I did a report on this in 5th grade, people thought I was making it up.
i had someone here on lemmy try to say the scientists recruited to the US via operation paperclip weren't involved in crimes against humanity. a lot of people have missed in the shuffle of the past 80 years exactly what happened during the holocaust.
not to mention that one of the issues Nuremburg faced at the time was they couldn't go too heavy on the pro-Jewish side because your average man on the street was so antisemitic as a matter of course that if you looked too sympathetic towards the holocaust you'd lose popular support.
Paperclip can be rationalised as pragmatic, but bow about these guys?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_Gs-0dhOo
https://ebeggin.substack.com/p/ratlines-nato-and-the-fourth-reich
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-nazi-officials-in-germany-post-world-war-ii-government-2016-10?r=US&IR=T
Changed my view on history over the years.
I think the US media has washed their image so clean with the WW2 movies that most people have no idea about stuff like the nazi rally happened in the US and the support for eugenics in the Us, and the concentration camps in the Us.
Every day thousands upon thousands of people were being killed. Why? Because they were wearing the uniform of an enemy country. Killing people for wearing the wrong clothes (or maybe just standing too close to someone wearing the wrong clothes) is what a war is.
It strikes me as odd to be super upset over internment when more Japanese people were killed when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. Internment was obviously bad, but compared to other shit happening at the time? I guess the people killed in the war couldn't tell their story afterwards, so we don't care about that? Or maybe it's because we've been indoctrinated to believe that killing someone for wearing the wrong clothes is good and honourable?
There was a Japanese insurgency in Hawaii, so some of the people held in internment camps were actually insurgents. Obviously most of them weren't. But what's the difference between that scenario and hitting a military target and a lot of civilians getting killed because they happened to live a little too close to a military target? Because that kind of shit was happening all the time in WWII.
Or the Japanese concentration camps. USA bigot since day one. USA more like a white supremacists wet dream.
lord… i live near two of the american concentration camps called out by name in the planning docs for auschwitz…
american concentration camps called out by name in the planning docs for auschwitz
Where did you learn about this?
The US is all about realpolitik, and begins to make a lot more sense when you look at everything through a Kissinger-shaped lens (rest in piss, you evil bastard). We pretend to be ideological so our citizenry can feel good about ourselves, but the way the nation operates is purely pragmatic. Look no further than Israel-Palestine and how buddy-buddy we are with Saudi Arabia for modern examples. Even our support of Ukraine, while overlapping with an ethical imperative, is driven primarily by the interests of NATO and the relatively inexpensive degradation of Russia’s military and political standing we can participate in. We only give a shit about “human rights” when it benefits us.
Operation Paperclip was pragmatism. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance when we try to hold in our minds that we brought Nazi scientists over and the idea that we’re “the good guys” and fought for “justice,” so our brains try to reduce that cognitive dissonance by saying those scientists weren’t behind any of the evils of the Nazis. They were, obviously. That didn’t matter to our government, but they kept the operation classified for a reason.
Please do explain the 'useful' pragmatic excuse for these monsters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_Gs-0dhOo
https://ebeggin.substack.com/p/ratlines-nato-and-the-fourth-reich https://www.businessinsider.com/former-nazi-officials-in-germany-post-world-war-ii-government-2016-10?r=US&IR=T
The US is all about realpolitik
Not to excuse the US's history of foreign diplomacy, but I think it would be naive to believe that there exists any major power who doesn't treat geopolitics with the same level of pragmatism.
The Soviets hated the Nazi even more than the US did and yet they still had their own version of paperclip. Operation Osoaviakhim brought almost double the number of Nazi scientists into the Soviet Union.
Osoviakhim was somewhat more ideologically consistent than Paperclip. The scientists weren't invited to the USSR with promises of cushy jobs and immunity from prosecution: they were forced from their homes, loaded onto freight trains, and made to work. It was part of the wider program of the Allies using the forced labour of ethnic Germans as a means of war reparations.
Unlike the Soviets the US/UK did everything to keep nazis in power and save them.
I mean, the Soviets didn't offer them any guarantees. But I think that's more of a byproduct of how they held leverage over the specialist, and more of a difference in how the two cultures choose to motivate employees.
Despite this, the affected specialists and their families were doing well compared to citizens of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Zone, apart from the suffering of deportation and isolation. The specialists earned more than their Soviet counterparts. The scientists, technicians and skilled workers were assigned to individual projects and working groups, primarily in the areas of Aeronautics and rocket technology, nuclear research, Chemistry and Optics. The stay was given for about five years.
To be fair to Von Braun, he did have slaves build his rockets.
Wasn't just Von Braun and the V2. Me-262s were built with forced labor. Then there's the Comet, which was an amazingly bad idea. I'm surprised it wasn't flown by slave labor, as little as they seemed to care for the pilot's safety. The fuel was so corrosive that if it leaked the pilot would be dissolved alive.
Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer
R.I.P. Tom Lehrer
(Heard this first in For All Mankind, an excellent show I recommend to everyone, pirate it if you don’t have Apple TV+.)
Well shit I didn't know he died
The difference is that the Americans rolled out a red carpet for the Nazis and offered employment contracts. The Soviets showed up one night and kidnapped nearly 7000 nazis at gunpoint, and then forced them to work to pay reparations. Based.
Wouldn't that count as slave labour?
Wouldn't that count as slave labour?
Not according to the Allies at the Yalta conference.
By the late 1940s, the only people claiming that the labor enjoyed by the Soviets at the hands of captured Nazis was "slavery" - were Nazis.
By all allied accounts, using German labor to pay reparations was deemed acceptable given how the Soviets had just sacrificed 27 million people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II
Forced labour hmm. I mean it definitely sounds like slave labour, just lawful form of it. The article does have a quote:
"In accordance with the Yalta agreement, the Russians were using slave labor of millions of Germans and other prisoners of war and civilians"
Two wrongs don't make a right.
The Treaty of Versailles was really unfair to the German people but that didn't justify anything the Nazis did. The terrible things the Nazis did also didn't justify the terrible things the Soviets did.
Yes but you see when the Communists do it it's "based". /s
Always check which instance someone is using. If it's lemmy.ml it's people who worship Soviet Russia and China
They also committed mass rapes
They also claimed 7 out of every 10 Nazis killed in WWII, and by all accounts at the time, contributed the most to winning the war.
Absolutely...while kidnapping, raping, and murdering children. There was a reason Germans wanted the west troops to march in as opposed to the soviets.
The frogurt contains potassium cyanide.
The remaining Axis scientists that the Soviets did capture still had to live in unglamorous conditions: on some projects the Soviet authorities limited the rôle of the Axis specialists merely to consultation and practical training.
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