i had someone here on lemmy try to say the scientists recruited to the US via operation paperclip weren’t involved in crimes against humanity. a lot of people have missed in the shuffle of the past 80 years exactly what happened during the holocaust.
TheRealKuni@piefed.social
on 22 Aug 16:18
nextcollapse
The US is all about realpolitik, and begins to make a lot more sense when you look at everything through a Kissinger-shaped lens (rest in piss, you evil bastard). We pretend to be ideological so our citizenry can feel good about ourselves, but the way the nation operates is purely pragmatic. Look no further than Israel-Palestine and how buddy-buddy we are with Saudi Arabia for modern examples. Even our support of Ukraine, while overlapping with an ethical imperative, is driven primarily by the interests of NATO and the relatively inexpensive degradation of Russia’s military and political standing we can participate in. We only give a shit about “human rights” when it benefits us.
Operation Paperclip was pragmatism. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance when we try to hold in our minds that we brought Nazi scientists over and the idea that we’re “the good guys” and fought for “justice,” so our brains try to reduce that cognitive dissonance by saying those scientists weren’t behind any of the evils of the Nazis. They were, obviously. That didn’t matter to our government, but they kept the operation classified for a reason.
You think the USA is morally superior to the former USSR?
TheRealKuni@piefed.social
on 22 Aug 19:52
nextcollapse
I suppose with regard to Ukraine I should have said “our support was.”
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Aug 20:42
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I wouldn’t say we’re allied with Russia lmfao, that’s liberal bullshit, Trump is only looking after himself and whoever gives him the most in return. Very transactional, which means we are essentially allies with whoever gives us (him) the best offer. Whether that be literal gifts or things for his “legacy”.
You ever wonder why Marxists sound so much like Trump supporters these days?
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Aug 03:25
nextcollapse
In what way are we allies with Russia in your eyes?
If we were, the Ukraine / Russia war would be over already with heavy losses on the Ukraine side, instead we literally just gave them even more ammunition.
Again, it’s a transactional relationship for Trump, which I’m not saying is good at all, but it is the case, and to claim we’re allied with Russia is just factual incorrect.
I was actually going to commend you for not just assuming I was a trump supporter but… Rip
Trump and Putin will act in concert if their goals align so they can both personally benefit. They’re both egotistical monsters though who are entirely about themselves and their legacy first and foremost. You’re absolutely reaching by saying they’re close friends or allies, the proof is in the pudding, Trump could have completely pulled out of Ukraine but he hasn’t yet. Why do you think that is?
Trump could have completely pulled out of Ukraine but he hasn’t yet. Why do you think that is?
I already said, it would piss off the rest of his administration. He has to change them slowly. Take over DC so that if the anti-Russia components revolt, it won’t matter, for example. Arm DC soldiers. You see where this is going.
Bro he filled his second admin with sycophants, literally just raided Flynn with the FBI lmfao. Sorry you’re incorrect and making this both too simple and too complex lmao.
LOL
Did they stop supplying weapons, intelligence,etc…?
Did secret agent Orange unilaterally break all the missile treaties, pit sanctions on Russia and expand NATO troops around their border just to fool us?
TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
on 22 Aug 17:30
nextcollapse
The US is all about realpolitik
Not to excuse the US’s history of foreign diplomacy, but I think it would be naive to believe that there exists any major power who doesn’t treat geopolitics with the same level of pragmatism.
The Soviets hated the Nazi even more than the US did and yet they still had their own version of paperclip. Operation Osoaviakhim brought almost double the number of Nazi scientists into the Soviet Union.
Osoviakhim was somewhat more ideologically consistent than Paperclip. The scientists weren’t invited to the USSR with promises of cushy jobs and immunity from prosecution: they were forced from their homes, loaded onto freight trains, and made to work. It was part of the wider program of the Allies using the forced labour of ethnic Germans as a means of war reparations.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
on 23 Aug 03:35
nextcollapse
I mean, the Soviets didn’t offer them any guarantees. But I think that’s more of a byproduct of how they held leverage over the specialist, and more of a difference in how the two cultures choose to motivate employees.
