Alien Property Custodian Research Articles

US Alien Property Custodian patent documents: A legacy prior art collection from World War II – Part 2. Statistics

This is the second part of a two-part article on the origins, history and profile of Alien Property Custodian (APC) documents. The APC was responsible for administering American property, including patents, seized from nationals of enemy and enemy-occupied countries during World War II. Part 1 covered the wartime organization and activities of the APC, vesting orders and the agency’s patent portfolio. Part 2 describes APC documents (patent applications published by the US Patent Office at the request of the APC), the national and technological profiles of these documents and snapshots of the inventors who lost and, in some cases, regained their patent rights. APC documents are a small and little known but historically important collection of prior art documents.

US Alien Property Custodian patent documents: A legacy prior art collection from World War II – Part 1. History

In 1943, at the height of World War II, the US Patent Office, by the authorization of the Alien Property Custodian (APC), published 2964 pending patent applications that had been seized from nationals of enemy and enemy-occupied countries. This unusual act – only in 2001 did the USPTO begin routinely publishing some pending patent applications – was prompted by the APC’s wartime mandate to make enemy technology available to American industry. During and after the war many of these applications were issued as patents assigned to the APC. However, up to 58% were abandoned, becoming, in effect, orphan documents. APC documents, although they resemble contemporary patents and are granted prior art status by the USPTO, are virtually unknown today, even among patent professionals. This two-part paper investigates the origins, history and profile of this unique collection of prior art documents. Part one reviews the wartime organization and activities of the Office of the Alien Property Custodian, the agency responsible for the creation of APC documents, the use of vesting orders to seize patents and the APC’s patent portfolio. Part two describes applications published by the APC, their national and technological profiles, and snapshots of the inventors and companies who lost and, in some cases, regained their patent rights.

Vesting GAF Corporation: The Roosevelt Administration's Decision to Americanise I. G. Farben's American Affiliates in World War II

The wartime seizure by the US government of General Aniline & Film Corporation (GAF) was intended to create a powerful US owned business, able to compete with its former affiliate, the German behemoth I. G. Farben. The US government justified its actions by a careful study of the failed World War I sequestration of the German chemical industry. Considerable friction developed between key government agencies, including the Treasury and the Justice departments who both believed that they should control enemy property in wartime. In the end, President Roosevelt, mindful of the problems in World War I over enemy property, decided to resurrect the Alien Property Custodian to control seized property for the duration of the war. However, US law allowed legal redress for wrongfully seized property and this enabled I. G. Chemie to begin its long and ultimately successful lawsuit with the US government over ownership of GAF.

Pain and Profits: The History of the Headache and Its Remedies in America

Pain and Profits is an accessible social history of headache that aims to answer the question of why headache treatment remains in popular hands. It is also a highly readable history of jurisdictional disputes among the pharmaceutical industry, dispensing druggists, and clinical practitioners that is suitable for undergraduate courses. Bringing the history of drug supply (and demand) to bear upon the history of headache, Jan R. McTavish interweaves the history of commerce with the history of medicine. She uses patient accounts of this most everyday complaint to supplement those of the trade press, which portray ongoing professional disputes over prescription, distribution, advertising, and marketing but largely ignore sufferers. The book is also a history of intellectual property and direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, a much-contested policy blamed for everything from the com-modification of medicine to its democratization. This book reminds us that both are far from new phenomena. At times the book falls prey to the very trivialization of the headache it protests; it is sometimes more anecdotal and engaging than substantive. The final chapter on headache research is somewhat unsatisfying. McTavish is at her best when she recounts how aspirin became inextricably linked to the headache, given that it was not so introduced or marketed by either Bayer or Sterling Drug, the American company that bought the property at auction when it was confiscated by the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian at the outset of World War I. McTavish ultimately settles upon “laypeople” as responsible for keeping headaches within the realm of self-medication, yet she acknowledges gaps both in the credibility of the laity and in physicians' sympathy toward them (p. 172). The people are attributed great sway, yet their outlines are but vaguely delineated. There is little attempt to specify populations and thus the public is represented as a somewhat homogenous and stubborn actor.

Visions, Achievements, and Challenges of the Division of Chemical Education during the Early Years

The first decade of the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Education (DIVCHED) was most extraordinary. It began in 1924 with grand visions, plans, and accomplishments, and ended in the Depression. The period was dominated by two figures, Neil Gordon, founding editor of the Journal of Chemical Education, and Francis Garvan, the United States Alien Property Custodian who, through the Chemical Foundation, poured money into chemical education for his own purposes. At Garvan's urging, DIVCHED also published a journal for high school teachers, The Chemistry Leaflet, edited by Pauline Beery Mack, later famous for advising NASA on bone density loss in space travel. The Chemistry Leaflet later appeared as the ACS educational magazine, Chemistry. Woven into the paper are three continuing concerns of the DIVCHED: sustained service to the high school teacher, participation of university and industrial leaders in DIVCHED, and women in chemical education.

