October 2002

The more desperate the situation became for the Axis Powers, the weirder the schemes that came to light: there was talk, for example, that the Japanese were building mini-bombers which could be stored on U-boats and thus transported close to the Central American mainland. Re-assembled on board and launched from the boat, these bombers were to destroy in a suicide mission, the gates of the Panama Canal and thus interrupt the shipping of essential war materials and supplies from the factories of the eastern United States to the Pacific theater of war. The American and British teams of military and industrial specialists following the combat troops were charged to find out what was actually there and what could, reasonably, be expected to happen. This was, by no means, a safe and pleasant job. Most of the 'targets' had, more or less, been subjected to bombing or devastated during the fighting; the Germans were still counter-attacking; there were mines and unexploded ammunition everywhere; and the just 'liberated ' Germans were not always friendly or cooperating. Some of the intelligence men lost their lives or were wounded and all were living and working under conditions that were not better than those for the soldiers. But why the hurry, could this information gathering not have taken place later?
 
One reason why not was the lack of intelligence concerning the state of atomic bomb development in Germany. The Allies did not know that Hitler, not wanting, or not being able to recognize the revolutionary potential of atomic weapons, did not favor, and, therefore, support financially, the development of these bombs on the level that would have assured success. There was also talk later on that German physicists like Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, and their staffs, who had been in the forefront of atomic research prior to the war, were hesitant to deliver the all-destructive power of the atom into the Fuehrer's hands and kept stalling. Furthermore, some of the most brilliant minds had left Germany and Europe for the United States during Hitler's persecution of the Jews and were now working for the Allies. True or false: the West did not know what was really going on and how far the German research had advanced literally until the last days of the conflict when, with the capture of Heisenberg, they finally could breathe easier. 
 
What was known to the Allies was that the German chemists had developed highly toxic and deadly gases and biological cultures, that these were already being used to kill Jews and other 'undesirables' by the thousands, and that there would be a good chance that Hitler would use these poisons at the end of the war to destroy his enemies and what was left of his own people. To secure and study these weapons and, possibly, find antidotes, was another reason for the rapid deployment of the intelligence troops.
 
Thirdly, it was expected that the war against Japan, especially following the Allied invasion of the Japanese homeland, would be a bitterly fought and long-lasting battle costing many casualties on both sides. Where there any weapons in the German arsenal that could be quickly adapted for use against the Japanese?
 
Finally, the development of German miracle weapons had to be based on advances in research and development by Germany's industry and research facilities from basic to advanced levels and the results of that research had to be made available to American and Allied companies for their exploitation and use, especially during the period of conversion from wartime to peacetime economy.
 
1.The Collectors
 
The teams collecting military and industrial information and documents were made up of small groups of military and/or industrial specialists, working independently. They were recruited from military or Government laboratories and from American and British companies and were experts in their fields. Knowing the state of development in their specialties in their own countries, they were able to judge whether German development was superior, inferior, or just useful. All teams reported to their own field agencies; their reports were generally classified "secret" until after the capitulation of Germany and of Japan respectively. There seems to have been little coordination or cooperation between the individual agencies and, to the dismay of German factory owners and what was left of their technical staffs, many of the targets were visited by several teams and more than once, and, what one team left behind, the others took. The most important agencies working in Germany and their 'fields of interest' were the following: (1)

OSS, the Office of Strategic Services - identified targets of strategic and industrial importance and provided this information to other agencies which then sent investigative teams.

EEIS, the Enemy Equipment Intelligence Service - actually located German and Japanese equipment, such as new aircraft, tanks, binoculars, ammunition, metalworking equipment, etc. for evaluation and to instruct Allied personnel in its use. Later, the staff was used to evaluate German industrial equipment in general.

ALSOS Mission - This group, composed of military and counter-intelligence specialists was charged with a specific mission: to determine the state of atomic bomb development in Germany.

FIAT, the Field Intelligence Agency, Technical - was established to investigate German industrial development during 1939 - 1945 primarily in the American Occupation Zone. Headquartered in Frankfurt, it was the 'collecting' arm of the Technical Industrial Intelligence Committee (TIIC). 

