Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[Dave Monroe]

... well, I'd been under the impression that, despite the Soviet
headstart in the space race (which no doubt parallelled the arms race),
even as JFK, for example, was touting a  Soviet ICBM threat, the
actuality of the matter was, he was overstating the case (to some
extreme--I think the USSR had something like maybe four ICBMs) for the
budgetary and PR benefit of the military.  My next step after the Nazi
a-bomb project was to get to the Soviets, have things like David
Holloway's Stalin and the Bomb and Paul Josephson's Red Atom, as well as
James Harford's biography of Korolev (of Soviet space program fame), but
he're langushing in stacks right now.  Only so much time, esp. when one
finds oneself rereading much previous research ...

Still, the question is, Cold War expediency vs. I don't know, moral
rectitude, justice, whatever.  Certainly, the reason why Truman did an
about face from both Roosevelt's and his own previously stated policies
against using Nazi scientists was the Cold War.  Whether or not the
American use of Nazi rocket (and then some) scientists ultimately
prevented, ultimately will prevent Mutually Assured Destruction is a
matter for history, alternate or otherwise, to determine ((as) if it
ever will, ever can be), but ...

... but to note just one example (given in Cockburn an St. Clair's
Whiteout),  under Operation Overcast, begun, by the way, before Truman
had rescinded the ban against the importation of Nazi scientists,
aomngst von Braun's team there was on George Richkey, slavemaster at the
Mittelwerk, over the Dora concentration camp labor used there--and Dora,
while, I believe, not primarily a concentration camp for Jews,
nonetheless eventually did indeed have Jews amongst its prisoners,
certainly by the time that Gravity's Rainbow is set, but the point is,
it WAS a concentration camp, it WAS part of the Holocaust, in which,
indeed, groups beyond the Jews were perscuted, tortured, killed.  "In
retaliation against sabotage in the missile plant--prisoners would
urinate on elctrical equipment, causing spectacular
malfunctions--Richkey would hang them twelve at a time, with wooden
sticks shoved into their mouths to muffle their cries.  In the Dora camp
itself he regarded children as useless mouths and instructed the SS
guards to club them to death, which they did." (Cockburn and St. Clair,
Whiteout, p. 167).  He went on to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, where he
oversaw security for Nazi researchers, and further served as the
translator for the Mittelwerk records.  "He thus had the opportunity,
which he used to  the utmost, to setroy any material compromising to his
colleagues and himself" (ibid.).  Such, er, "characters" abounded, and,
i would note, we didn't even really hold true to that Nuremburg code
against using Nazi medical research, say, experiments on (the living
bodies and corpses of) concentration camp prisoners in low-pressure
chambers.  The next question might be, well, why not extract some good
from evil, some gold from shit?  The problem, well, to redeem the
Holocaust?  "All's well that ends well"?  Not to my mind ...

... but why don't Cockburn and St. Clair discuss Stalin, the pogroms,
the gulags? Well, their book, Whiteout, IS subtitled "The CIA, Drugs and
the Press," it's specifically about the shady dealings of the CIA and
its predecessor organization, the OSS.  Can't cover everything
everywhere.  Certainly, Stalin, the stalinist regime, was ultimately
responsible for killing far more Soviet citizens that Hitler, the Third
Reich, was, for killing Germans, but Stalin had rather more time, and
rather more citizens, and I think that perhaps the specificity of the
Holocaust, the Shoah, was in its unique bureaucratization,
technologization, industrialization of the process.  One could no doubt
cast a jaundiced eye on the genocidal tendencies of the US gov't as
well, although we (being an American citizen) seem largely to go after
non-citizens, whether aiding and abetting totalitarian regimes in other
countries, or the native, but, at the time, non-citizen, peoples of our
own territories.  You've no doubt, however, caught the recent
translation of Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism. 
I understand there's a Black Book of Capitalism underway now as well ...
that, Neufeld's The Rocket and the Reich, gotta make a list for
tomorrow, by which time we'll no doubt have moved on to soemthing else,
but ...