Despite this, the affected specialists and their families were doing well compared to citizens of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Zone, apart from the suffering of deportation and isolation. The specialists earned more than their Soviet counterparts. The scientists, technicians and skilled workers were assigned to individual projects and working groups, primarily in the areas of Aeronautics and rocket technology, nuclear research, Chemistry and Optics. The stay was given for about five years.
bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml
on 23 Aug 18:50
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Nazis are useful anticommunists
kameecoding@lemmy.world
on 22 Aug 20:24
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I think the US media has washed their image so clean with the WW2 movies that most people have no idea about stuff like the nazi rally happened in the US and the support for eugenics in the Us, and the concentration camps in the Us.
Every day thousands upon thousands of people were being killed. Why? Because they were wearing the uniform of an enemy country. Killing people for wearing the wrong clothes (or maybe just standing too close to someone wearing the wrong clothes) is what a war is.
It strikes me as odd to be super upset over internment when more Japanese people were killed when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. Internment was obviously bad, but compared to other shit happening at the time? I guess the people killed in the war couldn’t tell their story afterwards, so we don’t care about that? Or maybe it’s because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that killing someone for wearing the wrong clothes is good and honourable?
There was a Japanese insurgency in Hawaii, so some of the people held in internment camps were actually insurgents. Obviously most of them weren’t. But what’s the difference between that scenario and hitting a military target and a lot of civilians getting killed because they happened to live a little too close to a military target? Because that kind of shit was happening all the time in WWII.
Bloomcole@lemmy.world
on 23 Aug 14:20
nextcollapse
Paperclip can be rationalised as pragmatic, but bow about these guys?
Greece also was fascist.
All of them got a place in NATO, like many nazis.
They were anti-communist bcs that is the main characteristic of fascists.
And the US has zero problem with that, on the contrary.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Aug 14:44
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not to mention that one of the issues Nuremburg faced at the time was they couldn’t go too heavy on the pro-Jewish side because your average man on the street was so antisemitic as a matter of course that if you looked too sympathetic towards the holocaust you’d lose popular support.
Cat_Daddy@hexbear.net
on 22 Aug 15:27
nextcollapse
I feel like the “Nazi SS Officer” part should also be the ostrich
TheRealKuni@piefed.social
on 22 Aug 15:56
nextcollapse
The difference is that the Americans rolled out a red carpet for the Nazis and offered employment contracts. The Soviets showed up one night and kidnapped nearly 7000 nazis at gunpoint, and then forced them to work to pay reparations. Based.
AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
on 23 Aug 03:02
nextcollapse
The Treaty of Versailles was really unfair to the German people but that didn’t justify anything the Nazis did. The terrible things the Nazis did also didn’t justify the terrible things the Soviets did.
Since the Nazis were fighting the Soviets in cold conditions, they did a lot of research on hypothermia. Their methodology involved putting Jews out in the cold and measuring how long it took for them to get hypothermia.
There was a lot of debate over whether the results of their research should be used or just be destroyed because using it might encourage future scientists to use immoral methods in their research. They ultimately decided to use that research.
But when they looked at the data, there was no real science happening. They were just freezing people to death out of cruelty with no benefit to science.
A lot of “Nazi science” is very overrated. Turns out cruel and hateful people don’t make for good scientists. Science is done by people and people and if those people ignore morality, they become very warped. “Science at all costs, ignore morality” doesn’t actually result in useful research. It may feel like ignoring ethics in favour of scientific progress is a strong pro-science stance, but it’s just another fascist power fantasy.
Goretantath@lemmy.world
on 22 Aug 17:20
nextcollapse
Its the reason the USA is fucked right now, they witness protectioned a bunch of nazis and they grew familys based on evil values.
Bristlecone@lemmy.world
on 22 Aug 17:43
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Among other things
bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml
on 22 Aug 17:58
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Hitler was inspired by the US manifest destiny and genocide of the native americans, nazis did well in the US because they fit perfectly in, they did not corrupt the US.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 22 Aug 20:43
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I do not think german nazis were too motivated against africans, specially african-americans.
They were ultra racist against Jewish and Slavic.
The American nazis were the ones obsessed with skin color against black people.
