Читать книгу An Ordinary Guy, Operation Saponify - Andrew Gilbrook - Страница 10
ОглавлениеOperation Paperclip and Overcast
To understand why we have been and continue to be lied to, I thought it was necessary to figure who was in on this secret, the documents we were finding led me to believe the British were complicit, along with the USA, so why? Operation Paperclip and Operation Overcast contained what I thought was the answer.
… A deal …
It was an open secret of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members and some were former leaders of the Nazi Party. This story has been well publicised in many books and other publications.
The primary purpose for Operation Paperclip was U.S. military advantage in the Soviet–American Cold War and the Space Race. The Soviet Union was more aggressive in forcibly recruiting more than 2,200 German specialists, a total of more than 6,000 people including family members, with Operation Osoaviakhim during one night on 22nd October 1946. This Soviet operation was to forcibly remove scientists to continue their work in Russia. Probably this alone caused many of the German scientist to want to live in the USA.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) established the first secret recruitment program, called Operation Overcast, on 20th July 1945, initially "to assist in shortening the Japanese war and to aid our post-war military research". The term "Overcast" was the name first given by the German scientists' family members for the housing camp where they were held in Bavaria. Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip by Ordnance Corps (United States Army) officers, who would attach a paperclip to the folders of those rocket experts whom they wished to employ in America.
In a secret directive circulated on 3rd September 1946, President Truman officially approved Operation Paperclip and expanded it to include one thousand German scientists under "temporary, limited military custody".
The Osenberg List.
In the later part of World War II, Nazi Germany found itself at a logistical disadvantage, having failed to conquer the USSR with Operation Barbarossa (June - December 1941), the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 - January 1944), Operation Nordlicht ("Northern Light", August - October 1942), and the Battle of Stalingrad (July 1942 - February 1943). The failed conquest had depleted German resources, and its military-industrial complex was unprepared to defend the Großdeutsches Reich (Greater German Reich) against the Red Army's westward counterattack. By early 1943, the German government began recalling from combat many scientists, engineers, and technicians. They returned to work in research and development to bolster German defence. The recall from frontline combat included 4,000 rocketeers returned to Peenemünde, in northeast coastal Germany.
“Overnight, Ph.Ds. were liberated from KP duty, masters of science were recalled from orderly service, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics ceased to be truck drivers.”
- Dieter K. Huzel, Peenemünde to Canaveral
The Nazi government's recall of their now-useful intellectuals for scientific work first required identifying and locating the scientists, engineers, and technicians, then ascertaining their political and ideological reliability. Werner Osenberg, the engineer-scientist heading the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (Defence Research Association), recorded the names of the politically cleared men to the Osenberg List, to reinstate them to scientific work.
In March 1945, at Bonn University, a Polish laboratory technician found pieces of the Osenberg List stuffed in a toilet. The list subsequently reached MI6, who transmitted it to U.S. Intelligence. Then U.S. Army Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, used the Osenberg List to compile his list of German scientists to be captured. Wernher von Braun, Germany's premier rocket scientist, headed Major Staver's list.
In Operation Overcast, Major Staver's original intent was only to interview the scientists, but what he learned changed the operation's purpose. On 22nd May 1945, he transmitted to the U.S. Pentagon headquarters Colonel Joel Holmes's telegram urging the evacuation of German scientists and their families, as most "important for the Pacific war" effort. Most of the Osenberg List engineers worked at the Baltic coast German Army Research Centre Peenemünde, developing the V-2 rocket. After capturing them, the Allies initially housed them and their families in Landshut, Bavaria, in southern Germany.
Beginning on 19th July 1945, the U.S. JCS managed the captured ARC rocketeers under Operation Overcast. However, when the "Camp Overcast" name of the scientists' quarters became locally known, the program was renamed Operation Paperclip in November 1945. Despite these attempts at secrecy, later that year the press interviewed several of the scientists.
For years the scientists were held or invited to work in scientific bases around the USA under contract. In 1959, 94 Operation Paperclip men went to the United States.
Overall, through its operations to 1990, Operation Paperclip imported 1,600 men, as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the US and the UK, valued at $10 billion in patents and industrial processes.
So how does this mean that a deal had been struck with Hitler? Surely this was the USA and Russia helping themselves to their war reparations.
It was known Hitler had a double, it would be too easy to replace Hitler in the bunker with one of his doubles, kill him and burn the evidence, as has been written earlier. Is there proof that Hitler escaped?
My evidence is witness. Of course, a witness would need to be proved to be reliable, but think, why would a witness lie in the case of Hitler’s escape from Berlin? Hitler’s end, as described in the history books is enough, the end of a mad vicious dictator. Why lie that he has escaped? There is no reason to lie. That would be my logic. So now I needed to find any witnesses that categorically state they had some part in or saw Hitler anywhere other than a burnt grave in Berlin beyond 4th May 1945.
So began a trawl of any document I could find relating to the subject. There were thousands, and Karen was brilliant at sifting through the mass and only passing on to me to scrutinise the useful parts. We made a brilliant team, with access to the most secret of documents and reports that any other reporter or writer would certainly not have access.