Technology Transfer as War Booty: The U.S. Technical Oil Mission to Europe, 1945

Abstract

By the last month of the fighting in Germany, as the Allied armies rolled across the Rhine, combat-weary GIs were used to seeing groups of intelligence officers moving about the war zone. They were no longer startled to see small groups of scholarly looking American officers drive up to bombed-out and newly captured factories and, apparently unmindful of the smoke and sometimes nearby gunfire, systematically investigate the plant. They watched as tons of records were hauled out into the open for eventual crating and shipment and as nervous and obsequious German scientists were questioned by these visitors who wore neither rank nor unit designation on their American uniforms. The onlookers would have been surprised to learn that these investigators were not really army officers at all but industrial scientists and government experts, and that the plants they investigated had one thing in common: All had produced strategic materials under the Third Reich. Ultimately, more than 3,000 separate teams-involving more than 10,000 investigators, industrialists, engineers, and technicians-visited thousands of enemy factories, scientific institutions, business premises, and other objectives in an effort to explore and exploit the fundamental industrial knowledge of the enemy. The Second World War, unlike any war in the history of civilization, was a war of science. The brains and industrial techniques of Allied scientists and engineers were matched against those of the enemy to produce the most advanced and effective devices in pursuit of military supremacy. The forces of science and industry had been marshaled to invent and develop new devices, all of which were held under a tight cloak of military security. Each warring nation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on fundamental and applied research which, while primarly intended for the purpose of war, presented a