C.
Lester Walker
Published in “Harper's Magazine” - October, 1946 Page
329
I
Someone wrote to Wright Field
recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection
of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please,
be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the
Army Air Forces answered.:
"Sorry – but that would be
fifty tons."
Moreover, that fifty tons was
just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of
captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. If you always thought of war secrets
– as who hasn't? – as coming in sixes and sevens, as a few items of information
readily handed on to the properly interested authorities, it may interest you
to learn that the war secrets in this collection run into the thousands, that
the mass of documents is mountainous, and that there was never before been
anything quite comparable to it.
The collection is today chiefly
in three places: Wright Field (Ohio), the Library of Congress, and the
Department of Commerce. Wright Field is working from a documents "mother
lode" of fifteen hundred tons. In Washington, the Office of Technical
Services (which has absorbed the Office of the Publication Board, the
government agency originally set up to handle the collection) reports that tens
of thousands of tons of material are involved. It is estimated that over a
million separate items must be handled, and that they, very likely, practically
all the scientific, industrial and military secrets of Nazi Germany.
One Washington official has
called it "the greatest single source of this type of material in the
world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country's brain-power."
How the collection came to be
goes back, for beginnings, to one day in 1944 when the Allied Combined Chiefs
of Staff set in motion a colossal search for war secrets in occupied German
territory. They created a group of military-civilian teams, termed the Joint
Intelligence Objectives Committee, which was to follow the invading armies into
Germany and uncover all her military, scientific, and industrial secrets for
early use against Japan. These teams worked against tine to get the most vital
information be: ore it was. destroyed, and in getting it performed prodigies of
ingenuity and tenacity.
At an optical company at Wetzlav,
near Frankfurt, for example, the American colonel investigating felt positive
that the high executives were holding out on him. But nothing would shake their
story: they had given him everything. He returned next day with a legal
document which he asked them all to sign. It declared they had turned over
"all scientific and trade data; and if not, would accept the
consequences." Two days later they glumly signed the document, then led he
colonel to a cache in a. warehouse will. From a safe tumbled out the secret
file on optical instruments, microscopy, aiming devices.
One two-man search team found
itself completely stymied. Records that they had-to find had completely
disappeared. A rumor indicated they might have been hidden in a mountain. The
two scoured 1 the region in a jeep. Nothing. But keeping at it, they stumbled
one day onto a small woods road whose entrance was posted:
Achtung! Minen! Gingerly, slowly, they inched
their jeep in. Nothing happened. But a concrete dugout sunk in the hill
revealed another sign: "Opening Will Cause Explosion."
"We tossed a coin," one
member of this search team said later, "and the loser hitched the jeep towrope
to the dugout door, held his breath! and stepped on the gas."
There was no explosion. The
door-ripped from its hinges. The sought-for secret files were inside.
The German Patent Office put some
of its most secret patents down a sixteen-hundred-foot mine. shaft at Heringen,
then piled liquid oxygen, in cylinders, on top of them. When the American Joint
Intelligence Objectives team found them, it was doubtful that they could be
saved. They were legible, but in such bad shape that a trip to the surface
would make them disintegrate. Photo equipment and a crew were therefore lowered
into the shaft and a complete microfilm record made of the patents there.
PERHAPS one of the most exciting
searches was also the grimmest. This was the hunt .for hidden documents which
might reveal that Nazi scientists had frozen human beings to death and then
tried to bring them back to life again. Interviewing four Nazi doctors one day
in June 1945, at a laboratory of the Institut für Luftfahrtmedizin, at
Gut Hirschau, Bavaria, an American medical corps major, Leo Alexander, was
struck with the dreadful conviction, despite repeated denials, that this had
occurred.
His suspicion were aroused by
three things. All the small animal laboratory equipment was carefully preached;
all large-animal equipment destroyed. One of the doctors wanted to dissolve his
research institute and dismiss his staff. And none of the scientists could find
any data on human beings at all, not even on those rescued from North Sea
waters and saved by the new revival techniques. Did this mean that everything
of the sort was hidden away with other data which, the doctors didn't want to
show?
