It is a fact that war forces immediate solutions, reacting to events that gallop and defy well-designed plans on paper.
And so there are not a few times in war history where secret military plans are captured and executed on pi and fi, insisting on the here and now and ignoring the wider consequences in the long run.
One such was Operation Connector, which operated between 1945-1959 and turned the United States into an unprecedented Nazi paradise. That is, German scientists directly affiliated with the party or collaborators of the regime.
America was transformed into a safe haven for them, as it now had a new war to fight, albeit an undeclared one. Cold War they told him and the Americans had to take the upper hand at all costs.
This was notorious even in the days of Operation Paperclip, a top-secret US intelligence program designed to bring the greatest minds of the Nazi apparatus to the country to join the Space Conquest and the battle with the USSR.
And they caught sea bass, because it was essentially these scientists who made powerful world landmarks, such as the moon. Apollo 11!
To make this happen, of course, the Americans deeply buried every notion of morality and law. Records of Nazi scientists (criminals or just accomplices) have disappeared from the face of the earth to work secretly for the superpower.
The question that remains to be asked is whether the US was justified in its decision to forgive war criminals in exchange for political advantage?
After the defeat of the Nazi threat of World War II, a new battle would begin. And this time not a single bullet would fall…
Immediately after its end World War II, while the people glorified the Allies for the triumph against the Nazi flame, they were busy with the next day. And the truth is that each of them made several controversial decisions, decisions that remained hidden for decades.
Perhaps the most backward of all was the pardon to a Nazi of recognized prestige to enlist in the services of Asteroessa. Operation Connector was called and it would pay off with jealousy, snatching 1.600 Nazi scientists from the greedy hands of the other Allies.
Because the US was not alone in this immoral race. All the big players of the winners wanted to get their hands on as much as they could from Axis technology and know-how. The old differences between the West and the USSR came to the surface again and the Americans and the British mainly ran to appropriate things before the Russians.
But America had the upper hand. As the impending Cold War threatened to destroy the precious victory, the United States quickly granted immunity to top Nazi war crimes scientists and fled to secret laboratories across the Atlantic.
The race was to work in American and not Soviet laboratories, because such great scientists would not be lost. After all, the Russians had their own plan to plunder great Nazi minds, we are talking about a normal and ruthless battle.
In one day, on October 22, 1946, the secret services and the Red Army snatched 2.200 German specialists (over 6.000 people, if we count their families) from the occupation zone at gunpoint. Soviet and sent them to work in Union laboratories.
That is why the Americans and the British had started the broom operation earlier, so that the developments would not catch up with them. Before the official end of the war, British and American military units plowed the occupied German territories in search of military, scientific and technological secrets. And their creators, alas.
Inside and behind the Allied lines, organizations such as the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (later known as the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency) combed the ground, seizing military equipment, documents, and work. And of course interrogating German scientists, observing their moods.
Such a discovery was to play a major role, a paper found in March 1945 in the toilets of the University of Bonn listing all the scientists who had been recruited in the last phases of the war since Third Reich.
The "Osenberg List" was a real treasure. It was a list compiled by Werner Osenberg himself, the chief engineer who ran the Defense Research Association of the Third Reich, and contained all the important German scientists working in the regime's laboratories.
When he failed to take the USSR, Hitler did not give up. Instead, he was collecting new supplies and scrambling for new plans to face the red giant. In 1943 he engaged in his most valuable asset, scientists, mathematicians, engineers, technicians and more than 4.000 missile specialists, locking them in a Baltic port to develop new lines of defense against the advance of the Red Army.
Peenemunde in northern Germany became the focus of Nazi missile research, and Osenberg was mobilized to bring its scientific elite there. Germany. In whose biography there should be not only significant achievements and distinctions, but also declared sympathies with the Nazi ideology.
You had to be both an ace in your job and "theirs" to get there. This was the "Osenberg List" and all the names it contained were in favor of the Nazi regime and its aims.
Great work was being done in Peenemunde in terms of weapons technology, and the Nazis would soon even have biological weapons of war. And then the Pentagon woke up and said but stop, we want these weapons too!