Patents for Victory

SUMMARYIn national emergencies governments have the power to suspend patent rights. During World War II, the U.S. government seized tens of thousands of foreign-owned patents and other forms of intellectual property. The agency responsible for this was the Office of the Alien Property Custodian (APC). The APC was charged with making the technical information disclosed in these patents available to American industries for use in the war effort. To accomplish this mission the agency's Patent Information and Marketing Section established patent libraries nationwide; exhibited patent information at trade shows and conferences; published and sold catalogs, indexes and abstracts of seized patents; and distributed patent information to other agencies and libraries.

The President's Man: Leo Crowley and Franklin Roosevelt in Peace and War

Leo Crowley has been known only as the administrator condemned by President Truman for cutting off Soviet lend-lease after V-E Day. Stuart L. Weiss revises this view while exploring Crowley s long, significant state and federal career, emphasizing his service as Franklin D. Roosevelt s man for all seasons.Weiss deals effectively with Crowley s flaws and virtues as well as those of the administrations he served. Crowley was confirmed as chair of the FDIC in 1934 despite a charge, unknown to President Roosevelt, that Crowley had committed fraud as a banker in Wisconsin. Crowley then served with distinction for more than eleven years as the administration twice buried a 1935 Treasury Department report that, had it been handed to Wisconsin authorities, could have sent him to prison: Roosevelt valued Crowley s political and administrative talents too highly to allow that to happen.In 1939, Roosevelt, anxious to have business support for stopping the Axis powers, encouraged Crowley to take the chair of a holding company about to be prosecuted by the SEC. After Pearl Harbor, like priorities prompted the president first to name Crowley alien property custodian, then chair of the Board of Economic Warfare to supplant Roosevelt s politically troublesome vice president, and, finally, foreign economic administrator, the person responsible for civilian lend-lease activityIn this vibrant biography, Weiss furnishes the reader with detailed portraits of a man faithful to his president even when he disagreed with him and of a president willing to do what he felt was necessary for the good of the country.

Scientific information in wartime: the Allied-German rivalry, 1939-1945

Preface The Internationalization of Science and Scientific Information in the Twentieth Century National Government Support for Scientific Information in Great Britain and the United States before World War II National Government Support for Scientific Information in Germany before World War II The Allied Wartime Supply System for Enemy Scientific Information Germany's Wartime Supply System for Enemy Scientific Information Postwar Consequences Appendix A: List of Journals Available in Reprint from the Office of Alien Property Custodian Appendix B: Title Page, Prefatory Material and First Contents Page of the First Issue of the Referatenblatt, Issued Collaboratively by the Information Centers of the Welt-Wirtschaftlichen Institut in Hamburg and the Technologische Hochscule in Berin, 1942 References Index

Das Reichskommissariat für die Behandlung feindlichen Vermögens im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Eine Studie zur Verwaltungs-, Rechts- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands. By Stephan H. Lindner · Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991. 178 pp. Tables, notes, and bibliography. DM 58. ISBN 3-515-051971-1.

This is a brief study of the interministerial and interagency struggles that surrounded the administration of enemy assets in Nazi Germany. The Reichskommissariat fur die Behandlung feindlichen Verm6gens, which was a creation of the German Foreign Office, operated in a manner similar to its equivalent, the American Alien Property Custodian, at least as regards assets either located within the borders of the Reich or not owned by Jews or other Eastern-peoples in occupied Europe. With these exceptions, foreign properties came under a benevolent form of trusteeship that kept enterprises intact. Such a benign policy made good sense, according to Stephan Lindner, and therefore it was hard to dislodge. Foreign-owned factories contributed to the war effort to the same extent as others. Profits could not be repatriated owing to currency controls. A hard line would have invited retaliation not only in enemy nations but in many neutral countries, which, though subject to U.S.-British pressures, had maintained trade links to the Continent. In the event of a compromise peace, finally, a policy of forbearance and moderation might have protected the Reich from seizures like those following the First World War. Most of Lindner's account describes successive challenges to Reichskommissariat policy mounted by self-seeking Nazi economic factions like the Goring complex. The reader might have gained a fuller appreciation of what was at stake in these contests if, instead of recounting such essentially repetitious episodes, the author had compared specific instances of factory administration by each of the two sides in the struggle. Nevertheless, this dispassionate analysis is a welcome addition to a literature that helps explain why, except for victims of Nazi racism, business as usual was the usual business response in the Third Reich.