Wishing to leave the four Germans
in a frame of mind not to destroy their records, the American concealed his
suspicions, and, for the time being, transferred his search elsewhere.
Chance suddenly played into his
hands. The Allied radio one night broadcast a grim tale of the Dachau
concentration camp. Researches on death, and treatment of shock, from exposure
to cold had been performed on prisoners. The broadcast named the leading
experimenter, one Dr. Rascher, and called him a member of the medical staff of
the SS.
For Alexander this was a lead. He
happened just to have learned that the American Seventh Army had recently
captured a vast mass of especially secret SS records. He therefore headed for
the Seventh Army. Documents Center to see what was there.
There was more than he
anticipated. Even to the complete and final report – Himmler's personal copy,
with his green-penciled annotations, all over it – with the names of Rascher
and all others involved, and containing all the damning details of the almost
unbelievable experiments.
Victims had been immersed naked
in ice water until they lost consciousness. All the time elaborate testings
were constantly made: rectal, skin, and interior-of-the-stomach temperatures;
pulse, blood sugar, blood chlorides, blood count and sedimentation; urine
tests; spinal fluid. Appendix 7, Figure 5, showed that seven subjects were
chilled to death beyond revival in from fifty-three to one hundred and six
minutes.
"This table," Alexander
commented in his own report, "is certainly the most laconic confession of
seven murders in existence."
It had been with the rest of the
documents – in Himmler's private cave in mountain at Hallein. Even though the
aide of the mountain had been dynamited down over the cave mouth, the American
searchers had found it.
The earliest Joint Intelligence
Objectives search teams were followed by others, which were to dig out
industrial and scientific secrets in particular. The Technical Industrial
Intelligence Committee was one group of these, composed! of three hundred and
eighty civilians representing seventeen American industries. Later came the
teams of the Office of the Publication Board itself and many mow groups direct
from private industry. Of the latter – called, in Germany, Field Intelligence
Agencies Technical (FIAT) – there have been over five hundred; of one to ten
members each, operating by invitation and under the aegis of the OPB.
Today the search still goes on.
The Office of Technical Services has a European staff of four to five hundred.
At Hoechst, it has one hundred abstractors who struggle feverishly to keep
ahead of the forty OTS document-recording cameras which route to them each
month over one hundred thousand feet of microfilm.
II
What did we find? You'd like some
outstanding examples from the war secrets collection?"
The head of the communications
unit of Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch opened his desk drawer and
took out the tiniest vacuum tube I had ever seen. It was about half thumb-size.
"Notice it is heavy
porcelain – not glass – and thus virtually indestructible. It is a thousand
watt – one-tenth the size of similar American tube. Today our manufactured know
the secret of making it. . . . And here's something. ..."
He pulled some brown,
papery-looking ribbon off a spool. It was a quarter-inch wide, with a dull and
a shiny side.
"That's Magnetophone
tape," he said. "It's plastic, metallized on one side with iron
oxide. In Germany that supplanted phonograph recordings. A day's Radio program
can be magnetized on one reel. You can demagnetize it, wipe it off and put a
new program on at any time. No needle; so absolutely no noise or record wear.
An hour-long reel costs fifty cents." He showed me then what had been two
of the most closely-guarded, technical secrets of the war: the infra-red device
which the Germans invented for seeing at night, and the remarkable diminutive
generator which operated it. German cars could drive at any, speed in a total
blackout, seeing objects clear as day two hundred meters ahead. Tanks with this
device could spot; targets two miles away. As a sniperscope it enabled German
riflemen . to pick off a man in total blackness.
There was a sighting tube, and a
selenium screen out front. The screen caught the incoming infra-red light,
which drove electrons .from the selenium along the tube to another screen which
was electrically charged and fluorescent. A visible image appeared on this
screen. Its clearness and its accuracy for aiming purposes were phenomenal.
