Tue Jul 20, 2004 1:47 pm by Tawakalna
bth those examples are true and aren't really conspiracies at all anymore, although they were seen so at the time, and there was for many years a conspiracy to hush-up post-war accomodation of former Nazis especially in scientific fields. Actually there have been some rather good books on monographs on the subject and you could rattle on about that alone for hours, but I'll try to stick to the point.
The US rocket programme was of course famously led by von Braun. What is less well known is the degree of WvB's collaboration with his Nazi masters, and his acqiescence at the appalling miseries inflicted on the slave labourers at the rocket plants. WvB was always very evasive on this topic, preferring to present himself as this idealistic leader of science character.
The vile German research on live victims in the experiment sections of the concentration camps did indeed form the basis for much post-war work on areas such as extreme conditions, and genetic research. The illegal and immoral experiments pushed forward scientific knowledge far more quickly than would normally have been possible. This has always been the position adopted by the beneficiaries of this knowledge, but the moral quandary still remains, I'm afraid.
As to your other point, the acceleration of advanced scientific knowledge almost overnight; well, you must remember that war is a tremendous catalyst for change and technological acceleration in urban and industrial societies. Many of the basic theories and indeed protoytpes for the creations of WW2 existed before the war - jet engines, swept wings, missiles, helicopters, atomic theory etc. But the cost in resources could not be realistically borne in peacetime even by authoritarian states like Nazi Germany. War however does away with many moral and practical obstacles, and as long as the research showed war-winning potential, it was funded. The Germans put their resources into jets and rockets and got them, the US put its money and materiel into the atom bomb and they got it; would it have been the same the other way around?
Why the Germans didn't get nukes, when at the start of the war they were way ahead in the application of atomic theory, even with the defection of many scientists to the US (right up until the end of the war the Aliies believed Germany to be in the lead and this was the real impetus of the Manhattan Project, to beat Germany to the Bomb) The popular coin still trotted out today is that Heisenberg deliberately delayed and hampered development before and during the war, on moral and political grounds. His famous calculation in which he told the Wehrmacht High Command scientific bureau that a nuclear weapon was too expensive, too big, and would take too long to build (which effectively killed the project) is regularly held up as an example of this subversion, as he got the figures so impossibly wrong compared to the correct calculations produced by Oppenheimer and the Manhattan team.
In fact, Heisenberg really did get it wrong. While he was anything but a Nazi, and in fact a decent enough man, he wasn't a hero either, and his family were under constant if veiled threat. He co-operated fully if reluctantly with Nazi demands, but hadn't made the breakthroughs that Hans Bethe and others had made. After the war had ended and Heisenberg along with his colleagues was debriefed by Allied Intelligence, it became clear that H hadn't done his maths right and when shown the correct formulae to use, figured out the correct means for nuclear fission in a few minutes, using a tenth of the fissile material and making a bomb practical. But this was a revelation to him at the time; although he later denied it, saying really he knew all along. Then came the gradual mythologising of Heisenberg's "resistance," a rehabilitation to cover up the reality of his collaboration with the Nazis and to rescue his damaged reputation in atomic research, to save face.
As to other wartime mysteries and conspiracy theories; you know UFOs were reported in Allied bomber streams over Germany, the so-called "Foo Fighters?" probably advanced German rocket/jet fighter prototypes. Roswell occurs only 2 yrs after WW2 in a remote part of the US regularly used for secret military activity? the UFO craze begins in earnest in the late 40s/50s as the Cold War is cranking up, and science and technology are advancing rapidly esp in aerodynamics and rocketry? isn't the connection obvious? So, as has already been pointed out, ludicrous rumours of aliens and spacecraft are put out to cover-up what's really going on which is high-end aerodynamic and propulsion research. The same research was easy to carry out in Nazi Germany where scientists in wartime could get almost whatever they needed in complete secrecy, but in the USA in peacetime presented problems of a different order, naturally.
