The Great German Patents Heist
One of the greatest ripoffs of all time was the theft of German patents after World War II
It is quite acceptable to American pride to acknowledge that immigrants have contributed to our prosperity and greatness.
It’s a little harder to swallow that a good deal of our scientific lead and prosperity – despite the ever-increasing burdens of non-skilled illegal immigrants and unproductive home-growns – has come from simply seizing German patents and inventions after World War I and far more so after World War II.1
There are those who claim the key to America’s felicity has been its Jewish citizens. After all, this is now a “service economy” of stockbrokers and financial and entertainment services.
Could America dispense with actually manufacturing or growing anything, and instead focus on the essentials like Broadway shows, Hollywood sitcoms and currency speculation?
The message of Bernt Engelmann’s 1974 Deutschland ohne Juden, published in English by Bantam Books, New York in 1984 as Germany Without Jews, is clear: You Germans were mediocre until we Jews came, and now that we’re gone, you have sunk back into mediocrity.
Engelmann cites endless lists of great Jewish MDs of German or Austrian domicile, several of whom, such as bacteriologists Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) and Robert Koch (1843-1910), won the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology (Ehrlich, 1908; Koch, 1905). [Scriptorium comments: Robert Koch was not Jewish.] Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), of dubious credentials, is one of Engelmann’s prize examples.
Engelmann also slays entire forests with pages of printed paeans to forgotten Jewish playwrights, songsters, operetta producers, critics, publishers etc. How could one forget the immortal Meyerbeer? To the wary eye, it smacks of ethnic self-congratulation.
One gifted Jew writes a piece, another publishes it, yet another reviews it favorably, a fourth sits at the box office counting out his money and a fifth takes his 10 percent as agent – an unconvincing proof that the nation of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven needed music lessons.
Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) and Karl Benz (1844-1929) invented the modern gasoline engine in 1878-1887. Other Germans took the lead in 19th-century chemistry and created the first contact lens (in the 1880s), X-rays (Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895), quantum physics (discovered in 1900 by Max Planck, 1858-1947), aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) and last (and least), saccharin in 1913.
As for previous centuries, the Germans got no credit for inventing the croissant or “Kipferl,” as the Germans call it, in Vienna to celebrate defeating the Turks in 1683; one notes the Turkish religious logo, the crescent (a baked good then snatched up by the French as the “croissant”). Equally, they receive zero credit for baking the first quiche, which in Lorraine and Rhinelander dialects (“Kiisch”) simply means “kitchen leftovers baked into a pie.”
Baked goods aside, the facts reveal that the most creative period in world history may have been Germany between 1932 and 1945, and that much of America’s scientific lead came from looting German patents by the ton, both in World War I and far more so after World War II.
And because Germany was so devastated after World War II, there has been a brain drain ever since of the top young German scientists – to Massachusetts and California for computers and genetics and to greater Los Angeles, Houston and Cape Canaveral for aerospace.
As one German scientist remarked:
“Since the war, we have not had the financing capabilities for basic research for the long-term future. That kind of serious money only the Americans have.
In Germany, and in Japan, also, we do applied and clinical research for immediate applications.
But to be on the cutting edge, the money and the positions are now in America and we have to go there.”2
An astounding admission of the stripping of German inventiveness after the war came in an October 1946 article by C. Lester Walker in Harper’s magazine. Entitled “Secrets by the Thousands,”*** it presents some problems for the Bernt Engelmanns of this world who imply that German science in the 1932-45 period would have been “nothing without the Jews.”
In fact, the article suggests in deadly seriousness that German Chancellor Adolf Hitler had been right, from his point of view, to prolong the war to the last gasp. According to the deputy commanding general of Army Air Forces Intelligence, Air Technical Service Command, in a speech to the American Society of Aeronautical Engineers:
“The Germans were preparing rocket surprises for the whole world in general and England in particular which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year.”