CIOS, the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee - was made up of American and British specialists to examine German industrial targets. The reports issued by this group are the CIOS and JIOA (Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency) document series.

TIIB, the Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch (later: TIIC, Technical Industrial Intelligence Committee) - was established as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but transferred to the Department of Commerce in January 1946. Its task was to look into every segment of the German industrial landscape and obtain any information that might be of interest to American companies. During 1946 TIIB sent over 400 investigators into Germany. Many of these industrial experts traveled at their company's expense, sworn in as temporary Government employees without compensation. TIIB arranged with the Army for their transportation and for their living and working quarters in Germany. In return, the investigators agreed that their findings would be fully reported in writing to TIIB and that these reports would be made public. 

To make sure that individual investigators did not use information obtained from German companies for their own or their company's exclusive use, two men from competing companies were teamed up. Furthermore, the reports submitted were reviewed for completeness by TIIB staff and the American military government. Overall, TIIB staff selected from the 3.5 billion pages collected from the files of German industry about 3.5 million which were considered of interest to United States industry. The documents chosen were filmed in Germany, the rest were left there. In addition, TIIB brought more than 300,000 pounds of German equipment and product samples from Germany, in addition to the 200 tons of materials captured by the Army and Navy, which was also turned over to civilian agencies for study and testing after the military had completed its studies (2). 

Navy Technical Mission, Europe (Japan) - original a portion of the ALSOS Mission, was assigned to investigate German (and Japanese) advances in synthetic fuels and lubricants of interest to the Navy. U.S. Naval Technical Oil Mission in Europe: Production of Synthetic Fuels by the Hydrogenation of Solid and Liquid Carbonaceous Materials (PB 27701).

TOM (Technical Oil Mission) - A non-military group sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Mines, was made up of American and British petroleum experts and charged with investigating the industrial production of synthetic fuels and lubricants from coal using the Fischer-Tropsch method. The Bureau and American industry actually built petroleum manufacturing plants according to German specifications after the war, but the glut of petroleum available then made the program uneconomical. In the 1970's, however, faced with a petroleum embargo, the Republic of South Africa developed the SASOL synthetic petroleum plant using the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Working under different economic constellations, it is still in operation today. U.S. Government Technical Oil Mission. Index. Microfilm. Reel.... (LC call number: Z6972.U6)

The Documents Research Center, A-2, United States Air Forces in Europe - was "organized for the purpose of collecting and processing all captured German air documents. The organization was moved to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, in 1946 where the project is being continued by the Air Documents Division, Intelligence, T-2. While the Research Center was still in Europe it was estimated that between 1,000 and 1,500 tons of German air documents eventually would be collected. The final screened library, however, and the collection which is now at Wright Field consists of approximately 220 tons. These documents are in the process of being cataloged, indexed, abstracted, translated and analyzed." (3). 

The Library of Congress was to have received a complete copy of the filmed material but only about one third of the total output was sent. The archival copy was turned over by the Air Force to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and can be consulted at its Garber Facility in Suitland, MD. The copy retained by the Library of Congress cannot be used in modern reader-printers which tear the microfilm copies into small segments. All books and journals from the same haul were turned over by the Air Force to the Library of Congress where they were examined and new items incorporated into the general collections. Duplicates were made available to other libraries or discarded, if not claimed. The reports are indexed in a multi-volume Desk Catalog of German and Japanese Air-Technical Documents (Z5063.A1U6). Some of the air documents were also made available to the Publication Board of the Department of Commerce, re-issued and made available to the public as PB documents.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey - studied the effectiveness of the Allied bombing effort on targets in Germany, as well as German-occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The Library of Congress Foreign Mission - was sent to gather books and journals published in Germany (and the rest of Europe) and not available for purchase through normal channels once the war had been declared. Up to that point German literature could still be obtained either directly from the sources or by way of neutral countries (Sweden).