At least that’s the impression I get when reading about those times.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world
on 22 Aug 20:24
nextcollapse
To be fair to Von Braun, he did have slaves build his rockets.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Aug 04:03
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Wasn’t just Von Braun and the V2. Me-262s were built with forced labor. Then there’s the Comet, which was an amazingly bad idea. I’m surprised it wasn’t flown by slave labor, as little as they seemed to care for the pilot’s safety. The fuel was so corrosive that if it leaked the pilot would be dissolved alive.
AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
on 23 Aug 02:53
nextcollapse
It’s not really funny.
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Aug 17:57
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Russia like “Ooh! Write that down!”
mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 23 Aug 18:02
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Huh?
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works
on 24 Aug 12:34
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Russia also employed a bunch of Nazi scientists for their own rocket program.
Memorable quote from The Right Stuff, a good movie about the Space Race: “Our Nazis are better than their Nazis.”
threaded - newest
I did a report on this in 5th grade, people thought I was making it up.
i had someone here on lemmy try to say the scientists recruited to the US via operation paperclip weren’t involved in crimes against humanity. a lot of people have missed in the shuffle of the past 80 years exactly what happened during the holocaust.
The US is all about realpolitik, and begins to make a lot more sense when you look at everything through a Kissinger-shaped lens (rest in piss, you evil bastard). We pretend to be ideological so our citizenry can feel good about ourselves, but the way the nation operates is purely pragmatic. Look no further than Israel-Palestine and how buddy-buddy we are with Saudi Arabia for modern examples. Even our support of Ukraine, while overlapping with an ethical imperative, is driven primarily by the interests of NATO and the relatively inexpensive degradation of Russia’s military and political standing we can participate in. We only give a shit about “human rights” when it benefits us.
Operation Paperclip was pragmatism. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance when we try to hold in our minds that we brought Nazi scientists over and the idea that we’re “the good guys” and fought for “justice,” so our brains try to reduce that cognitive dissonance by saying those scientists weren’t behind any of the evils of the Nazis. They were, obviously. That didn’t matter to our government, but they kept the operation classified for a reason.
The US does not currently support Ukraine or NATO, and is allied with Russia.
And when it comes to Nazi rocket scientists falling into the hands of post-WW2 America, or the USSR, I’m quite glad it was the former.
You think the USA is morally superior to the former USSR?
I suppose with regard to Ukraine I should have said “our support was.”
I wouldn’t say we’re allied with Russia lmfao, that’s liberal bullshit, Trump is only looking after himself and whoever gives him the most in return. Very transactional, which means we are essentially allies with whoever gives us (him) the best offer. Whether that be literal gifts or things for his “legacy”.
is this the Trump supporter “liberal bullshit” or the Marxist “liberal bullshit”?
Why did Trump tariff every country on earth except Russia?
Marxist lol
We already do zero trade with Russia right? (I haven’t checked but we sanctioned the shit out of them right lmao)
You ever wonder why Marxists sound so much like Trump supporters these days?
In what way are we allies with Russia in your eyes?
If we were, the Ukraine / Russia war would be over already with heavy losses on the Ukraine side, instead we literally just gave them even more ammunition.
Again, it’s a transactional relationship for Trump, which I’m not saying is good at all, but it is the case, and to claim we’re allied with Russia is just factual incorrect.
I was actually going to commend you for not just assuming I was a trump supporter but… Rip
Trump is allied with Putin. It’s just going to take a while for him to convert the rest of the country.
It’s more like a close friendship for him.
Trump and Putin will act in concert if their goals align so they can both personally benefit. They’re both egotistical monsters though who are entirely about themselves and their legacy first and foremost. You’re absolutely reaching by saying they’re close friends or allies, the proof is in the pudding, Trump could have completely pulled out of Ukraine but he hasn’t yet. Why do you think that is?
He has a history of stuffing his cabinet with them too:
politico.com/…/connections-trump-putin-russia-tie…
I already said, it would piss off the rest of his administration. He has to change them slowly. Take over DC so that if the anti-Russia components revolt, it won’t matter, for example. Arm DC soldiers. You see where this is going.
Bro he filled his second admin with sycophants, literally just raided Flynn with the FBI lmfao. Sorry you’re incorrect and making this both too simple and too complex lmao.
What does any of that have to do with Russia?
