alt Hacker NewsA good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program.
Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.
If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.
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For any unfamiliar with the history, Russia was a mass murdering machine in this era, vaporizing tens of millions of people, including Russians, in very short spans of time without even a second thought.
We all know Germans was. And some people would fling fecal allegations that “so was the US!”. No. German and Russian actions were categorically different than wartime casualties (even brutal, possibly criminal, wartime casualties like fire bombing heavily civilian enemy areas like Dresden)
This went both ways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim
This is such a gross comment. 'nugget', 'win-win', 'Germans of value'.
Paperclip didn't grab random 'Germans', it pulled in Nazi mass murders and rewarded them for their crimes.
> "Rudolph was barely able to produce four rockets that were later returned from Peenemünde as defective. There are estimates that approximately 20,000 laborers died while building the V-2 rockets at Mittelwerk, more than the V-2 killed in bombardments."
> According to fellow scientists in Paperclip, Rickhey had bragged about killing slave laborers at Mittelwerk.
> Camp inmates, mostly Polish and Soviet POWs, were locked inside of a portable pressure chamber built by the Luftwaffe in which the interior air pressure could be altered to simulate the effects of freefalling from a high-altitude without oxygen. Of the 200 test subjects employed in the experiment 80 were killed by the tests outright, with the remainder subsequently being executed by the SS. ... several Luftwaffe officials associated with Strughold's Institute for Aviation Medicine, including his former research assistant Dr. Hermann Becker-Freyseng and his ex-commanding officer Oskar Schröder, were convicted of crimes against humanity in connection with the Dachau experiments at the 1946–1947 Nuremberg Doctor's Trial. During these proceedings, Strughold contributed several affidavits for the defense on behalf of his accused colleagues.
> When shown a picture of himself standing behind Himmler, von Braun said that he had only worn the SS uniform that one time, but in 2002 a former SS officer at Peenemünde told the BBC that von Braun had regularly worn the SS uniform to official meetings. He began as an Untersturmführer (Second lieutenant) and was promoted three times by Himmler, the last time in June 1943 to SS-Sturmbannführer (Major). Von Braun later stated that these were simply technical promotions received each year regularly by mail.
> The V-2 was a quantum leap of technological change. We got to the Moon using V-2 technology but this was technology that was developed with massive resources, including some particularly grim ones. The V-2 programme was hugely expensive in terms of lives, with the Nazis using slave labour to manufacture these rockets.
> If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could...
Misleading. Pretty much all Germans were eager to surrender to the Western Allies - US/UK/France. That became the German government's official top priority in the closing days of the war, and Eisenhower threatened to seal the Western Front (to German soldiers and civilians fleeing the Soviets) when the Germans dragged their heels on his terms of surrender.
A relatively brief treatment can be found here - https://history.army.mil/portals/143/Images/Publications/cat...
They got a leg up and still the Russians with Sputnik got into space first, on top of splitting Korea and winning in Vietnam and having the nuclear bomb fall into their lap and to top it off they appear to have the Manchurian candidate in the White House.