2. The Targets

Any company having in some form contributed to the German war effort (and who had not, no matter how large and small) or having research information or products that would be of interest to Allied manufacturers, was considered a 'target'. Much information on German industries had already been compiled and made available to the Allied air armies by the United States intelligence agencies. Further targets were research institutes, universities, military laboratories, testing ranges and supply depots, Government agencies like the Reichsforschungsrat (The National Research Council), even concentration camps (sites of medical research using humans as test objects), the Reichspatentamt (Patent Office), the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (Air Force Ministry), the Wehrmachtwaffenamt (Army Weapons Agency), their subordinate departments, research/test facilities, etc. 

It was not always easy to find the targets - many had been destroyed by bombing or during combat, their documents burned, looted, removed for or from safe storage; owners, managers, scientific personnel killed, drafted into the armed forces, dispersed, relocated; roads and rail lines impassible; the population frightened, uncooperative, hostile: 'After what you have done to us, why should we give you our family- company- and commercial secrets? They belong to us, we will need them to rebuild...' In other cases people cooperated willingly, often for the chance of getting food, cigarettes. 

Sometimes several visits and some arm-twisting was needed to get the Germans to deliver documents, information, and sometimes it just took a good dose of Yankee ingenuity. Theodore von Karman, a world famous aeronautical scientist, who was a member of one of the teams looking for information on German experimental aircraft, describes his experiences at an aeronautical research facility near Braunschweig that had escaped Allied detection and bombing because it was so well camouflaged that nobody knew it existed. The team had gone through the trashed, chaotic laboratories, looking, but finding very little, when, suddenly, on a desk in a corner someone noticed a scale model of the swept-wing bomber, a type of aircraft that nobody had ever seen before. They reasoned that were there was a model, there must also be documentation, like wind tunnel, testing, and design data. But no matter where they looked and whom they interrogated, the records could not be located. Finally von Karman, who had been a student at nearby Goettingen University before the war, resorted to a ruse:

"I had with me a sergeant assigned to Intelligence. Frank Tchitcherine was of Russian origin, and in fact had been related to the first minister of education in the Kerensky government of Russia. As we were walking to our automobile with the director, I said in English, which I knew the director understood:

'Listen, Tchitcherine, we are through here. I think now it is time to notify Russian Intelligence to take over.'
Russian Intelligence was nowhere in the vicinity. But I knew that the Germans were terrified of the Russians and that this might stir them into action. I was right. The next day the director called in Tchitcherine and took him to a dry well. He looked inside. It was full of documents.

Among them were the papers describing the sweptback wing and providing considerable wind-tunnel data which showed clearly that the sweptback plane had superior speed properties near the speed of sound. These data were the first of its kind. Schairer quickly wrote to his Boeing associates to stop work on the Mach 1 transonic plane with the straight wing which they had designed, telling them of his find. He microfilmed the data and used them when he got back to Seattle to design the B-47, the first U.S. sweptback bomber....

In going through the papers, Ted Toller, one of my former assistants who was on a committee involved with these documents, came to me one day and said that he had found a very interesting report. The title, as translated by the English-speaking German sergeant, was 'The Resistance of Undernourished Bodies.' Troller wondered what this title was doing in a collection of aerodynamics material. So he looked up the author and found it was von Karman. It was a translation of my 1931 paper 'The Drag on Slender Bodies'.

The documents revealed that the Germans had conducted a variety of interesting research at Braunschweig. For instance, they had run studies of the effect of wind on human beings and shown that the human being can take velocities up to 550 miles an hour. They also had developed an emergency pressure suit fixed up with a cylinder of oxygen like those used in USAF life rafts. If a plane flying at 70,000 feet loses pressure, the pilot can jerk a ribbon and re-pressurize himself. All these items were valuable to the United States." (4)

3. The Loot

I am not sure that there was, in the end, an exact accounting of how many documents/pages were taken from Germany, or if that was at all possible. Some documents contained more than 1,000 pages, others, like patent applications, only one.
Von Karman, in the source already cited goes on to say that "some 3,000,000 documents, weighing 1,500 tons were sifted and microfilmed in Europe; eventually they formed the basis for the collections of ASTIA, the Armed Services Technical Information Agency, " now the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). The Annual Report of the Secretary of Commerce for 1946 (5) talks about 3,500,000 pages that TIIB selected. If one adds the documents brought to the United States and processed at Wright Field, and those deposited at the Library of Congress, then the number of pages becomes astronomical. 

