Technology and Culture

Technology Transfer as War Booty: Thezyxwvutsrqponml U.S. Technical Oil Mission to Europe, 1945 ARNOLD KRAMMER By the last month of the fighting in Germany, as the Allied armies rolled across the Rhine, combat-weary GIs were used to seeing groups of intelligence officers moving about the war zone. They were no longer startled to see small groups of scholarly looking American officers drive up to bombed-out and newly captured factories and, apparently unmindful of the smoke and sometimes nearby gunfire, systematically investigate the plant. They watched as tons of records were hauled out into the open for eventual crating and shipment and as nervous and obsequious German scientists were questioned by these visitors who wore neither rank nor unit designation on their American uniforms. The onlookers would have been surprised to learn that these investigators were not really army officers at all but industrial scientists and government experts, and that the plants they investigated had one thing in common: All had produced strategic materials under the Third Reich. Ultimately, more than 3,000 sepa­ rate teams—involving more than 10,000 investigators, industrialists, engineers, and technicians—visited thousands of enemy factories, scientific institutions, business premises, and other objectives in an effort to explore and exploit the fundamental industrial knowledge of the enemy. The Second World War, unlike any war in the history of civiliza­ tion, was a war of science. The brains and industrial techniques of Allied scientists and engineers were matched against those of the enemy to produce the most advanced and effective devices in pursuit of military supremacy. The forces of science and industry had been marshaled to invent and develop new devices, all of which were held under a tight cloak of military security. Each warring nation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on fundamental and applied research which, while primarly intended for the purpose of war, presented a Dr . Kr a m m e r is professor of history at Texas A&M University.© 1981 by the Society for the History of Technology. 0040-165X/81/2201-0003$01.00 68 69jihgfedcbaZYX Technology Transfer as War Booty unique form of war booty as the conflict came to a close. Germany’s substantial advances in numerous industries—especially rocketry, op­ tics, plastics, industrial chemistry, pharmaceuticals, and synthetic fuel technology—would be of substantial value to both American industry and to the continuing war effort against the Japanese. Moreover, it was clear that there was another contender for the information: the Soviet Union, whose own teams of investigators were already crisscrossing Germany from the East. Speed, therefore, was as im­ portant as thoroughness. Of all the areas of concern, the most repre­ sentative of the swift and sweeping transfer of industrial technology was synthetic petroleum and related materials. It was a story whose roots went back to Germany during the 1920s. Early Synthetic Fuel Research Numbed by her defeat in the cataclysmic First World War, and casting about desperately for an explanation, Germany found herself in agreement with Lord Curzon’s dictum that the winning side had floated to victory on a sea of oil. It was a bitter lesson which the Germans hoped to avoid in the future. Consequently, a number of German chemists, building on their earlier successful research in synthetic aniline dyes, ammonia, and nitrogen, now attacked the problem of converting Germany’s vast resources of coal to the other­ wise unavailable petroleum products. By the mid-1920s, they had developed two major processes. The first, developed by Friedrich Bergius (later to win the Nobel Prize for his work), forced a mixture of powdered coal, recycled oil, and a catalyst into a high-pressure vessel filled with hydrogen, where the coal was eventually liquefied. The resulting product was then separated into gasoline, middle oil, and heavy oil. The final products were gasoline and diesel fuel, and about 4 or 5 tons of coal were required to make a ton of gasoline, including the coal required to produce the power, steam, and hydro­ gen used in the process. In the second process, discovered by two German chemists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch, the powdered coal was broken up by superheated steam to produce a mixture of...