I did a report on this in 5th grade, people thought I was making it up.
i had someone here on lemmy try to say the scientists recruited to the US via operation paperclip weren't involved in crimes against humanity. a lot of people have missed in the shuffle of the past 80 years exactly what happened during the holocaust.
The US is all about realpolitik, and begins to make a lot more sense when you look at everything through a Kissinger-shaped lens (rest in piss, you evil bastard). We pretend to be ideological so our citizenry can feel good about ourselves, but the way the nation operates is purely pragmatic. Look no further than Israel-Palestine and how buddy-buddy we are with Saudi Arabia for modern examples. Even our support of Ukraine, while overlapping with an ethical imperative, is driven primarily by the interests of NATO and the relatively inexpensive degradation of Russia’s military and political standing we can participate in. We only give a shit about “human rights” when it benefits us.
Operation Paperclip was pragmatism. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance when we try to hold in our minds that we brought Nazi scientists over and the idea that we’re “the good guys” and fought for “justice,” so our brains try to reduce that cognitive dissonance by saying those scientists weren’t behind any of the evils of the Nazis. They were, obviously. That didn’t matter to our government, but they kept the operation classified for a reason.
The US is all about realpolitik
Not to excuse the US's history of foreign diplomacy, but I think it would be naive to believe that there exists any major power who doesn't treat geopolitics with the same level of pragmatism.
The Soviets hated the Nazi even more than the US did and yet they still had their own version of paperclip. Operation Osoaviakhim brought almost double the number of Nazi scientists into the Soviet Union.
Osoviakhim was somewhat more ideologically consistent than Paperclip. The scientists weren't invited to the USSR with promises of cushy jobs and immunity from prosecution: they were forced from their homes, loaded onto freight trains, and made to work. It was part of the wider program of the Allies using the forced labour of ethnic Germans as a means of war reparations.
Unlike the Soviets the US/UK did everything to keep nazis in power and save them.
I mean, the Soviets didn't offer them any guarantees. But I think that's more of a byproduct of how they held leverage over the specialist, and more of a difference in how the two cultures choose to motivate employees.
Despite this, the affected specialists and their families were doing well compared to citizens of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Zone, apart from the suffering of deportation and isolation. The specialists earned more than their Soviet counterparts. The scientists, technicians and skilled workers were assigned to individual projects and working groups, primarily in the areas of Aeronautics and rocket technology, nuclear research, Chemistry and Optics. The stay was given for about five years.
I think the US media has washed their image so clean with the WW2 movies that most people have no idea about stuff like the nazi rally happened in the US and the support for eugenics in the Us, and the concentration camps in the Us.
lord… i live near two of the american concentration camps called out by name in the planning docs for auschwitz…
Or the Japanese concentration camps. USA bigot since day one. USA more like a white supremacists wet dream.
not to mention that one of the issues Nuremburg faced at the time was they couldn't go too heavy on the pro-Jewish side because your average man on the street was so antisemitic as a matter of course that if you looked too sympathetic towards the holocaust you'd lose popular support.
Paperclip can be rationalised as pragmatic, but bow about these guys?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_Gs-0dhOo
https://ebeggin.substack.com/p/ratlines-nato-and-the-fourth-reich
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-nazi-officials-in-germany-post-world-war-ii-government-2016-10?r=US&IR=T
Changed my view on history over the years.
They were effective anti-communists. Same reason after the War the US cuddled up with the essentially fascist regimes of Salazar and Franco.
Greece also was fascist.
All of them got a place in NATO, like many nazis.
They were anti-communist bcs that is the main characteristic of fascists.
And the US has zero problem with that, on the contrary.
Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer
R.I.P. Tom Lehrer
(Heard this first in For All Mankind, an excellent show I recommend to everyone, pirate it if you don’t have Apple TV+.)
Well shit I didn't know he died
The difference is that the Americans rolled out a red carpet for the Nazis and offered employment contracts. The Soviets showed up one night and kidnapped nearly 7000 nazis at gunpoint, and then forced them to work to pay reparations. Based.
Wouldn't that count as slave labour?
Wouldn't that count as slave labour?
Not according to the Allies at the Yalta conference.
By the late 1940s, the only people claiming that the labor enjoyed by the Soviets at the hands of captured Nazis was "slavery" - were Nazis.
By all allied accounts, using German labor to pay reparations was deemed acceptable given how the Soviets had just sacrificed 27 million people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II
Yes but you see when the Communists do it it's "based". /s
Always check which instance someone is using. If it's lemmy.ml it's people who worship Soviet Russia and China
They also committed mass rapes
The frogurt contains potassium cyanide.
They also claimed 7 out of every 10 Nazis killed in WWII, and by all accounts at the time, contributed the most to winning the war.
Absolutely...while kidnapping, raping, and murdering children. There was a reason Germans wanted the west troops to march in as opposed to the soviets.
And now the Marxist state is a fascist one.
Hmm.
And now the one that fought fascism is a fascist one.
Hmm.
Let's be honest, practically everyone is turning fascist these days, for one reason or another.
Fascist helping fascists in power
putin, xi, trump, the axis of evil
To be fair to Von Braun, he did have slaves build his rockets.
Russia like "Ooh! Write that down!"
Huh?
Russia also employed a bunch of Nazi scientists for their own rocket program.
Memorable quote from The Right Stuff, a good movie about the Space Race: "Our Nazis are better than their Nazis."
Its the reason the USA is fucked right now, they witness protectioned a bunch of nazis and they grew familys based on evil values.
Well Wernher von Braun was a weird one... for example he opposed segregation while some local govenor clearly did not
I do not think german nazis were too motivated against africans, specially african-americans. They were ultra racist against Jewish and Slavic.
The American nazis were the ones obsessed with skin color against black people.
At least that's the impression I get when reading about those times.
What were they supposed to do, leave them all to Operation Osoaviakhim?
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