I remember that when I came to the Library in 1957, there were large green boxes, 'footlockers' 8 feet long, stored, to the very ceilings, in the hallways and vestibules of the 4th floor of the Adams Building, containing documents to be processes by the Air Information and Air Technology Divisions under contract to the Air Force. One day they were gone - "shipped back to Germany" and soon AID and ATD were abolished also. In addition to corporate papers, there were interviews with plant/laboratory personnel, photographs, blueprints, patents and patent applications (the Secretary of Commerce talks of thousands of applications obtained from the files of the giant I.G.Farben complex alone which had not even been filed with the Reichspatentamt because of staff shortages everywhere) and much more. From these mountains of materials the industrial teams prepared summary reports some up to 1,000 pages thick. To give an idea of the coverage it is interesting to look at just a small selection of the important new discoveries which they contained: 

One of the best customers for German technical information were the American aircraft and airline industries. In addition to general studies of the German air transport industry (PB 17920, 19717), there are studies on 'Plastics in the Aircraft Industry' (PB 1104, 4351, 27000, 58373), 'Aircraft Hydraulic and Fuel Systems' (PB 16684), 'Magnetic Brakes for Propellers (PB 464, 4349), 'Helicopters' (PB 6339, 6340, 16712, 17544), 'De-icing of Windshields' (PB462, 23815, 23856, 31251, 40292, 58242); then there are numerous reports on rocket fuels (PB186, 392, 405, 4284, 23815, etc). In terms of military aircraft two reports are of interest: The Horton Tail-less Aircraft (PB 260) possibly a forerunner of the stealth bomber, and German High-Speed Airplanes and Design Development (CIOS XXXI-3). 

In the area of construction the Germans were forced, because of the devastating success of Allied bombings, to put their most important factories underground. Immense tunnels running for miles under the Harz Mountains in Thuringia were built by slave labor from the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp at a horrendous cost in human lives to house whole synthetic fuel refineries as well as aircraft and rocket assembly lines. Obviously, such underground installations and their ventilation, heating and cooling, sanitation, etc. systems were of great interest to the Bureau of Mines and the mining industries, as well as the Defense Department, which was preparing abandoned mines as 'safe places' for high Government officials in case of future wars. (PB 25638, 25639, 27779).

Acetylene is one of the most versatile intermediates for the generation of synthetic rubbers, plastics (vinyl), and industrial alcohols, plus many other compounds. It is also highly explosive so that its generation, transport and use must be subject to very strict controls. German industry, depending greatly on acetylene, devoted much energy and research to making it safe and expanding its use. (PB 188, 189, 377, 485, 517, 969, 1017, 4287, 7745, 7747, 23750, 25560, 28556, 44943, 46966). 

Germany has not been blessed with significant oil deposits; to fuel her war machine she depended on imports from the Soviet Union and Rumania. When these sources were lost, she had to rely on synthetic fuel derived from her rich coal reserves. The process, called the Fischer-Tropsch Process, uses water gas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide derived from the hydrogenation of coal, coke, or lignite and extra hydrogen over catalysts at elevated pressures and temperature to generate straight-chain hydrocarbons and waxes which can be further processed to yield fuels, lubricants, facts, even some type of margarine. (PB 284, 288, 289, 373, 1279, 1291, 7745, 7917, 12624, 18911, 18926, 23750, 28883, 46390, 49196, 66130, 75817, 75845, 77706, 78242)

Plastics and synthetic fibers have always spawned successful industries in Germany. Here are just a few examples of many reports published in these areas: 'Plastic Plants' (PB 400, 403, 531, 979, 1069, 25642, 37784); 'Chemical Developments in the Synthetics Industry' (PB 1243); 'Soda Ash and Caustic Soda' (PB 7746, 7797, 27434, 40122); 'Dyestuff Intermediates' (PB 82, 60945, 67569, 77672, 78269, 78276)

Solid fuels: Germany always has had enormous supplies of coal in the Ruhr and, after the annexation of portions of Poland in 1939, also control over the Upper Silesia coal deposits. Improving the technologies of mining and processing coal was important for the war effort (PB 1827, 4322, 4323, 4345, 4461, 4462, 20579).