Those who were on the infamous list initially wanted to arrest and interrogate. This was foreseen by Operation Overcast, as the company was originally named. But as the Americans discovered the unthinkable aspects of high-tech Nazi technology, plans changed.
Why not pick them up as a family in the US and get them to work for them? And so on May 22, 1945 the Allies attacked the base of Peenemunde and captured those working on the V-2 missile. What was the V-2? The world's first long-range ballistic missile!
The Office of Strategic Research (OSS), which would later be renamed CIA. After gaining the approval of President Truman, the Connection Company was now running normally.
Only the president made it clear to them that they could not recruit any declared Nazi scientist. And everyone in Peenemund was like that! The "window" in the directive was found, of course: they erased any file, register or evidence that could link them to the Nazi mechanism.
Clean and free of all possible war crimes, 1.600 German scientists and their families arrived on the other side of the Atlantic to revolutionize the US arsenal of chemical and biological warfare weapons and the space race.
First and foremost, Werner von Braun! At the head of the V-2 research unit, the missile that leveled Britain, von Braun was an ordinary American citizen of German descent across the Atlantic. He became a significant member of it NASA and director of the Marshall Space Flight Center!
It was erased from his records that his missile program was being held hostage by the Buchenwald concentration camp. Innocent victims dying of hunger and overwork. The use of the V-2 as a "weapon of revenge" was also abolished, as the Nazis used it to raid cities in retaliation for Allied bombing.
The agreement with the Devil, however, paid off for America. Von Brown gave her her first space satellite, Explorer 1, and Saturn V later, when she officially joined NASA. Saturn V took the Apollo mission to the Moon.
How not to be honored with the National Medal of Science? But four of his close associates were also awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the highest honor given by the US Space Agency.
As soon as he landed on American soil in 1945, Peenemunde's technical director locked himself in a secret military base in Texas and tested the V-2. Until 1977, when he passed away, stricken with cancer, he lived a prestigious and laurel-crowned life.
He always had with him his close associates, an army of Nazi scientists who had staffed every important area of the Marshall Space Flight Center. At his side is always Kurt Debus, this official member of the SS, who was the director of the test field we know today as the Kennedy Space Center.
In addition to the other values, one crater of the Moon is named after him and a second of von Brown.
With them is Otto Ambros, his "favorite chemist Adolf Hitler", As he was known, who was even tried in Nuremberg for mass murder and crimes against humanity.
On the other side of the Atlantic, however, they saw him gracefully, his knowledge was necessary, you see, for the conquest of Space. He died as a special adviser to the US Department of Energy.
For 50 full years, from 1963-2013, the American Space Medicine Association honored top scientists with the Strughold Award. By the "father of space medicine" himself, Hubertus Strughold. Who was Strughold?
As the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2013, forcing the Space Medicine Association to change the name of the award, he was one of those Nazi doctors who did experiments to people.
And the names are many here. All of them were washed away by the crimes of the past. A prime example is Dr. Theodor Benzinger, who died in his 90s and the New York Times dedicated a wonderful article to him as the inventor of the ear thermometer.
They forgot to mention that it was another Nazi doctor who did his research on hostage camps.
All of them initially worked in secret facilities in Texas and New Mexico as "special advisers to the Department of War" and later, clear of their suspicious past, found their place in the top state apparatus.
None of them were ever tried (except for one, Georg Rickhey, who was ousted and taken to Germany in 1947 to stand trial and finally acquitted!) And all lived a life of gift…
Even today, much of the story of Operation Paperclip remains alarmingly unknown, as if some stubbornly insist on denying it.
Recent journalistic investigations and claims for access to the documents have been denied and again denied. In some cases, even lawsuits. In fact, when the "New York Times" are the ones doing the research, their request is approved, but the available data are missing.
Even for some of these scientists who were later linked to the atrocities of the Holocaust, nothing is available. Some obviously did a very good job and wiped them off the face of the earth.
Before they are magically portrayed as remarkable American citizens with enviable science. A science so good that in addition to their contribution to military equipment and the battle of space, the patents granted by their work exceeded the value of $ 10 billion.
In 2005 the organization Interagency Working Group, created by Bill Clinton"The belief that they [the US military and the CIA] recruited only a few 'rotten apples' can not stand in the light of the new documents," she said in a report to Congress.