Inside the tube, distortion of the stream of electrons by the earth's magnetism
was even allowed for!
The diminutive generator – five
inches across – stepped up current from an ordinary flashlight battery to 15,000
volts. It had a walnut-sized motor which spun a rotor at 10,000 rpm – so fast
that originally it had destroyed all lubricants with the great amount of ozone
it produced. The Germans had developed a new grease: chlorinated paraffin oil.
The generator then ran 3,000 hours!
A canvas bag on the sniper's back
housed the device. His rifle had two triggers. He pressed one for a few seconds
to operate the generator and the scope.. Then the other to kill his man in the
dark. "That captured secret," my guide declared, "we first used
at Okinawa – to the bewilderment of the Japs."
We got, in addition, among these
prize secrets, the technique and the machine for making the world's most
remarkable electric condenser. Millions of condensers are essential to the
radio and radar industry. Our condensers were always made of metal foil. This
one is made of .paper, coated with 1/250,000 of an inch of vaporized zinc.
Forty per cent smaller, twenty per cent cheaper than our condensers, it is also
self-healing. That is, if a breakdown occurs (like a fuse blowing out), the
zinc film evaporates, the paper immediately insulates, and the condenser is
right again. It keeps on working through multiple breakdowns – at fifty per
cent higher voltage than our condensers! To most American radio experts this is
magic, double-distilled.
Mica was another thing. None is
mined in Germany, so during the war our Signal Corps was mystified. Where was
Germany getting it?
One, day certain piece of mica
was handed to one of our experts in the U.S. Bureau of Mines for analysis and
opinion. "Natural mica," he reported, "and no impurities."
But the mica was synthetic. the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research had discovered how to make it
and – something which had always eluded scientists – in large sheets.
We know now, thanks to FIAT
teams, that ingredients of natural mica were melted in crucibles of carbon
capable of taking 2,350 degrees of heat, and then – this was the real secret –
cooled in a special way. Complete absence of vibration was the first essential.
Then two forces directly perpendicular to each other were applied. One,
vertically, was a controlled gradient of temperature in the cooling. At right
angles to this, horizontally, was introduced a magnetic field. This forced the
formation of the crystals in large laminated sheets on that plane.
"You see this . . .the head
of Communications Unit, TIIB, said to me. It was metal, and looked like a
complicated doll's house with the roof off. "It is the chassis or frame,
for a radio. To make the same thing, Americans would machine cut, hollow,
shape, fit – a dozen different processes. This is done on a press in one
operation. It is called the 'cold extrusion' process. We do it with some soft,
splattery metals. But by this process the Germans do it with cold steel!
Thousands of parts now made as castings or drop forgings or from malleable iron
can now be made this way. The production speed increase is a little matter of
one thousand per cent."
This one war secret alone, many
American steel men believe, will revolutionize dozens of our metal fabrication
industries.
In textiles the war secrets
collection has produced so many revelations, that American textile men are a
little dizzy. There is a German rayon-weaving machine, discovered a year ago by
the American 'Knitting Machine' Team, which increases production in relation to
floor space by one hundred and fifty percent. Their "Links-Links"
loom produces a ladderless, runproof hosiery. New German needle-making
machinery, it is thought, will revolutionize that business in both the United
Kingdom and the United States. There is a German method for pulling the wool
from sheepskins without injury to hide or fiber, by use of an enzyme. Formerly
the "puller" – a trade secret – was made from animal pancreas from
American packing houses. During the war the Nazis made it from a mold called aspergil
paraciticus, which they seeded in bran. It results not only in better
wool, but in ten per cent greater yield.
Another discovery was a way to
put a crimp in viscose rayon fibers which gives them the appearance, warmth,
wear resistance, and reaction-to-dyes of wool. The secret here, our
investigators found, was the addition to the cellulose of twenty-five per cent
fish protein.
