This thought-provoking study by historian Monique Laney focuses on the U.S. government-assisted integration of German rocket specialists and their families into a small southern community at the end of World War II. In 1950, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, a town that would celebrate the team, despite their essential role in the Nazi war effort a decade earlier, for their contributions to the U.S. Army missile program and later to NASA's space program. Based on oral histories, provided by members of the African American and Jewish communities, the rocketeers' families, and co-workers, friends, and neighbors, Laney's book demonstrates how the histories of German Nazism and Jim Crow in the American South intertwine in narratives about the past. This is a critical reassessment of a singular time that links the Cold War, the “Space Race,” and the Civil Rights era while addressing important issues of transnational science and technology, and asking Americans to consider their country's own history of racism when reflecting on the Nazi past.

The Yearbook of Transnational History is dedicated to disseminating pioneering research in the field of transnational history. This fourth volume is focused to the theme of exile. Authors from across the historical discipline provide insights into central aspects of research into the phenomenon of exile in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Both centuries have seen large numbers of people fleeing revolutions, oppression, persecution, and extermination. This volume is the first publication to provide a comprehensive overview over exiles of various political and ethnic groups beginning with the French Revolution and ending with the transfer of Nazi scientists from post-World-War-II Germany to the United States. This volume contains contributions about the refugees created by the French Revolution, the Forty-Eighters who were forced out of Germany after the failed Revolution of 1848/49, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Vietnamese anti-colonial activists in France, the exiles of Nazi Germany, and the transfer of Nazi scientists such as Wernher von Braun to the United States after World War II.

At the end of the Second World War, Germany lay at the mercy of its occupiers, all of whom launched programmes of scientific and technological exploitation. Each occupying nation sought to bolster their own armouries and industries with the spoils of war, and Britain was no exception. Shrouded in secrecy yet directed at the top levels of government and driven by ingenuity from across the civil service and armed forces, Britain made exploitation a key priority. By examining factories and laboratories, confiscating prototypes and blueprints, and interrogating and even recruiting German experts, Britain sought to utilise the innovations of the last war to prepare for the next. This ground-breaking book tells the full story of British exploitation for the first time, sheds new light on the legacies of the Second World War, and contributes to histories of intelligence, science, warfare and power in the midst of the twentieth century.

A gripping history of one of the United States' most controversial Cold War intelligence operations. Project Paperclip brought hundreds of German scientists and engineers, including aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, to the United States in the first decade after World War II. More than the freighters full of equipment or the documents recovered from caves and hastily abandoned warehouses, the German brains who designed and built the V-2 rocket and other "wonder weapons" for the Third Reich proved invaluable to America's emerging military-industrial complex. Whether they remained under military employment, transitioned to civilian agencies like NASA, or sought more lucrative careers with corporations flush with government contracts, German specialists recruited into the Paperclip program assumed enormously influential positions within the labyrinthine national security state. Drawing on recently declassified documents from intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the State Department, Brian E. Crim's Our Germans examines the process of integrating German scientists into a national security state dominated by the armed services and defense industries. Crim explains how the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency enticed targeted scientists, whitewashed the records of Nazis and war criminals, and deceived government agencies about the content of security investigations. Exploring the vicious bureaucratic rivalries that erupted over the wisdom, efficacy, and morality of pursuing Paperclip, Our Germans reveals how some Paperclip proponents and scientists influenced the perception of the rival Soviet threat by volunteering inflated estimates of Russian intentions and technical capabilities. As it describes the project's embattled legacy, Our Germans reflects on the myriad ways that Paperclip has been remembered in culture and national memory. As this engaging book demonstrates, whether characterized as an expedient Cold War program born from military necessity or a dishonorable episode, the project ultimately reflects American ambivalence about the military-industrial complex and the viability of an "ends justifies the means" solution to external threats.

“Skillfully researched and powerfully written, The German Wife will capture you from the first page.” —Madeline Martin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London The New York Times bestselling author of The Warsaw Orphan returns with a gripping novel inspired by the true story of Operation Paperclip: a controversial secret US intelligence program that employed former Nazis after WWII. Berlin, 1930—When a wave of change sweeps a radical political party to power, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes’s academic husband benefits from the ambitions of its newly elected chancellor. Although Sofie and Jürgen do not share the social views growing popular in Hitler’s Germany, Jürgen’s position with its burgeoning rocket program changes their diminishing fortunes for the better. But as Sofie watches helplessly, her beloved Berlin begins to transform, forcing her to consider what they must sacrifice morally for their young family’s security, and what the price for their neutrality will be. Twenty years later, Jürgen is one of the many German scientists offered pardons for their part in the war, and taken to America to work for its fledgling space program. For Sofie, this is the chance to exorcise the ghosts that have followed her across the ocean, and make a fresh start in her adopted country. But her neighbors aren’t as welcoming or as understanding as she had hoped. When scandalous rumors about the Rhodes family’s affiliation with Hitler’s regime spreads, idle gossip turns to bitter rage, and the act of violence that results will tear apart Sofie’s community and her family before the truth is finally revealed. “An unforgettable novel that explores important questions highly relevant to the world today.” —Christine Wells, author of Sisters of the Resistance Don’t miss Kelly Rimmer’s next historical suspense, The Paris Agent, coming July 2023! For more by Kelly Rimmer, look for: Before I Let You Go The Things We Cannot Say Truths I Never Told You The Warsaw Orphan

