By Andrew Walker / BBC News
Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead
pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men
provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost.
The end of World War II saw an intense scramble for Nazi
Germany's many technological secrets. The Allies vied to plunder as
much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble of the
Thousand Year Reich for themselves, while preventing others from doing
the same.
The range of Germany's technical achievement astounded
Allied scientific intelligence experts accompanying the invading forces
in 1945.
Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided
missiles, stealth technology and hardened armour were just some of the
groundbreaking technologies developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops
and factories, even as Germany was losing the war.
And it was the US and the Soviet Union which, in the
first days of the Cold War, found themselves in a race against time to
uncover Hitler's scientific secrets.
In May 1945, Stalin's legions secured the atomic
research labs at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the
suburbs of Berlin, giving their master the kernel of what would become
the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal.
US forces removed V-2 missiles from the vast Nordhausen
complex, built under the Harz Mountains in central Germany, just before
the Soviets took over the factory, in what would become their area of
occupation. And the team which had built the V-2, led by Wernher von
Braun, also fell into American hands...
...
Added to this, the large number of still-secret
Paperclip documents has led many people, including Nick Cook, Aerospace
Consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly, to speculate that the US may have
developed even more advanced Nazi technology, including anti-gravity
devices, a potential source of vast amounts of free energy.
Cook says that such technology "could be so destructive
that it would endanger world peace and the US decided to keep it secret
for a long time"...
Read the whole article here: Project PaperClip