Even without its brilliant Jewish minority, the Germans’ “V-2 rocket which bombed London was just a toy compared to what the Germans had up their sleeve.” They had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of production or development, using every kind of remote control device or fuse: radio, radar, wire-guided, continuous wave, acoustics, infrared, light beams and magnetism.
And for power the Germans were years ahead in jet propulsion at both subsonic and supersonic speeds – even creating a “jet helicopter” wherein tiny jets spun the helicopter blade tips at blinding speeds.
Just as the war was ending, and President Franklin Roosevelt was ordering both Gens. George Patton and Dwight David Eisenhower to pull back and let “Uncle Joe” (Josef Stalin) have Berlin and Eastern Europe, the Germans had been readying their giant A-4 (V2) rocket for production.
Forty-six feet in length, it weighed over 24,000 pounds and could travel 230 miles – rising 60 miles over the earth to a blistering top speed of 3,375 miles per hour. Its secret was a rocket motor running on liquid nitrogen and alcohol. It was either radar controlled or self-guided by a gyroscope. Since it flew faster than the speed of sound (by many times), it could not be heard before it struck.
But most Americans know about German World War II rockets. A few even know that in addition to the car engine the Germans also invented the jet and perfected the superhighway or autobahn (the three most important inventions binding this vast country [i.e. America; Scriptorium ed.] together).
Virtually no one knows that in Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio, in the Library of Congress and in the Department of Commerce in Washington, a “mother lode” of 1,500 tons of German patents and research papers were being mined furiously after the war.
One gloating Washington bureaucrat called it “the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country’s brain power.”
Fortunately, it was for the benefit of the United States, which, having thwarted Hitler’s crusade against the Soviet Union, had to take up the same gauntlet against a communism spread worldwide by the late 1940s.
The genesis of the project to grab German secrets was in 1944, when, amazed by German technology in everything from rockets and jets to Tiger tanks, a Joint Intelligence Objectives committee was set up to confiscate German inventions the instant they were obtained, even before the surrender, for use against Japan.
Even before reaching the German border, fascinating discoveries began to be made, including one with which every American is familiar: audio tape. The 1946 Harper’s article shows the head of the Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch, in quaint excitement:
…[p]ulling some brown, papery-looking ribbon off a spool. It was a quarter-inch wide, with a dull side and a shiny side. “That’s Magnetophone tape,” he said.3 “It’s plastic, metallized on one side with ferrous oxide.
In Germany, that supplanted phonograph recordings. A day’s radio program can be magnetized on one reel. [Then] you can demagnetize it, wipe it off, and put on a new program at any time. No needle, no noise or record wear. An hour-long reel costs 50 cents.”
A Short History of Recording and Its Effects Upon Music by Michael Chanan4 points out that even in the late 1920s, before the “12 darkest years of German history,”5 one Fritz Pfleumer had developed a plastic recording tape. It was launched commercially by BASF6 in 1934.
The idea was based on the film strip, and its original application was for dictation in an office environment. In Britain, a project funded by the great radio genius Guglielmo Marconi was attempting the same thing. (On D-Day, the Americans played audio tapes of combat loudly at various locations to try to throw off the German defenders.)
However, the great leap forward came when one A. M. Poniatoff, president of a small California company called Ampex (a trade name still familiar to the older generation), then wearing a U.S. Army uniform, helped seize German-held Radio Luxembourg in late 1944. Instantly grasping the gold mine in profits and quality which the Magnetophone tape represented, Poniatoff had the 3M Company rush the new tape into American production, and it swept the Los Angeles entertainment industry.
Its major breakthrough came in 1947 when Bing Crosby first used it to record his network shows. The crooner not only preferred the Magnetophone sound but invested heavily in Ampex.
Later, movie soundtracks went onto audio tape as well, improving mixing and dubbing efficiency as well, and avoiding the infuriating mishap where a successfully shot movie scene had to be retaken due to sound defects. Ampex later went on to introduce the first videotape recorders in 1956 (all now but a memory, sacrificed on the altar of free trade with Japan).