Intriguing, real-life espionage stories bring to life a comparative history of the Allies' efforts to seize, control, and exploit German science and technology after the Second World War. During the Second World War, German science and technology posed a terrifying threat to the Allied nations. These advanced weapons, which included rockets, V-2 missiles, tanks, submarines, and jet airplanes, gave troubling credence to Nazi propaganda about forthcoming "wonder-weapons" that would turn the war decisively in favor of the Axis. After the war ended, the Allied powers raced to seize "intellectual reparations" from almost every field of industrial technology and academic science in occupied Germany. It was likely the largest-scale technology transfer in history. In Taking Nazi Technology, Douglas M. O'Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators invaded Germany's factories and research institutions, seizing or copying all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land—including that of other Allied nations. Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed—and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did it, and when still matters today. He also argues that these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself.

In 1945, Germany and Japan lay prostrate after total war and resounding defeat. By 1960, they had the second and fifth largest economies in the world respectively. This global leadership has been maintained ever since. How did these 'economic miracles' come to pass, and why were these two nations particularly adept at achieving them? Ray Stokes is the first to unpack these questions from comparative and international perspectives, emphasising both the individuals and companies behind this exceptional performance and the broader global political and economic contexts. He highlights the potent mixtures in both countries of judicious state action, effective industrial organisation, benign labour relations, and technological innovation, which they adapted constantly - sometimes painfully - to take full advantage of rapidly growing post-war international trade and globalisation. Together, they explain the spectacular resurgence of Deutschland AG and Japan Incorporated to global economic and technological leadership, which they have sustained to the present.

The sciences played a critical role in American foreign policy after World War II. From atomic energy and satellites to the green revolution, scientific advances were central to American diplomacy in the early Cold War, as the United States leveraged its scientific and technical pre-eminence to secure alliances and markets. The growth of applied research in the 1970s, exemplified by the biotech industry, led the United States to promote global intellectual property rights. Priorities shifted with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as attention turned to information technology and environmental sciences. Today, international relations take place within a scientific and technical framework, whether in the headlines on global warming and the war on terror or in the fine print of intellectual property rights. Science and American Foreign Relations since World War II provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary geopolitics of science.

In Educating the Enemy, Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, she draws an important comparison to another population of children in the El Paso public schools who received dramatically different treatment: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican children in El Paso were segregated into "Mexican" schools, as opposed to the"American" schools the German students attended. In these "Mexican" schools, children were penalized for speaking Spanish, which,because of residential segregation, was the only language all but a few spoke. They also prepared students for menial jobs that would keep them ensconced in Mexican American enclaves. .

American Astronautical Society Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award As NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969, many African American leaders protested the billions of dollars used to fund “space joyrides” rather than help tackle poverty, inequality, and discrimination at home. This volume examines such tensions as well as the ways in which NASA’s goal of space exploration aligned with the cause of racial equality. It provides new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad.  Essays explore how thousands of jobs created during the space race offered new opportunities for minorities in places like Huntsville, Alabama, while at the same time segregation at NASA’s satellite tracking station in South Africa led to that facility’s closure. Other topics include black skepticism toward NASA’s framing of space exploration as “for the benefit of all mankind,” NASA’s track record in hiring women and minorities, and the efforts of black activists to increase minority access to education that would lead to greater participation in the space program. The volume also addresses how to best find and preserve archival evidence of African American contributions that are missing from narratives of space exploration.  NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement offers important lessons from history as today’s activists grapple with the distance between social movements like Black Lives Matter and scientific ambitions such as NASA’s mission to Mars.  Contributors: P.J. Blount | Jonathan Coopersmith | Matthew L. Downs | Eric Fenrich | Cathleen Lewis | Cyrus Mody | David S. Molina | Brian C. Odom | Brenda Plummer | Christina K. Roberts | Keith Snedegar | Stephen P. Waring | Margaret A. Weitekamp  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.