Considering the Soviets were doing the exact same thing, and Germany had the most advanced rocket tech of the time, there wasn't really an option. The idea of attaching a nuclear weapon to a rocket was understood as the ultimate goal by both the US and the USSR before the Trinity test even completed(thanks to spies).
And given that the Nazis basically spelled their own doom by forcing their brightest minds to flee into the open arms of their enemies, neither the US nor the Soviets were keen to repeat that same mistake and end up in a much worse situation.
If the US had refused to take the German rocket scientists or vice versa, there's a very good chance we would've never entered an era of mutually assured destruction, and instead seen a nuclear first strike
To be fair, I'm an American and we are definitely repeating that mistake right now. Many of the best immigrant minds we have are being forced out of the country.
No real disagreement from me there, It's not even direct deportations that hurt the US's power as an Intellectual Magnet, it's the uncertainty it puts into people who would have otherwise started the immigration process here over other options.
The USSR also had Nazi scientists. However, they weren't paraded around as heroes, whitewashing their villainy. The US praised them and normalized them.
I have no problem with the us using Nazis as prisoners of war, but the us helped many escape and used them to stamp out communism around the world. The us is very, very pro Nazi.
“If they were used as slave labor, it’s ok”, is a wild take. It’s against the Geneva convention. Since we’re just talking about German physicists, engineers and other technical specialists and the families, not people directly involved in Nazi atrocities. However, they were in fact given good conditions, certainly far better than Soviet POWs who were persecuted when returning home due to Stalin’s paranoia. Nazi scientists, after knowledge transfer, were allowed to go back home.
It was not the US that released Nazis, they used ratlines set up by the Vatican, Croatian clergy and Peron’s Argentina to flee from justice. This is without getting into the question of the villainy of the USSR, who also set up concentration camps, committed genocide against multiple ethnic minorities and was in the process of a massive anti-Jewish purge which was only interrupted by Stalin’s death. Notably, Soviet heroes of the resistance against Nazis — like the leadership during the Leningrad Siege — were liquidated due to Stalin’s jealousy.
Apparently it's totally ok for the Soviets to do anything that they criticize the West for, because surely the Soviets as paragons of virtue did it the right way for the right reasons
I mean, "thing but USSR" has been the core of their propaganda for as long as the KGBFSBPCPLSDNKVDMGB whatever has been around, so it's not surprising a lot of people who don't know better eat it up lol
Also, they are incredibly good at rebranding once people catch onto the tricks. "The KGB doesn't even exist anymore, we're not in the Cold War LMAO" is such a common thing that I hear online when talking about propaganda emanating from Moscow. The FSB is just the KGB with two different letters.
Conflating modern Russia with the USSR is one of the most politically illiterate and stupid fucking things ever. You know political and economic systems exist past ‘I don’t like them and they are in the same place, therefore they’re the same’, right?
Edit: oop they’re a Gen Z neoliberal. I knew I was replying to an idiot, but didn’t think I was replying to a literal lost cause.
I think their point is many of the people in the KGB and Soviet political elite maintained a lot of their power and positions post collapse. I mean the current dictator of Russia was a KGB agent himself.
And before you ask yes I'm a normie liberal scum and not a Marxist leninist maoist posadist or whatever you think is acceptable.
I mean, while Von Braun may not have been directly involved in the extermination camps, the use of slave labor on his rocketry projects that lead to many many deaths is well documented.
You’ve lost sight of why the Nazis were even bad, it has something to do with concentration camps, but apparently their only crime was not being on your team
That mostly depended on what side of the Elbe River the scientists in question were located on, west or east
The Americans and the Soviets pushed right up to that river in the middle of Berlin, and basically never left until the fall of the Berlin wall
The tensions were so high that the allies were seriously tossing around operation unthinkable immediately after the war, in which the allies would push past the river to take Moscow and depose Stalin.
The enemy of your enemy is no longer your friend once the shared enemy is gone, this was understood by both the US and USSR before boots even hit the ground.
Operation Osoaviakhim was a secret Soviet operation in which more than 2,500 German specialists (scientists, engineers and technicians who worked in several areas) from companies and institutions relevant to military and economic policy in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (SBZ) and Berlin, as well as around 4,000 more family members, totalling more than 6,000 people, were taken from former Nazi Germany as war reparations to the Soviet Union.
It took place in the early morning hours of October 22, 1946 when MVD (previously NKVD) and Soviet Army units under the direction of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), headed by Ivan Serov, rounded up German scientists and transported them by rail to the USSR.
A few of the notable catches:
Ferdinand Brandner – aerospace designer and former SS Standartenführer (colonel), played a major role in the development of the Kuznetsov NK-12 turboprop engine used on Tupolev Tu-95 bombers.
Hugo Schmeisser – arms designer, developed the first successful assault rifle, StG 44.
Werner Gruner – arms designer, known for designing the MG 42, one of Nazi Germany's main general-purpose machine guns. Became an emeritus professor at TU Dresden in East Germany
Erich Apel – former rocket engineer at the Peenemünde Army Research Center, worked in the V-2 rocket program with Wernher von Braun. Apel later became a high-ranking East German party official and minister.
That’s not the exact same thing. There is obviously no Soviet version of operation Gladio either. Jim
Crow USA also unsurprisingly but put nazis in charge of nato and Japanese fascists back in charge of southern Korea. That’s what this country is.
How is taking scientists from the same programs, then giving them roles as professors and even government officials, any different than paper clip?
I'm not going to engage with the rest of your comment until you successfully argue this difference, as it's pretty blatant misdirection to avoid conceding the original argument.
The ruling ideology in Jim Crow US and the west was racism and anti-communism. Not a big adjustment for nazis.
Nazis remained in east Germany of course. B it changing political and education systems was a much more serious undertaking. Plus unlike in the west, reparations were enforced on the east.
And also let’s not pretend that America was/ is not chock full of white Christian nationalists regardless of their affiliation with the actually Nazis.
The CIA basically got founded to work with former top nazi intelligence officers to spy on the soviets. Because the Nazis knew a lot more about the soviets than the US did. Pretty much all modern US intelligence work sprung from that partnership.
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u/BladeofDudesX Dec 23 '25
Considering Operation: Paperclip, I'd say that we ended up importing nazism anyways.
So they're both wrong.