Sulfonamide: In wars past more soldiers died of infections of their wounds than in actual combat. With the beginning of the 20th century, great strides were made in the development of sanitary methods and anti-bacterial agents. German doctors, chemists and pharmacists had always been in the forefront of medical research. The development of sulfonamide was no exception (that it was tested on human guinea pigs in the concentration camps is another chapter). (PB 237, 248, 918, 77766, 80380 with 10 supplements)

One of the most dreaded diseases was malaria and research to find effective drugs was really universal. The German effort , except for the test methods, was significant (PB 237, 239, 246, 1101, 1718, 1859, 81613)

Some of the most cruel experiments were performed in the field of aviation medicine by the infamous SS-doctor Sigismund Rascher at Dachau Concentration Camp. Simulating conditions experienced by a pilot shot down over the North Atlantic, he subjected inmates to exposure to cold by immersing them in ice water to find out how long they could survive and possibly have a chance for being rescued (PB250). Another experiment involved pilots at high, oxygen-poor altitudes - when should they pull the cord to inflate the parachute and how long could they free-fall before losing consciousness? (same report).

Metallurgists in Germany were far ahead of their American counter-parts in the field of magnesium and magnesium alloy production and processing; the reports were much in demand by American companies (PB 204, 18930, 18948, 29663, 23748, 44675, 49828, 94315)

One curiosity is reported in the literature that simply begs to be repeated: Among all these high-technology, war-related products and efforts, there appears a lonely teddy bear and other stuffed toy animals manufactured by the Steiff Company, which was the target investigated by a British specialist on behalf of a British manufacturer.

4. Evaluating the Loot

The activities of FIAT and the 'acquisition' of German industrial know-how are best described in a unique book by John Gimbel: "Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany." It is 'must-reading' for anybody studying or interested in the years immediately following World War II in Europe. It is the only attempt, to my knowledge, of reporting the efforts of trying to put a price tag on what was taken. In summary, Gimbel refers to a meeting early in 1947 in Moscow of the Council of Foreign Ministers, established by the victorious nations to deal with problems arising from inter-zonal relations and the question of German reparations. 

Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, "argued the case of his government's claim against Germany for 10 billion dollars in reparations, reportedly stating that Great Britain and the United States had already received considerable reparations from Germany in the form of patents and other technical know-how. 'Press reports say that these reparations amount to more than ten billion dollars' Molotov said" (6). (In true Soviet fashion, and true to the old Communist maxim that 'what is yours is mine and what is mine is none of your business' Molotov did not mention that the Soviet Union had already taken from her occupation zone literally everything that was not nailed down, and if it had been, they took that and the nails, too. For example, the Russians dismantled vast stretches of the rail system in East Germany, the locomotives, passenger- and freight cars, the rails, the ties upon which the rails rested, and then the gravel upon which the ties had been laid). "General Marshall", Gimbel continues, "the American Foreign Minister, in response stated: 'We have used United States scientists to obtain information on German science, including patents, all of which information is being published in pamphlets and made available to the rest of the world. As a matter of fact, Amtorg, the Soviet Purchasing Agency in the United States, has been so far the biggest single purchaser of these pamphlets. The pamphlets cost a nominal fee to cover printing and administrative expenses. No ten billion in reparations is involved." (7).

But once raised, the question of the value of the German industrial information obtained by Britain and the United States would not go away. Early estimates ranged from $10 million to $275 million. It was General Lucius Clay, the American High Commissioner in Germany, who kept on raising the question and prod the War-, Navy-, State-, and Commerce Departments to come up with a 'realistic' figure. General Clay was not against the official position of the United States that America should not pay the Germans for the industrial know-how taken; on the other hand he felt strongly that the value of this information should be counted towards the reparations that would be imposed by the victors on the Germans. Years of political maneuvering between the U.S. Government departments involved produced no results. 