But of all the industrial
secrets, perhaps, the biggest windfall came from the laboratories and plants of
the great German cartel, I. G. Farbenindustrie. Never before, it is
claimed, was there such a store-house of secret information. It covers liquid
and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics.
drugs, dyes. One American dye authority declares:
"It includes the production
know-how and the secret formulas for over fifty thousand dyes. Many of them are
faster and better than ours. Many are colors we were never able to make. The
American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years."
III
IN MATTERS of food, medicine, and
branches of the military art the finds of the search teams were no less
impressive. And in aeronautics and guided missiles they proved to be downright
alarming. One of the food secrets the Nazis had discovered was a way to
sterilize fruitjuices without heat. The juice was filtered, then cooled, then
carbonated and stored under eight atmospheres of carbon-dioxide pressure. Later
the carbon-dioxide was removed, the juice passed through another filter –
which, this time, germ-proofed it – and then was bottled. Some thing, perhaps,
for American canners to think about.
Milk pasteurization by
ultra-violet light has always failed in other countries, but the Germans had
found how to do it by using light tubes of great length, and simultaneously how
to enrich the milk with vitamin D.
At a plant in Kiel, British
searchers of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee found that cheese was
being made – "good quality Hollander and Tilitser" – by a new method
at unheard-of speed. "Eighty minutes from the renneting to the hooping of
the curd," report the investigators. The cheese industry around the world
had never been able to equal that.
Butter (in a creamery near
Hamburg) was being produced by something long wished for by American butter
makers: a continuous butter making machine. An invention of dairy equipment
manufacturers in Stuttgart, it took up less space than American churns and
turned out fifteen hundred pounds an hour. The machine was promptly shipped to
this country to be tested by the American Butter Institute.
Among other food innovations was
a German way of making yeast in almost limitless quantities. The waste sulfite
liquor from the beechwood used to manufacture cellulose was treated with an
organism known to bacteriologists as candida arborea at temperatures
higher than ever used in yeast manufacture before. The finished product served
as both animal and human food. Its caloric value is four times that of lean
meat, and it contains twice as much protein.
The Germans also had developed
new methods of preserving food by plastics and new, advanced refrigeration
techniques. Refrigeration and air-conditioning on German U-boats had become so
efficient that the submarines could travel from Germany to the Pacific, operate
there for two months, and then return to Germany without having to take on
fresh water for the crew. A secret plastics mixture (among its ingredients were
polyvinyl acetate, chalk, and talc) was used to coat bread and cheese A loaf
fresh from the oven was dipped, dried, redipped, then heated half an hour at
285 degrees. It would be unspoiled and good to eat eight months later.
"As for medical secrets in
this collection," one Army-surgeon has remarked, "some of them will
save American medicine years of research; some of them are revolutionary –
like, for instance, the German technique for treatment after prolonged and
usually fatal exposure to cold." This discovery – revealed to us by Major
Alexander's search already mentioned – reversed everything medical science
thought about the subject. In every one of the dread experiments the subjects
were most successfully revived, both temporarily and permanently, by immediate
immersion in hot water. In two cases of complete standstill of heart and
cessation of respiration, a hot bath at 122 degrees brought both subjects back
to life. Before our war with Japan ended, this method was adopted as the
treatment for use by all American Air-Sea Rescue Services, and it is generally
accepted by medicine today.
German medical researchers had
discovered a way to produce synthetic blood plasma. Called capain, it
was made on a commercial scale and equaled natural plasma, in results. Another
discovery was periston, a substitute for the blood liquid. An oxidation
production of adrenalin (adrenichrome) was produced in quantity Successfully
only by the Nazis and was used with good results in combating high blood
pressure (of which 750,000 persons die annually in the United States). Today we
have the secret of manufacture and considerable supply.
