said.

[ChopChaeJoe]