The list goes on and on: synthetic mica, which increased American cold steel production by 1,000 percent; “the secrets for 50,000 dyes, many of [which] are faster and better than ours, colors we were never able to make”; milk, butter and bread preservation without chemicals; and refrigeration and air-conditioning for German U-boats so efficient that their subs could cruise from the Atlantic to the Pacific, fight there for two months and return to Germany without having to take on fresh water for the crew.
In addition, there was the pilot ejector seat, the infrared rifle scope, and even the negative-air ionizer, which many Americans use for the fresh feeling it puts in the air, with claims of reduced blood pressure, allergy and asthma symptoms.
In addition to official government looting of Germany (what GIs always called “liberating”), there was also the personal looting bonanza exemplified by Robert Maxwell, financier extraordinaire, and at one time the most hated man in Britain.
The great contribution of this Orthodox Jewish citizen, born Jan Hoch in what was then Czechoslovakia, was to found a scientific publishing empire in Britain, called Pergamon Press, based entirely on German research he had looted with British intelligence connivance.
Maxwell came to dominate the British tabloid press and raided his own employees’ pension fund to the tune of 90 million pounds.
He finally perished mysteriously and nakedly in a plunge from his yacht in 1991 just a week after standing up to the Israeli secret police, the Mossad – who may have set him up in business in the first place.
Interestingly, his main co-conspirator in the United States, Robert Rubin, formerly of Goldman Sachs, is now secretary of the treasury.7
When not gunning down a surrendering German mayor armed only with a white flag (as he boasted in a Der Spiegel interview) or bribing British officers to invent his heroic war record (for which war record Montgomery personally pinned a medal on him), Maxwell/Hoch8 was in the British Zone of Berlin in 1946 with the full backing of British intelligence, coercing the vast research findings of the Springer science publishing house from Springer’s widow for pence on the pound.
Ultimately, after Maxwell stripped $94 million from the pension funds of the 5,000 employees of the Mirror Group, his U.S. financiers at Goldman Sachs were stripped of an estimated $250 million to settle their claims – whereupon Maxwell’s body was fished from the sea by an astonished Spaniard, to be buried with full honors in Israel and hopefully forgotten.
Far from exemplifying that the Germans were nothing without Jewish scientific help, his life suggested that one Jew could become a billionaire exploiting German ideas. Which raises the justifiable question of the atom bomb, which European Jews did produce for America and German scientists did not provide in time for Germany.
In his magisterial Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler (“Conspiracy and Treason Against Hitler”),9 Gen. Otto Ernst Remer details how anti-Hitler elements in the German scientific community maneuvered their own Werner Carl Heisenberg (b. 1901) into the key uranium-developing program at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (now succeeded by the Max Planck Institute of Physics).
His clear mission, proudly proclaimed after World War II,10 was to bureaucratically delay the German A-bomb project until the Allies had won the war.11
As just one example, munitions minister Albert Speer pleaded with Heisenberg and his fellow conspirator von Weizsäcker (brother of a later West German president) to name whatever money or materials they required after they claimed they had been held up by shortages.
Von Weizsäcker’s reply asking for “40,000 marks” caused Speer to stare in amazement, and to later confess that he had himself planned to propose 100 million marks for starters.
Not only did Heisenberg state explicitly to Der Spiegel, “We never tried to produce any atomic bombs and we are glad not to be responsible for having made any,” he also admitted leaking the latest information on German uranium-splitting research to the half-Jewish Danish scientist Niels Bohr, who promptly informed his racial confreres in the U.S.
Thus, Germany did not lack the bomb because it lacked Jews, but rather because a handful of key scientists hostile to Hitler wormed their way into the German atomic program.
Heisenberg had even admitted to a shocked Luftwaffe audience in 1942, after the devastating British 1,000-bomber annihilations of the port cities of Kiel and Lübeck, that Germany could produce a bomb with material “the size of a banana” (gesturing with his hands) to wipe out an entire enemy city, but then he caught himself and said this of course would be economically impossible.12
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here wintersonnenwende.com
Header image: BBC
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