Likewise of great importance
medically were certain researches by Dr. Boris Rojewsky of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute of Biophysics at Frankfurt. These were on the ionization of air as
related to health. Positively ionized air was discovered to have deleterious
effects upon human well-being, and to account for the discomfort and depression
felt at times when the barometer is falling. In many persons, it was found, its
presence brought on asthma, hay fever, and nervous tension. It raised high
blood pressure, sometimes to the danger point. It would bring on the symptoms
common in mountain sickness-labored and rapid breathing, dizziness, fatigue,
sleepiness.
Negatively ionized air, however,
did all the opposite. It was exhilarating, creating a feeling of high spirits
and well-being. Mental depression was wiped out by it. In pathological cases it
steadied breathing, reduced high blood pressure, was a check on allergies and
asthma. The importance of its presence wherever human beings live, work, or
recuperate from illness may some day make its production one of the major
functions of air conditioning.
IV
But of highest significance for
the future were the Nazi secrets in aviation and in various types of missiles.
"The V2 rocket, which bombed
London," an Army Air Force publication reports, "was just a toy
compared to what the Germans had up their sleeve."
When the war ended, we now know,
they had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of production or
development, using every known kind of remote control and fuse: radio, radar,
wire, continuous wave, acoustics, infra-red, light beams, and magnetics, to
name some; and for power, all methods of jet propulsion for either subsonic or
supersonic speeds. Jet propulsion had even been applied to helicopter flight.
The fuel was piped to combustion chambers at the rotor blade tips, where it
exploded, whirling the blades around like a lawn sprinkler or pinwheel. As for
rocket propulsion, their A-4 rocket, which was just getting into large scale
production when the war ended, was forty-six feet long, weighed over 24,000
pounds, and traveled 230 miles. It rose sixty miles above the earth and had a
maximum speed of 3,735 miles an hour – three times that of the earth's rotation
at the equator. The secret of its supersonic speed, we know today, lay in its
rocket motor which used liquid oxygen and alcohol for fuel. It was either radio
controlled or self-guided to its target by gyroscopic means. Since its speed
was supersonic, it could not be heard before it struck.
Another German rocket which was
coming along was the A-9. This was bigger still – 29,000 pounds – and had wings
which gave it a flying range of 3,000 miles. It was manufactured at the famous
Peenemünde army experiment station and achieved the unbelievable speed of 5,870
miles an hour.
A long range rocket-motored
bomber which, the war documents indicate, was never completed merely because of
the war's quick ending, would have been capable of flight from Germany to New
York in forty minutes. Pilot-guided from a pressurized cabin, it would have
flown at an altitude of 154 miles. Launching was to be by catapult at 500 miles
an hour, and the ship would rise to its maximum altitude in as short a time as
four minutes. There, fuel exhausted, it would glide through the outer
atmosphere, bearing down on its target. With one hundred bombers of this type
the Germans hoped to destroy any city on earth in a few days operations.
Little wonder, then, that today
Army Air Force experts declare publicly that in rocket power and guided
missiles the Nazis were ahead of us by at least ten years.
The Germans even had devices
ready which would take care of pilots forced to leave supersonic planes in
flight. Normally a pilot who stuck his head out at such speeds would have it
shorn off. His parachute on opening would burst in space. To prevent these
calamitous happenings an ejector seat had been invented which flung the pilot
clear instantaneously. His chute was already burst, that is, made of latticed
ribbons which checked his fall only alter the down-drag of his weight began to
close its holes.
A Nazi variation of the guided
air missile was a torpedo for underwater work which went unerringly to its
mark, drawn by the propeller sound of the victim ship from as far away as ten
miles. This missile swam thirty feet below the water, at forty miles an hour,
and left no wake. When directly under its target, it exploded.
All such revelations naturally
raise the question: was Germany so far advanced in air, rocket, and missile
research that, given a little more time, she might have won the war? Her war
secrets, as now disclosed, would seem to indicate that possibility. And the
Deputy Commanding General of Army Air Forces Intelligence, Air Technical
Service Command, has told the Society of Aeronautical Engineers within the past
few months:
"The Germans were preparing
rocket surprises for the whole world in general and England in particular which
would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had
been postponed for so short a time as half a year."
