Strategies for knowledge transfer
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Strategies for knowledge transfer Douglas M. O’Reagan: Taking Nazi technology: allied exploitation of German science after the second world war. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, 296 pp, $54.95 HB Alexander von Lünen1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The transfer of German scientists and engineers after World War Two has received some attention in the past from historians and journalists alike. Many of these publications have focused on the exploits of Wernher von Braun, owing not only to the prominence of the Space Race during the Cold War, but also to von Braun’s own aptitude in promoting his ideas of space exploration, such as the 1950s series he produced with Disney. This also means that most of the available literature has focused on the programs to bring German scientists to the USA—mainly ‘Operation Paperclip’—, as if France, the UK and the USSR were mere bystanders in this enterprise. In fact, all the Allied countries pursued a strategy of knowledge transfer to survey and ultimately benefit from German scientific achievements. O’Reagan’s book addresses this lacuna, covering all the different approaches adopted by the Allies to secure German know-how after the war. Moreover, rather than dealing with individuals or selected technologies, it focusses on the nature of international knowledge transfer more generally, as illustrated by the efforts of the Allies to profit from German science. After a thorough introduction, which sets up the argument and narrative of the book and surveys the relevant scholarship on the topic at hand, the author addresses some common myths surrounding the state of German science in World War Two. Despite the commonly held belief that German science was in a league of its own, the contemporary reports by the various Allied agencies at the end of, and after the war were often less enthusiastic about what the Germans had achieved. In particular, the investigators from the American agencies were apparently disappointed by what they found when they surveyed German firms and laboratories. O’Reagan suggests that this might have been due to American investigators being recruited from businesses, and thus wanting to downplay the achievements of their German * Alexander von Lünen [email protected] 1
History Division, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, UK
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competitors. But, he argues, the disappointment was in no small part a result of unrealistic expectations based on German wartime propaganda. O’Reagan goes on to detail the scientific exploitation programs in each Allied nation—American, British, French and Soviet—and the specific agendas and conflicts within and between them. The American program was probably the largest, but the other parties also invested considerable resources to recruit scientists and transfer German know-how. There follows a chapter each on the postwar reconstruction of German academia and science, on the evolution of information science and technology as a result of the vast number of
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