The Departments of the Army and the Navy did submit data; Commerce declined, saying that the true value could only be assessed five to ten years down the road when it became known what American industry had done with the information; State refused to comply outright saying "that such an evaluation would serve no practical purpose except 'to keep the American conscience clean'... The FIAT material should not be valued for reparation purposes. The discussants had essentially three reasons: First, given the hundreds of tons of documents and materials held by the Commerce Department, the task of sorting and evaluating separate items with the staff that could be assigned to it would be physically impossible. Second, the material was not only for the United States, and it would be doubtful that other countries would agree to charge their reparations accounts similarly. Third, reparations was an integral concern and properly the subject of an international agreement." (8)

John Gimbel tried to make his own evaluation of the know-how taken from Germany. Using statements made in public or in writing by U.S. Government officials and industrialists directly involved in evaluating and/or using the information contained in the German documents, as well as reports from the political and trade press, he arrived at a value of $ 5 billion for the U.S. take. By doubling this value to account for the British 'acquisitions' he arrived at - surprise! - the $10 billion mentioned by Mr. Molotov.

But this did not conclude the question of the value of the intellectual know-how derived from German industry. In late 1946 and early 1947 various German initiatives were started to evaluate the German losses. Up to this point the Germans had only been repaid for copying costs of the documents, obviously a ridiculously low sum. But the German efforts also failed as most companies, even those hardest hit, refused to cooperate for tax reasons. In other attempts the reported data could not be reduced to common denominators to yield meaningful results. 

Only after the new West German Government had agreed to forego any tax investigations that might evolve from the reporting, did industry finally comply. A report, issued by the Notgemeinschaft fuer Reparationsgeschaedigte Industrie (Emergency Union of Industries Damaged by Reparations) in February 1951 "estimated the total value of the patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property ('geistiges Gut') removed from Germany to be somewhere in the range of 10 to 30 billion Deutschmarks (DM) not Reichsmark, the currency used in Germany prior to its devaluation of 1949, or between $4.8 and $12 billion" (9). What was the actual value? If we consider that the Library of Congress still receives requests for copies of the German materials, more than 50 years after the War, primarily in the areas of dyestuffs, plastics, fuels, and, more recently, for the location of industries, test ranges for guns and ammunition, storage depots of chemical, biological, and explosive weapons (for the purpose of localizing and sanitizing toxic soils) then, maybe, the Commerce Department was right when it insisted that the value should be based on the usefulness and actual use by American industry over an extended period of time?

5. Other Foreign Documents

Obviously, the main interest in foreign information was concentrated on the German collection: its size, the immediacy of collecting and processing, the language (many American scientists and engineers still had studied German in college), the fact that German industry before the war had been a main competitor of many American companies, and that the Germans were renowned for the quality of their research. This also explains why Germany was investigated so thoroughly. 

From the very beginning, the situation involving Japanese information was different: not many people could read Japanese and the systematic investigation of Japanese industries did not begin until much later, giving the Japanese industrialists a chance to sort out what they wanted to give and what not. Also, as the mountains of German documents, along with materials from U.S. and British sources started to pile up, the Japanese documents were somewhat neglected. In his Annual Report for 1947 the Secretary of Commerce stated: " In addition to data from Germany, and documents from American sources, the (Bibliographic and Reference) Division (of the Office of Technical Services) is beginning to receive materials directly from Japan. Some of it consists of up-to-date technological studies prepared by Japanese nationals on subjects of interest to American industry. Many wartime and pre-war Japanese publications have also been received during the past year from the Washington Document Center. This Center is the Washington processing office which was set up to handle materials gathered in Japan by the military forces. Although much material has already been received, a large part of it is now out of date and of little value. We have been assured, however, that valuable documents from this source will reach us during the coming year." (10)

The Secretary continues: "The Belgian Government has voluntarily contributed scientific reports to the Division. In addition, extremely important material has been received from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hungary, South Africa, Italy, and France.... The excellent relations which OTS through this Division, has had with the British in the exchange of reports is noteworthy. At present the British Intelligence Objective Subcommittee, commonly known as BIOS, maintains a liaison office in Washington. Our work with this office might well be cited as a fine example of international cooperation. The British have generously provided large quantities of their printed reports and with single microfilm copies of any of their manuscript reports which were requested. They also provide a special reference service for this Office and for American business firms. We, on our part, provide a similar service for the British." (11)