You’re a BlueAnon conspiracy nut, you think everything is to do with Russia
.
Wow, compelling argument. You can tell “tankie” is a meaningful term because being from the wrong Lemmy instance can make you one
You ever wonder why ukraine supporters sound so much like nazis these days?
Please hurry, the Ostfront is calling, have another try
because Russia is already sanctioned to the ground, you must be living under a rock lmao.
LOL
Did they stop supplying weapons, intelligence,etc…?
Did secret agent Orange unilaterally break all the missile treaties, pit sanctions on Russia and expand NATO troops around their border just to fool us?
Not to excuse the US’s history of foreign diplomacy, but I think it would be naive to believe that there exists any major power who doesn’t treat geopolitics with the same level of pragmatism.
The Soviets hated the Nazi even more than the US did and yet they still had their own version of paperclip. Operation Osoaviakhim brought almost double the number of Nazi scientists into the Soviet Union.
Osoviakhim was somewhat more ideologically consistent than Paperclip. The scientists weren’t invited to the USSR with promises of cushy jobs and immunity from prosecution: they were forced from their homes, loaded onto freight trains, and made to work. It was part of the wider program of the Allies using the forced labour of ethnic Germans as a means of war reparations.
I mean, the Soviets didn’t offer them any guarantees. But I think that’s more of a byproduct of how they held leverage over the specialist, and more of a difference in how the two cultures choose to motivate employees.
Unlike the Soviets the US/UK did everything to keep nazis in power and save them.
Please do explain the ‘useful’ pragmatic excuse for these monsters:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_Gs-0dhOo
…substack.com/…/ratlines-nato-and-the-fourth-reic… businessinsider.com/former-nazi-officials-in-germ…
Nazis are useful anticommunists
I think the US media has washed their image so clean with the WW2 movies that most people have no idea about stuff like the nazi rally happened in the US and the support for eugenics in the Us, and the concentration camps in the Us.
lord… i live near two of the american concentration camps called out by name in the planning docs for auschwitz…
Where did you learn about this?
Or the Japanese concentration camps. USA bigot since day one. USA more like a white supremacists wet dream.
i mean Hitler was literally inspired by the US.
Every day thousands upon thousands of people were being killed. Why? Because they were wearing the uniform of an enemy country. Killing people for wearing the wrong clothes (or maybe just standing too close to someone wearing the wrong clothes) is what a war is.
It strikes me as odd to be super upset over internment when more Japanese people were killed when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. Internment was obviously bad, but compared to other shit happening at the time? I guess the people killed in the war couldn’t tell their story afterwards, so we don’t care about that? Or maybe it’s because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that killing someone for wearing the wrong clothes is good and honourable?
There was a Japanese insurgency in Hawaii, so some of the people held in internment camps were actually insurgents. Obviously most of them weren’t. But what’s the difference between that scenario and hitting a military target and a lot of civilians getting killed because they happened to live a little too close to a military target? Because that kind of shit was happening all the time in WWII.
Paperclip can be rationalised as pragmatic, but bow about these guys?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_Gs-0dhOo
…substack.com/…/ratlines-nato-and-the-fourth-reic… businessinsider.com/former-nazi-officials-in-germ…
Changed my view on history over the years.
They were effective anti-communists. Same reason after the War the US cuddled up with the essentially fascist regimes of Salazar and Franco.
Greece also was fascist.
All of them got a place in NATO, like many nazis.
They were anti-communist bcs that is the main characteristic of fascists.
And the US has zero problem with that, on the contrary.
not to mention that one of the issues Nuremburg faced at the time was they couldn’t go too heavy on the pro-Jewish side because your average man on the street was so antisemitic as a matter of course that if you looked too sympathetic towards the holocaust you’d lose popular support.
I feel like the “Nazi SS Officer” part should also be the ostrich
Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer
R.I.P. Tom Lehrer
(Heard this first in For All Mankind, an excellent show I recommend to everyone, pirate it if you don’t have Apple TV+.)
Well shit I didn’t know he died
Meanwhile in the Soviet Union
And now the Marxist state is a fascist one.
Hmm.
And now the one that fought fascism is a fascist one.
Hmm.
Let’s be honest, practically everyone is turning fascist these days, for one reason or another.