V
For the release and dissemination
of all these one-time secrets the Office of the Publication Board was
established by an order of President Truman within ten days after Japan
surrendered. The order directed that not only enemy war secrets should be
published, but also (with some exceptions) all American secrets, scientific and
technical, of all government war boards. (The Office of Scientific Research and
Development, the National Research Council, and other such.) And thereby was
created what is being termed now the biggest publishing problem a government
agency ever had to handle.
For the war secrets, which
conventionally used to be counted in scores, will run to three-quarters of a
million separate documentary items (two-thirds of them on aeronautics) and will
require several years and several hundreds of people to screen and prepare them
for wide public use.
Today translators and abstracters
of the Office of Technical Services, successor to the OPB, arc processing them
at the rate of about a thousand a week. Indexing and cataloguing the part of
the collection which will be permanently kept may require more than two
millions cards; and at Wright Field the task is so complicated that electric
punch-card machine; are to be installed. A whole new glossary of German-English
terms has had to be compiled – something like forty thousand words on new
technical and scientific items.
With so many documents, it has,
of course, been impossible because of time and money limitations to reprint or
reproduce more than a very few. To tell the public what is available,
therefore, the OTS issues a bibliography weekly. This contains the newest war
secrets information as released – with titles, prices of copies currently
available or to be made up, and an abstract of contents.
The original document, or the
microfilm copy, is then generally sent to the Library of Congress, which is now
the greatest depository. To make them more easily accessible to the public, the
Library sends copies, when enough are available, to about 125 so-called
"depository" libraries throughout the United States.
And is the public doing anything
with these one-time war secrets? It is – it is eating them up. As many as
twenty thousand orders have been filled in a month, and the order rate is now a
thousand items a day. Scientists and engineers declare that the information is
"cutting years from the time we would devote to problems already scientifically
investigated." And American business men...! A run through the Publication
Board's letters file shows the following;
The Bendix Company in South Bend,
Indiana, writes for a German patent on the record player changer "with
records stacked above the turntable." Pillsbury Mills wants to have what
is available on German flour and bread production methods. Kendall
Manufacturing Company ("Soapine") wants insect repellent compounds.
Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company, Iowa, asks about "interrogation of research
workers at the agricultural high school at Hohenheim." Pacific Mills
requests I. G. Farbenindustrie's water-repellent, crease-resistant
finish for spun rayon. The Polaroid Company would like something on "the
status of exploitation of photography and optics in Germany." (There are,
incidentally, ten to twenty thousand German patents yet to be screened.)
The most insatiable customer is Amtorg,
the Soviet Union's foreign trade organization. One of its representatives
walked into the Publication Board office with the bibliography-in hand and
said, "I want copies of everything." The Russians sent one order in
May for $5,594.00 worth – two thousand separate war secrets reports. In
general, they buy every report issued. Americans, too, think there is extraordinarily
good prospecting in the war secrets lode. Company executives practically park
on the OTS's front doorstep, wanting to be first to get hold of a particular
report on publication. Some information is so valuable that to get it a single
day ahead of a competitor, may be worth thousands of dollars. But the OTS takes
elaborate precautions to be sure that no report is ever available to anyone
before general public release.
After a certain American aircraft
company had ordered a particular captured war document, it was queried as to
whether the information therein had made it or saved it any money. The cost of
the report had been a few dollars. The company answered: "Yea – at least a
hundred thousand dollars."
A research head of another
business firm took notes for three hours in the OTS offices one day.
"Thanks very much," he said, as he stood to go, "the notes from
these documents are worth at least half a million dollars to my company."
And after seeing the complete
report the German synthetic fiber industry, one American manufacturer remarked:
"This report would be worth
twenty million dollars to my company if it could have it exclusively."
Of course you, and anybody else,
can now have it, and lots of other once secret information, for a few dollars.
All the war secrets, as released, are completely in the public domain.
— END —
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