6. What Happened to the Documents? 

We must not forget that the collectors were dealing with mountains of material and that only a very small fraction was processed and filmed. Thus the question has remained ever since "What happened to the rest?" It is still being asked today, especially if a researcher is interested in, let's say, a particular camera made by the Leitz Company and he is looking for the user manual. In my search for the answers I have, over the decades, talked to many people some of whom had been in the collecting and processing effort. "You cannot imagine, unless you had been there, how many documents and single pages were scattered all over the floors, crammed into shelves, stacked from floor to ceiling, falling over, spilling, it was utter chaos," I was told. The filming was often equally wild: page after page the documents were pulled through the machines , with quantity rather than quality being the determining factor by untrained machine operators who did the best they could under the circumstances. Quality control was non-existent. The result was that some film rolls contain almost in their entirety, only blurred, useless images. Also, when specialists wrote reports, let's say on the 'German Optical Industry' the supporting documents were, unless the were deemed important enough to be registered individually, discarded; the same happened to translated documents.

Military and Nazi Party documents generally were brought to the United States, sorted, filmed, and eventually returned to German archives. Books and journals were, supposedly, turned over to the Library of Congress, but we are not sure that we actually received all that was designated for the Library. According to Richard Eells, Acting Chief of the Aeronautics Division, "the Library, by agreement with the Air Material Command, Wright Field, has become the depository for all purely historical and descriptive portions of this captured material. The preliminary winnowing of the shipment from Wright Field yielded 9,114 aeronautical books, periodicals, and ephemera. In addition, more than 18,000 items representing the literature of related fields were turned over to the Library for its general collection. Some of the confiscated libraries belonged to institutions that loomed large in the history of the Luftwaffe: e.g., Junkers, Focke-Wulf, the Deutsche Akademie der Luftfahrtforschung (German Academy for Aeronautical Research), the Deutsche Forschungsinstitut fuer Segelflug (German Research Institute for Gliding), the Flugfunkforschungsinstitut (Research Institute for Aeronautical Radio), and the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (Air Ministry) itself." (12). During the past years I have inspected about two thirds of the Library's aeronautical collection but found but a dozen or so volumes having book plates ascribing them to the libraries of the institutes just mentioned. This certainly does not add up to the 12,000 books from the Junkers Aircraft Company Library alone that we supposedly received. 

It is interesting to note that according to German newspaper reports (13) published after the war, the American officer in charge of the team collecting the Junkers Library was none other than Charles Lindbergh, who was no stranger to Hitler's Germany. Because of his friendship with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering and General Udet (he was later accused of having been a Nazi sympathizer) many doors had opened to him in Nazi Germany and he had visited and inspected the aircraft manufactured by Junkers several times. We must also remember that the Allies had much respect for the German Luftwaffe and that one of the stipulations of the German capitulation was that she would never again build an air force. Therefore, all books and reports in German libraries that could be used to re-build the Luftwaffe, were to be removed from Germany. Now Dessau, where Junkers was located, was to be in the designated Russian Zone - why would the Americans leave a library of such importance to the Russians? So, what happened to these libraries?

Eells, in the article cited (14) also mentions another important aspect: "A check of the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie indicates that the Library of Congress has acquired many, if not all, of the commercial aeronautical imprints in Germany during the war years." One of the strengths of the Library of Congress before and for some decades after the War was its aeronautical collection. Now, if we already had almost all of the books contained in the Junkers and the other German libraries, we would have made the rest either available to other interested American libraries, or, on demand, returned the volumes to German archives (the disappeared footlockers?). Since the Junkers Aircraft Company, located in the Russian Zone or the German Democratic Republic, did no longer exist after 1945, who would have received the returned material? The Russians?


