130 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE arly treatment of Peenemunde, such as Michael Neufeld’s recent The Rocket and the Reich. Still, Wegener sets himself apart by offering a thoughtful, historically useful memoir. The future work of all histo rians of early rocketry and high speed flight will greatly benefit from Wegener’s formal compilation of recollections. Peter L. Jakab Dr. Jakab is a curator in the Aeronautics Department, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. He has written extensively on the history of aero space engineering. Technology Transfer Out ofGermany after 1945. Edited by MatthiasJudt and Burghard Ciesla. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. Pp. xviii+151; notes, index. $45.00 (hardcover). In September 1993, inspired byjohn Gimbel’s polemic in Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Ger many (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), the German His torical Institute in Washington, D.C., hosted a special conference on allied technology transfer from Germany. Gimbel would no doubt have contributed, but he died unexpectedly in 1992. The ten authors in these published proceedings take issue with his thesis, yet Technology Transfer Out of Germany could well stand as a Festschrift dedicated to Gimbel’s influence. Gimbel argued that American business interests managed to cor rupt the mission of Germany’s reconstruction after World War II. Large corporations convinced the Department ofCommerce to staff a special Office ofTechnical Services (OTS) with engineers who flew to Germany to plunder “intellectual reparations.” Gimbel’s book is filled with excellent archival documentation that must provide grist for the screenwriters of The X-Files: GIs rifled the patent logs and engineering bureaus of German firms and in some cases made off with entire production facilities, scientists, engineers, and all. John C. Green, director of OTS, justified it thus: “This is the first time any nation has ever acquired its reparations in knowledge instead of physical materials. The fundamental justification of this activity is that we won the war and the Germans did not.” According to Gimbel, this was supreme hypocrisy, a betrayal ofRooseveltian trustbusting liberalism. Johannes Bahr, Paul Erker, and Geoffrey Giles address the nature of technology transfer in this volume’s excellent concluding com mentary. They point out the simplistic conception oftechnology pos sessed by many contemporaries, who assumed that machines and ideas could simply be lifted out of Germany and plugged into Ameri can industry. As Raymond Stokes points out in one of the most inter TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 131 esting pieces, “often only the Germans possessed the technological know-how to make the knowledge productive” (p. 138). In this light, the “brain drain” of German scientists, skilled workers, and engi neers after 1945 to high-payingjobs in America is no surprise. The same phenomenon occurred in the East, and one of the virtues of this volume is André Steiner’s inclusion of fresh archival material from the former Soviet Union. Many have claimed that the Soviets dismantled East German industrial plant while West Germany ben efited from Marshall Plan aid. In reality, the Soviets changed quickly from a policy of expropriation to one of integration into the COMECON by the late 1940s. East German industry failed to match the pace of the West not because it was plundered but because of “barriers within the [East German] economy” (p. 136). All these essays point to the absence of anything like outright “plunder.” Rather, there was a scramble for patronage. As the intriguing bio graphical sketches ofGerman geneticists and psychologists provided by Mitchell Ash demonstrate, those who possessed knowledge that the Allies wanted sought the most favorable terms for denazification and the largest laboratory resources. “Intellectual reparations” never amounted to much in the first place for either East or West, as essays by Stokes, MatthiasJudt, Burghard Ciesla, Werner Abelshauser, and Steiner all point out. Most were limited to key, high-tech industries such as chemicals or aerody namics research. Most information was restricted to the military. The industries that really mattered for the postwar recovery, consumer durables, may have actually benefited as the Allies opened their home markets to German exports. In addition, as Volker Berghahn notes, it is not entirely clear what America in particular really stood to gain...