Plunder in Postwar Germany.

[Mensch Meyer]

During the period of the occupation, Germany was
stripped of much industry, plants and equipment,
as well as of its technical and scientific proprietary
information: an estimated $ 20 billion (1945 value)
taken by the Allies.

This is what happened: General Lucius D.Clay, US
Military Governor of Germany, was not too happy
about the legal implications and the practical results
of the approach he called 'hidden reparations'.
He had to deal with the day-to-day consequences.

Clay threatened to resign at one point. He said -
quote: "Under the Potsdam Protocol equipment other
than war material may be exported from Germany
only for reparations or for sale in American dollars as
an export item."

The issue was not "war material." We are not talking
about legally agreed upon reparations either: the
Allies could not agree. They quarreled.

Yet as the liberating troops advanced through western
Germany, they used "Blue Books", which listed research,
development, and production activities geographically
and in great detail.

This was planned. They were informed, and nothing
escaped their attention: optical glass, electron
microscopes, power circuitbreakers, die-casting
equipment, acetylene chemistry, wind tunnels,
textiles and textile machinery, x-ray tubes, forest
products, ceramics, colors and dyes, tape recorders,
heavy presses, high-tension cables, a unique chocolate
wrapping machine, a buttermaking machine, a
precision grinding machine, a process to preserve
soy bean oil, wood sugars, color film and processing,
synthetic blood plasma, artificial leather, plastics, soap
and detergents, motorcycles, and numerous other
technologies and processes.

There was also the work of FIAT (Field Information
Agency,Technical), established by SHAEF on May
31, 1945. Its 'Documents Program' sucked the
brains out of Germany, pure and simple. It
microfilmed anything of value from companies,
research institutions, universities, and patent
offices. Included were BMW, The Deutsche
Museum Muenchen (what for?), Agfa, Leitz, Bosch,
Merck, Universityof Duesseldorf, and on and on.

At the Berlin Patent Office alone, seventy people
produced more than 17 miles (!!) of microfilm of
patents, including 140,000 pending German,
Austrian, Italian, and Japanese patent applications.
This could have provided wonderful competitive
advantages for ruined countries with recovery dreams !

The microfilms were farmed out to private industry
in the US. Circulars were mailed to "625 US technical
societies and trade associations, to about 3000
industrial research laboratories, and several hundred
universities with research facilities available to
industry." Thousands of reports were produced
and copies were handed out freely.
Exhibitions of 'hidden reparations' equipment
were arranged for private industry viewing in:

Virginia: Transportation Equipment, Fort Monroe
Engineering Equipment;

Fort Belvoir, Philadelphia: Machine Tools and other
Items;

At Frankfort Arsenal, Chicago: The Bosch Condenser
Machine at Western Electric.

Fifty or more major business, scientific, engineering,
and industry trade magazines in the US carried articles
about these events.

Subsequent to the total destruction of the German
economy and actual famine, conditions would have
been so much more sensible without Allied deliberate
prohibition on making fertilizer. Germans could have
produced food to fight off starvation.

By exporting, the population could have earned some
cash to buy desperately needed grain. Instead they
were ordered by US military occupation authorities to
dismantle their own industrial plants and equipment.
This policy destroyed the few production facilities that
had survived the bombing and devastations of war on
German soil. These plants could have manufactured
goods for reparations if so ratified, and for cash to
buy food.

Such events beg the question, is this kind of history in
tune with the basics of American priniciples: Why would
the victors accept that starving children was justified
vengeance? What kind of a political philosophy is that?
Should one respect it?

All references are listed in Gimbel.

Source:

John Gimbel. Science, Technology, and Reparations:
Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany.
Stanford Univ., Press, 1990.

[Dan]

Such events beg the question, is this kind of history in
tune with the basics of American priniciples: Why would
the victors accept that starving children was justified
vengeance? What kind of a political philosophy is that?
Should one respect it?

What did Secretary of State Albright say about the half million Iraqi kids who died due to sanctions? "It's worth it".

[Mensch Meyer]

Such events beg the question, is this kind of history in
tune with the basics of American priniciples: Why would
the victors accept that starving children was justified
vengeance? What kind of a political philosophy is that?
Should one respect it?

What did Secretary of State Albright say about the half million Iraqi kids who died due to sanctions? "It's worth it".

Yep, SHE did have the answer, which leads to the next question: worth to WHOM ?

[Tarpon27]

Well, Mensch, why don't you post some figures on how many German children died from this removal of the economic base of post-war Germany, and you can also explain how, in lieu of this industrial rape, the German economy was the powerhouse of Europe in a few short years after the end of WWII.

And for the "dying Iraqi children":

http://reason.com/0203/fe.mw.the.shtml

http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/sto ... 03,00.html


It appears that the UN sanctions and the supposed Iraqi child death toll have not a great deal in common. Take a look.

Regards,

Mark

[Dan]

The question is one of philosophy. Exact number have nothing to do with Albright's statement. Acording to her answer even if the real number and cause were as assumed, it would be worth it.

[Tarpon27]

Dan wrote:

The question is one of philosophy. Exact number have nothing to do with Albright's statement. Acording to her answer even if the real number and cause were as assumed, it would be worth it.

The question, too, is whether or not the supposed death of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age 5 has actually occurred, which apparently is of little concern, correct?

You have the quote for Albright, or a URL?

Mark

[Dan]

The question, too, is whether or not the supposed death of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age 5 has actually occurred, which apparently is of little concern, correct?

Exactly

You have the quote for Albright, or a URL?