Fascist helping fascists in power
putin, xi, trump, the axis of evil
The difference is that the Americans rolled out a red carpet for the Nazis and offered employment contracts. The Soviets showed up one night and kidnapped nearly 7000 nazis at gunpoint, and then forced them to work to pay reparations. Based.
When the Allies reclaimed Nordhausen it was the anticommunists, not the Soviets, who ended up with the larger share of the scientific materials.
The remaining Axis scientists that the Soviets did capture still had to live in unglamorous conditions: on some projects the Soviet authorities limited the rôle of the Axis specialists merely to consultation and practical training.
Finally, three anticommunist rocket experts confirmed that by 1952 the U.S.S.R. had sent most of these Axis scientists back home, and that the Soviets (obviously) made major strides on their own.
They also committed mass rapes
The frogurt contains potassium cyanide.
They also claimed 7 out of every 10 Nazis killed in WWII, and by all accounts at the time, contributed the most to winning the war.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/4aa2c08c-7271-49c3-9548-7cdd3d0e181e.png">
Absolutely…while kidnapping, raping, and murdering children. There was a reason Germans wanted the west troops to march in as opposed to the soviets.
Wouldn’t that count as slave labour?
Yes but you see when the Communists do it it’s “based”. /s
Always check which instance someone is using. If it’s lemmy.ml it’s people who worship Soviet Russia and China
Not according to the Allies at the Yalta conference.
By the late 1940s, the only people claiming that the labor enjoyed by the Soviets at the hands of captured Nazis was “slavery” - were Nazis.
By all allied accounts, using German labor to pay reparations was deemed acceptable given how the Soviets had just sacrificed 27 million people.
…wikipedia.org/…/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_Wo…
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
The Treaty of Versailles was really unfair to the German people but that didn’t justify anything the Nazis did. The terrible things the Nazis did also didn’t justify the terrible things the Soviets did.
Forced labour hmm. I mean it definitely sounds like slave labour, just lawful form of it. The article does have a quote:
What were they supposed to do, leave them all to Operation Osoaviakhim?
the problem after WWII was there was only one christopher lee
How many were there before that?
I wish humanity had the ability to download brains so we can just suck out all the info from those nazi scientists and firing-squad them all
Since the Nazis were fighting the Soviets in cold conditions, they did a lot of research on hypothermia. Their methodology involved putting Jews out in the cold and measuring how long it took for them to get hypothermia.
There was a lot of debate over whether the results of their research should be used or just be destroyed because using it might encourage future scientists to use immoral methods in their research. They ultimately decided to use that research.
But when they looked at the data, there was no real science happening. They were just freezing people to death out of cruelty with no benefit to science.
A lot of “Nazi science” is very overrated. Turns out cruel and hateful people don’t make for good scientists. Science is done by people and people and if those people ignore morality, they become very warped. “Science at all costs, ignore morality” doesn’t actually result in useful research. It may feel like ignoring ethics in favour of scientific progress is a strong pro-science stance, but it’s just another fascist power fantasy.
Its the reason the USA is fucked right now, they witness protectioned a bunch of nazis and they grew familys based on evil values.
Among other things
Hitler was inspired by the US manifest destiny and genocide of the native americans, nazis did well in the US because they fit perfectly in, they did not corrupt the US.
Well Wernher von Braun was a weird one… for example he opposed segregation while some local govenor clearly did not
I do not think german nazis were too motivated against africans, specially african-americans. They were ultra racist against Jewish and Slavic.
The American nazis were the ones obsessed with skin color against black people.
At least that’s the impression I get when reading about those times.
To be fair to Von Braun, he did have slaves build his rockets.
Wasn’t just Von Braun and the V2. Me-262s were built with forced labor. Then there’s the Comet, which was an amazingly bad idea. I’m surprised it wasn’t flown by slave labor, as little as they seemed to care for the pilot’s safety. The fuel was so corrosive that if it leaked the pilot would be dissolved alive.
It’s not really funny.
Russia like “Ooh! Write that down!”
Huh?
Russia also employed a bunch of Nazi scientists for their own rocket program.
Memorable quote from The Right Stuff, a good movie about the Space Race: “Our Nazis are better than their Nazis.”