... by the way, Richard Rorty, in his Achieving our Country, complains
about
Vineland as well, along with, as I recall, Norman Mailer's Harlot's
Ghost and Neal
Stephenson's Snow Crash, among others, as, I don't know,
antiprogressivley
pessimistic or somesuch.  Remind me that Reed Way Dasenrock, in a paper
in Fascism,
Aesthetics and Culture (ed. Richard J. Goslan), called Gravity's
Rainbow, along
with, this time, Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, cryptofacsist, though
for reasons
I can't recall.  Can only carry so many books around with me at one
time, alas ...


jporter wrote:

> > From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
> >
> > Mnetioned this elsewhere, but ... well, it wasn't necessarily a matter of
> > us--US--or the USSR (though once the feeding frenzy for Nazi scientists began,
> > the UK and France jostled for tehir place in the buffet line as well).  One
> > COULD have tried them at Nuremberg, at, in many cases, one should have.
>
> I will assume, then, that you would have tried them at Nuremberg (as an
> answer to my question- "What would you have done?") Okay, but what about the
> ones who ended up in the USSR? (And here I admit not to know much about
> those swooped up by The Soviets) Presumably, they would have continued their
> work for Stalin's missile program, if he chose not to surrender them for
> trial. Certainly, after the evaporation of H&N in his backyard, he would
> have had additional reasons, *perhaps* legitimate, at least from a strategic
> pov, for not giving the up, or any other possible advantage in ICBM
> development.
>
> In fact, as spectacularly demonstrated in the fifties, the Soviets were far
> ahead of the allies in ICBM development, inspite of Operation Paperclip, and
> the vastly superior resources of the west. The OSS cum C.I.A. were very much
> aware of The Soviet lead, from the get go. By the fifties, of course, thanks
> to Sahkarov, The Soviets had also mastered fusion.
>
> It might be beneficial to recall just how difficult the design of an
> effective ICBM turned out to be for America. Rocket science on that scale IS
> incredibly difficult. The achievement of the Nazi rocket program was every
> bit as amazing- from a purely technological standpoint- as The Manhattan
> Project, or, the less recognized advances in computer science spearheaded by
> Turing.
>
> I am not at all making the argument that Nazi rocket scientists were in any
> way good guys, or were not guilty of heinous crimes, but I do not
> necessarily accept uncritically the arguments (and linkages) made by
> Cockburn and St. Clair, although I find them interesting, if somewhat
> ideological. Besides, St. Clair dislikes _Vineland_  (Probably too subtle
> for the snob : )
>
> I am on your side, vis a vis, The Holocaust in GR, but I do think that
> Pynchon deliberately plays it down, yet, to great effect. At the time of
> publication, *The Holocaust* had not yet been properly deconstructed. It was
> a term taken for granted; "owned" by the victors of WW II. I think the
> effect of GR is to marginalize The Holocaust by making it the membrane which
> must be tranversed. GR empowers the marginalized.
>
> Since the historical time of GR (the book not The Holocaust) an equally
> interesting act of suppression-  not just literary- has come to light.
> Hitler, the Nazi hierarchy and their sociological parallels amongst the
> allies, the complexities of the cause and effects of The Holocaust, in all
> it's gruesome detail, are being, and have been under discussion, since the
> liberation of the camps.
>
> By comparison, Stalin's extermination of twenty million people has been
> given short shrift. Why? Perhaps Cockburn and St. Clair would care to
> enlighten us?
>
> jody
>
> > Instead, and despite Roosevelt's and then Truman's initial directives NOT to
> > let them off the hook for our own benefit, those Nazi rocket et al. scientists
> > (and then some--e.g., Klaus Barbie) were spirited away by the OSS (vs. (?) the
> > SS) et al. in the national (and/or corporate) interest.  Again, see John
> > Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in
> > Postwar Germany, but if you want all the nasty, brutal details, see the
> > chapters on Operation Paperclip as well as on Klaus Barbie in Alexander
> > Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press.  These
> > past couple of days of rereading have only strengthened the case for much
> > already mentioned in re: Pynchon, GR and the Holocaust, and then some ... but,
> > again, don't rely on a "felling" of Freeman Dyson's in re: Heisenberg, Nazi,
> > collaborator, Nazi collaborator or no?  See at LEAST Powers and Walker and,
> > perhaps, Cassidy and Rose on the issue ...
> >