No

Regards

[Dan]

http://www.fair.org/extra/0111/iraq.html

This took 0.23 seconds to find on google.com

[HaEn]

http://www.fair.org/extra/0111/iraq.html

This took 0.23 seconds to find on google.com

VERRRRRY INTERESTING.
HN

[Tarpon27]

I already had it...it is in the _Reason_ article/URL you obviously didn't read, along with some of the background and context leading to Stahl's jamming a mike in Albright's face, making a claim that has turned out to be an outright lie, and Albright's stupid comment which she later recanted (also included in the article).

Plus, there is the simple fact that Saddam refused the oil for food program for 6 years, and then blames the UN sanctions for killing Iraqis, something he himself has never had a particular problem doing on his own.

Albright says she was quoted out of context, and you obviously won't believe it, and that's fine with me; I really never really cared too much for Albright, or Clinton Administration foreign policy. Frankly, I don't think Albright was quoted out of context, but I also don't believe she was somehow secretly delighted by the supposed 500,000 dead kids; but she is a Jew, right, so 500,000 dead Arab kids is what all Jews want, correct?

However, the 500,000 Iraqi children dead are fantasy, and what is more surreal, is that the figure never came from the Iraqi government or Saddam, but from the whacked radical left in the US.

Regards,

Mark

[Davey Boy]

West Germany certainly got more back than it lost after the war. Hell, even the Russians ended up putting money into East Germany to try and convince the west that it was a socialist paradise.


HETMAN

[Ovidius]

However, the 500,000 Iraqi children dead are fantasy, and what is more surreal, is that the figure never came from the Iraqi government or Saddam, but from the whacked radical left in the US.

As we all - supposedly - know, at the gate of each embassy of a country there is a panel with images from that country.

For about two years, on the panel of the Iraqi embassy in Bucharest there were pictures of children dead of starvation, of various diseases etc.

At the end of last September, those images vanished suddenly, and were replaced by what appears usually at other embassies - monuments, a map of Iraq etc.

Guess why?

~Ovidius

[James]

Mr. Meyer:

Do you have any comparable figures regarding the value of the money, art and materials the Germans took from occupied Europe, including but not limited to that taken from those persons sent to the various concentration camps? It seems to me that, in trying to figure the amount of reparations that may have been improperly taken from the defeated German nation, one must factor in any amount not properly belonging to the German nation in the first instance. In other words, to use an only slightly flawed analogy, one does not levy a fine against a thief in an amount less than that the thief holds as a result of his thefts. (And please, let's not put undue emphasis on my use of the words "thief" or "thefts" in the analogy. I would rather not have this turn into a discussion of whether Germany's conduct throughout the war was legal or not. THe issue I am asking you to address is whether or not you think that there is some merit in considering the fact that Germany exacted some "reparations" of its own for several years and from several countries and groups.)

[Mensch Meyer]

Mr. Meyer:

Do you have any comparable figures regarding the value of the money, art and materials the Germans took from occupied Europe, including but not limited to that taken from those persons sent to the various concentration camps? It seems to me that, in trying to figure the amount of reparations that may have been improperly taken from the defeated German nation, one must factor in any amount not properly belonging to the German nation in the first instance. In other words, to use an only slightly flawed analogy, one does not levy a fine against a thief in an amount less than that the thief holds as a result of his thefts. (And please, let's not put undue emphasis on my use of the words "thief" or "thefts" in the analogy. I would rather not have this turn into a discussion of whether Germany's conduct throughout the war was legal or not. THe issue I am asking you to address is whether or not you think that there is some merit in considering the fact that Germany exacted some "reparations" of its own for several years and from several countries and groups.)

We know all about that. Plenty of Hollywood docu-dramas have
saturated American culture with your story, which is centrifugal to
Jewish persecution during the Third Reich, events that to this day
turned modern Germans taxpayers into the post-war Cash Cow for
the Zionist agenda, enabling the creation of the beggar state, the
nation of Israel.

Quoting you about "theft" - let's move beyond the Holocaust and
the Jewish horizon of this century, let's get back to matters that
relate to WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

What brought mankind to the threshold of a new era during this
century and what put America in the forefront of the community
of nations? -- SPACE.--

This century saw the beginning of the Space Age, which began
when Wernher von Braun, the German rocket specialist and his
team of experts arrived in the U.S. on June 20, 1945.

As Director of the Development Operations Division of the Army
Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), von Braun's team developed the
Jupiter-C, a modified Redstone rocket.

The Jupiter-C successfully launched the western hemisphere's
first satellite in 1958. He later served as Director of NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center. Von Braun headed the effort to
build the giant Saturn V rocket used to launch the Apollo
missions to the Moon.

These events, based on German technology signaled the birth
of America's space program and laid the foundation of this
nation's strategic supremacy.

Operation Paperclip* brought von Braun, many of his coworkers,
German technological development in form of rocket hardware and
documentation to this country. The capture of this German scientist
advanced the US by $17 billion worth of German research technology.

THEFT:

(Der US-Geheimdienst verhaftet Wernher von Braun, 1945;
2000 Jahre Chronik * Bilddatenbank - AN302B -
--http://www.geschichte.2me.net/dch_3000.htm )

[Tarpon27]

So...how many German children starved to death when the Soviets took the hardware of the V2, and the US took took the scientists? And how many German children could be fed by advances of German rocketry technology?

And how did, again, Germany become the dominant economic power of Europe in a few short years after surrender? Your initial post was on the rape of industrial Germany, if you recall.

Regards,

Mark