Bibliography

1. Library of Congress. Science & Technology Division. Note of Karl Green. n.d.

2. United States Department of Commerce. Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 34th 1946.
Washington, DC : GPO, 1946: xxvi-xxvii, 17-29

3. Eells, Richard. 'Aeronautical Science. German Documents.' Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 3(4) Aug. 1946: 41

4. Von Karman, Theodore. The Wind and Beyond. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co. 1967: 276-277

5. United States Department of Commerce. Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 34th, 1946. Washington, DC: GPO, 1946: 24

6. Gimbel, John. Science, Technology, and Reparations. Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990: 134

7. Ibid 

8. Ibid, 139

9. Ibid, 160

10. United States Department of Commerce. Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 35th, 1947. Washington, DC: GPO, 1947: 24-25

11. Ibid, 25

12. Eels, Richard. 'Aeronautical Science'. Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 3(4) Aug. 1947: 41

13a. "Junkers Bibliothek: Ein verschollenes Objekt der Begierde" Mitteldeutsche Zeitung Dessau, 17 June 1995

13b. "'Bernsteinzimmer der Technik' soll nach Dessau zurueckkehren." Anhaltische Zerbster Nachrichten 24 March 1995

13c. "Fundgrube fuer Junkers Forschung und die Bibliothekssuche in Amerika" Der Alte Dessauer, 28 April 1995

14. Eells, Richard. Ibid, 1947: 30

June 2002

e-libraries (Net libraries)

This new concept in library research allows the researcher (student) to investigate a topic without having to go physically to a distant library. Most major publishers have signed contracts with university and special libraries to catalog new books and other documents and to put them, in toto, on the web.

Advantages to the researcher

• Does not need to travel to a distant library which may have the sought-after book or a substitute.

• The e-library is always open

• New search strategies allow that only relevant pages will appear on the screen - it is no longer necessary to read through a whole book

• When copying, only pages of interest need to be paid for

• If a whole book is wanted, it can be ordered immediately from the publisher

• Books, documents no longer protected by copyright can be copied directly at the source

Advantages to the publisher

• Books of interest to only a small circle of specialists are brought to the attention of a larger audience

• Books do not have to be printed, bound, and distributed but can be seen directly on the web

• By charging a copyright fee (generally per book page) rights to re-publish are immediately granted, plagiarism and piracy are reduced.

• Whole volumes can be ordered immediately from the publisher or a bookseller

Several government libraries and museums have been making their "treasures" available on the Internet. These include:

The Library of Congress  http://www.americaslibrary.gov

More than 80 collections, ranging from Presidential papers and records of the Congress from colonial times to the works of Leonard Bernstein through the American Memory Project and several sites for "young" scholars.

The National Archives and Records Administration  http://www.nara.gov

Special emphasis on the history of the United States as reflected in the important records of Government agencies.

The Smithsonian Institution  http://www.si.edu

The 'encyclopedia' of the 'Nation's storehouse' in FAQ format. Of special interest to students of aeronautics and astronautics are the collections of the National Air and Space Museum, its Library, and the Garber Facility, where old aircraft are being restored and exhibited.

ebrary  http://www.ebrary.com

Based on the electronic reproduction of historical documents by Digital Scanning Inc., in collaboration with Yale University Press. Free searching and browsing; copying, $0.25 per page. Buy books from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

The Internet Public Library  http://www.ipl.org

An initiative of the University of Michigan School of Information and Bell & Howell Information and Learning. Content: Any online text that is available in its entirety for free in digital form, not covered by copyright unless allowed by the copyright holder.

Jossey-Bass: Building Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom  http://www.josseybass.com

This Wiley company promotes books on all aspects of learning published by the Wiley Group.

The net Library  http://www.netlibrary.com

Created by librarians to 'enhance the role of librarians as stewards of knowledge, supporting their crucial role in serving millions of people every day who seek knowledge.'  For service, you need to establish an account.

Project Gutenberg  http://promo.net/pg

Maintained by the University of North Carolina, the site shows books published prior to 1923 (non-copyright protected); it is financed by contributions and expanded by voluntary assistance.

Questia  http://www.questia.com

Full text collections of books and journals devoted to the humanities, social sciences, and the liberal arts, directed at students, professors, librarians, and publishers; expects 250,000 titles by 2004. No charge for searches, accounts required for copying, displays one book page at a time.

Back to Document Services

Back to Document Services