Book Review - Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation Of German Science After The Second World War - O’Reagan, Douglas M. Baltimore

Reviewed by Matt Malone, Assistant Professor (Faculty of Law) at the Thompson Rivers University

In Taking Nazi Technology, Douglas O’Reagan examines the quadripartite occupying powers’ efforts at technology transfer from Nazi Germany following the Second World War. His book is replete with lessons for purveyors of today’s rhetoric that theft of intellectual property (IP) presents national security concerns. It contributes much-needed nuance to the assertions made in reports like the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee’s Impact of Intellectual Property Theft on the Economy, which highlighted the gravity of IP theft as a national security issue only to note the impossibility of measuring it accurately or creating precise estimates of its magnitude.^{Footnote 1}  Such critical lapses are typical of research in the genre.

O’Reagan dispenses altogether with estimating the value of “intellectual reparations,”^{Footnote 2}  dismissing attempts to do so as defying easy accounting.^{Footnote 3}  However, he accepts that “[a]nyone who wants to argue that the intellectual reparations were an enormous gain for the United States … can find plenty of evidence to support that claim.”^{Footnote 4}  Indeed, during the war, advanced technology used by the Nazis induced fear and envy among the Allied powers, with developments like the jet engine aircraft and the V-1 and V-2 rockets representing novel breakthroughs. In addition, Germany’s research universities (an institution it invented) enjoyed a stellar reputation. From 1901, when the Nobel Prizes were first awarded, through 1956, in every year but one, Germany won more Nobel prizes than any other country.

O’Reagan’s principal argument is that an obsessive focus on siphoning off German technology was met by the realization that copying abstract technical documents did not in itself accomplish technology transfer. Instead, it resulted in the occupying powers facing an “information problem,”^{Footnote 5}  having to digest a “staggering”^{Footnote 6}  quantity of documents. For example, after the Americans occupied the German patent office following the war—microfilming everything they could find and denying access to the French and Soviets (but granting it to the British)—most of the information went unused. This occurred even though the Americans provided weekly bibliographies of technical documents to industry actors. (Executive Orders from President Truman had mandated the release of domestically produced and foreign-acquired wartime intelligence to American industry.)^{Footnote 7}  O’Reagan quotes the United States’ Technical Industrial Intelligence Committee’s observation that by 1947 there were “literally hundreds of tons of undigested data scattered in a number of repositories in Germany, France, England, and Japan.”^{Footnote 8}

Technology transfer is not just about “copy[ing] documents.”^{Footnote 9}   Instead, it requires an acknowledgement that “technology live[s] at least as much in people as in things.”^{Footnote 10}  O’Reagan points to the most obvious example of this argument: Germany’s post–Second World War resumption of productivity during its Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), showing that, despite being plundered, the country had retained much of its value in postwar international markets.^{Footnote 11}  German innovators were also not permitted to file for any registered form of IP protection during the period from 1945 to 1949. Despite all these disruptions, “the economic consequences of technical exploitations were, at absolute worst, insufficiently damaging to prevent the economic miracle.”^{Footnote 12}

For readers unfamiliar with the Allied powers’ efforts at technology transfer, O’Reagan summarizes each of those efforts in some of the most cogent scholarship available to date. The most eye-catching part of the American effort at technology transfer, Operation PAPERCLIP, had the goal of extracting scientists directly from Nazi Germany. It was as much an effort to bring German science into the American fold as it was to prevent German science from falling into the Soviet fold. Perhaps the most iconic example from Operation PAPERCLIP came in the personage of Wernher von Braun, a member of the V-2 rocket design team at the Nazis’ Peenemünde Army Research Center, which the Americans reached before the Soviets following the war.^{Footnote 13}  Von Braun later helped develop the Saturn V rocket, which took astronauts to the moon, and his role in that effort “seems to have been crucial.”^{Footnote 14}  O’Reagan explains that von Braun was part of a cluster of German rocket scientists who settled in Huntsville, Alabama, following the war. By contrast, the Soviet version of this effort, Operation OSOAVIAKHIM, saw the forcible removal of approximately 3,000 German scientists, engineers and others on the single night of 22 October 1946, and their extraction to Soviet territory.^{Footnote 15}  By 1958, most had returned to Germany.^{Footnote 16}

After providing many examples of how extraction of people, not documents, better accomplished technology transfer, O’Reagan posits that this realization shook the foundations of existing legal and national security frameworks. He suggests that the effort pushed Allied powers to move from the fallacy of “thinking of technology as a zero-sum game” towards constructing IP frameworks that recognized and protected “embedded”^{Footnote 17}  knowledge. O’Reagan depicts the rise of IP law following Second World War as flowing from this realization and coinciding with a push by the Americans for “other nations to adopt American standards for business law.”^{Footnote 18}

A recognition of the importance of technical know-how by judges, lawyers and lawmakers in the IP community led to the creation of new forms of law, which “allow[ed] widespread know-how licensing in the 1940s to 1970s.”^{Footnote 19}  The percentage of law review articles where the term “technical know-how” appeared rose from 0% in 1940 to 0.15% by 1950—and to 0.35% by 1970.^{Footnote 20}  Similarly, common usage of the phrase “intellectual property” did not accelerate until the post–Second World War period.^{Footnote 21}

O’Reagan’s over-arching argument is that the most important technology transfer comes in the form of people, not things.^{Footnote 22}   Digestion of the vast amounts of technical information made available after the war presented a challenge, necessitating “softer”^{Footnote 23}  knowledge sets.^{Footnote 24}  By wading into arguments around the need to focus on “attracting and retaining foreign scientists and skilled workers … rather than forcing them out once student and temporary visas expire,” O’Reagan makes tentative comments on the current state of national security discourse in the United States. He notes that the present-day fear of data breaches is a red herring compared with the “bigger threat”^{Footnote 25} of the movement of people and the loss of talent. One hopes that more scholars will address the issue.

This article first appeared in the April, 2024 edition of Canadian Army Journal (20-2).