RichardQ Loc: Colorado

I have to admire your faithfulness to your cause, William! There was nothing we could do about the internal decisions in those Communist lands governed by rebels who even defied Moscow. When Tito shot down two U.S. cargo planes, using fighter planes and holding survivors hostage, all we did was start using one armed B-17 to accompany subsequent flights until he "apologized" and returned the hostages. It wasn't worth starting WW III. I'm afraid the Allies had little sympathy for any German minorities in other lands during those postwar years.

William J Renard

Sometimes we walk with the Devil to get to Heaven? The big wigs lead, and tell the small people that they are justefied in what they tell us, this has gone on since the inception of history, the sadness is that the average
innocent small person is the one who suffers most. Leaders, Politicians and lawyers, sometimes fit into the catagory of LIARS!!!

Quinn 4

Werner von Braun hands were as dirt as the Nazis we hanged at Nuremberg. Truman - Eisenhower - Kennedy all knew about those ex Nazis working and living here in the good old USA. USA landed on the moon over the bones of those people the Nazis killed. This is not any thing new, it came out back in the 1970s. I am taking a back by the fact not one person, but all of you did not known about is.

RichardQ Loc: Colorado

[quote=ecblackiii]

Thank you for your interest and comments, ecblackiii. I have to remind you that there were far more Nazi war crimes trials than the 13 Nuremberg trials, since the British, French, Russians, Poles, Italians, Czechs, etc. conducted their own trials inside their Occupation Zones and homelands -- and the U.S. Army ran peripheral courts such as the March-April 1946 trial of 61 Nazi war criminals (ages 23 to 63) in Dachau for their atrocities in the huge Mauthausen Camp in Austria. At least 165,000 POWs and German nationals died there between Jan. 1942 and early May, 1945.

According to Nazi Party records, only 10 percent of the German population were members in 1945, which means 90 percent were not. That would indicate that membership was not obligatory. In fact, some of the Paperclip Nazis were not Party members but held responsible posts. Von Braun contended he joined because that helped him to get funding for his rocketry obsession.

In the case of Paperclip, membership in the Nazi Party automatically barred a German from entering the USA, under strict orders from President Truman. The Paperclip officers deliberately disobeyed that order, qualifying them for severe courtsmartial -- which never happened. I also must remind you that all the Paperclip candidates were subjected to intense interrogations, from which detailed dossiers were compiled listing their war crimes as they themselves described them. Those dossiers were held secret for decades, and some, like von Braun's, are still not released. When they were reluctantly released to reporter Linda Hunt, without the forgeries, they revealed horrendous crimes committed by scientists of all stripes. Those facts do warrant my insinuations, IMHO.

kemosabe

Why would you say that? The decision has been proven to have saved approximately a million American lives. I guess that saving American lives would not be important to you.

Quinn 4

Kemosabe, you get your facts mix up. The people who work on the A-Bomb, had to get out of Germany and other places because the Nazis were hunting them down to kill them. Most of them got to America before America got into the war. Werner Von Braun and people like him came after the war.

RichardQ Loc: Colorado

Many thanks for your interesting and perceptive comments, pendennis. One fact that has been overlooked in this discussion of A-bombs is the inclination of physicists to gossip among themselves, across national borders, even in wartimes. They are practically an international garden club, sharing personal and professional information. They did a lot of letter writing before, during and after WW II (which today is replaced with e-mails, or worse, tweets). An example was a now-famous and controversial meeting between Nazi Germany's eminent physicist,Werner Heissenberg, and his Danish mentor, Prof. Niels Bohr in September, 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded Denmark. Heissenberg defended his work on an A-bomb for Hitler, and Bohr vigorously criticised it. The friends parted as enemies. Bohr and his family escaped to England and America, where he joined the Manhattan Project to create the American A-bomb. The incident generated books and a Broadway play, "Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn. Sounds like a Hollywood melodrama.