Brownell v. Singer.

610Trading with the Enemy — Agency of Bank Having Nationality of Enemy State — Liquidation of — Claim of Non-Enemy Creditor Against Bank — Preferred Claim under Law of State of the United States — Power of Alien Property Custodian to Seize Funds to be Applied to Such Preferred Claim — The Law of the United States of America

United States Trading with the Enemy Act; Effect of Vesting by Alien Property Custodian

United States Trading with the Enemy Act; Effect of Vesting by Alien Property Custodian

Seizure of Disputed Enemy Claims by the Alien Property Custodian

Seizure of Disputed Enemy Claims by the Alien Property Custodian

Friendly Alien's Right to Sue for Return of Property Seized by Alien Property Custodian

Friendly Alien's Right to Sue for Return of Property Seized by Alien Property Custodian

Lange v. Wingrave et al.

War — Effects of — Alien Enemies — Property of — Effect of Sale by Alien Property Custodian — Treaty of Peace — Interpretation of.

Ingenohl v. Olsen and Company, Inc.

Jurisdiction — Extraterritorial Effect of — Recognition Abroad of Acts of Alien Property Custodian — Effect on Trade Marks Registered in a Foreign Country.

Sechsstellige Trigonometrische Tafel

THE main content of this volume consists of a six-figure table of sines, tangents, cotangents and cosines over the range 0°-45°. Each page represents a range of 10 minutes, the intervals being 10 seconds, so that it contains 60 entries for each of the four functions. Each individual entry is supplied with its corresponding first difference, and tables of proportional parts are also appended. Sechsstellige Trigonometrische Tafel Edited by Herman Brandenburg. Pp. xxiv + 304. (Copyright vested in the Alien Property Custodian, 1944: first published in Leipzig, 1932.) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: J. W. Edwards; London: Dr. J. L. Comrie, Scientific Computing Service, Ltd., 1945.) 5 dollars.

Tables of Elementary Functions

THIS book is yet another example of a photolithoprint reproduction made in the United States by authority of the Alien Property Custodian. The original work, compiled by Emde at Stuttgart and published in 1940, is presented in conjunction with its English translation. Much of the information to be found in the 1933 Jahnke-Emde is included, with certain modifications ; broadly speaking, those tables of elementary functions which were omitted from the 1938 edition and later found their way back into the American reprint. Tables of Elementary Functions (In English and German.) By Fritz Emde. Pp. xii + 181. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: J. W. Edwards, 1945.) (Copyright vested in the Alien Property Custodian, 1944: first published in Leipzig and Berlin, 1940.) 3.20 dollars.

Shall Enemy Property be Returned? A Long-Term View

The ultimate disposition of some hundreds of million dollars' worth of property of enemy aliens, now under the control of the United States government, awaits a decision. In addition to patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc., the Alien Property Custodian has subjected to control enemy property amounting to nearly 200 million dollars, composed primarily of business enterprises. The United States Treasury has blocked some 330 million dollars worth of the assets of enemy nationals not involving control over specific productive assets.Many international lawyers hold that international law requires postwar restitution of, or in lieu of restitution compensation for, enemy private property sequestered during a war; and an important question of policy now presents itself. This article, on the basis of long-term considerations, advocates a policy of restitution.

The Pietro Campanella.

War — Effects of Outbreak of — Alien Enemy Claimant in an Cam Action for Forfeiture — Right of the Claimant to Put in a Defence against Forfeiture — Substitution of Alien Property Custodian for Claimants — Stay of Proceedings.

Methoden der mathematischen Physik

THESE two volumes are photo-lithoprints of the second edition of Vol. 1, issued in 1930, and Vol. 2, issued in 1937. The first volume contains seven chapters as follows: 1, the algebra of linear transformations and quadratic forms; 2, the development of an arbitrary function in series; 3, the theory of linear integral equations; 4, the basic principles of the calculus of variations; 5, the oscillation and eigenvalue problems of mathematical physics; 6, application of the calculus of variations to eigenvalue problems; 7, special functions defined by eigenvalue problems. Methoden der mathematischen Physik Von Prof. R. Courant Prof. D. Hilbert. (Published and distributed in the Public Interest with the consent of the Alien Property Custodian under License No. A. 82.) Band 1. Zweite verbesserte Auflage. Pp. xv + 469. 8 dollars. Band 2. Pp. xiv + 549. 8 dollars. (New York: Interscience Publishers, Inc.; London: H. K. Lewis and Co., Ltd., 1931–1937.) 2 vols., 14 dollars.