Customer Reviews

Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany

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The author deserves much credit for tackling this difficult subject -- there is a paucity of good archival materials available to reconstruct the extent of these scientific and technological transfers and the actual use and utilization of German technology in America. The author focuses on the former while the latter remains to be fully assessed. With patience and some luck he did locate a large number of relevant documents in U.S. and German archives that deal with the policies and collection efforts in post-war Germany. The story of the race to capture and utilize the German rocket scientists is, of couse, quite well-known -- that operation is but one chapter in this fine book.

I know from my own research that the personnel of Engineering Research Associates, a Saint Paul-based computer company founded in 1946, had access to a German magnetic drum storage device. ERA later developed its own magnetic drum storage which became a common storage device in that early period. Likewise, some American engineers reviewed German research and technology on magnetic recordings, and that served to augment the research being done in this country.

No one who has researched this subject disputes that captured technology made its way to this country and that those records and devices were examined and that knowledge dispersed. But what difference did any of this captured German technology make for American industrial development? In short, we will know for sure. In some cases I am certain it made little difference if any. Professor Gimbel gives his estimate of the overall value of this transfer -- $10 billion in then U.S dollars -- that is as well as any. All in all, an interesting book that offers a tantalizing introduction to the subject.

For missile technology we can be confident that there was a substantial benefit to the transfer of scientific and technological know-how (and personnel) to the United States, albeit a subject NASA would rather have us forget about. Whether anyone else in the future will be able to assess the industry-by-industry impact of these transfers is the challenge that remains.