During the last stages of World War II and after, all major allies tried to gain access to real or imagined German technological achievements, be it by interning relevant scientists and even removing several of them into the allied countries or by confiscating masses of documents from academic or industrial research institutions within reach and compiling reports from them. Douglas O'Reagan's book is not the first study that tackles this subject, but the depth of previous research is quite uneven. Best researched are the U.S. effort—for example, by John Gimbel—and, in part, the USSR effort; far less well researched is the French effort. In particular, no consensus exists in the literature as to how successful this endeavor has been and how its outcome should be measured. O'Reagan makes clear from the outset that he is skeptical toward the position of Gimbel, who estimated the worth of those “intellectual reparations” at about $10 billion for the United States alone; he leans more toward Ray Stokes's judgment that the real value of this confiscated knowledge must not be overestimated. Nevertheless, these efforts were in the interest not only of the war coalition for superior military technology with the war in the Far East still going on but also of industrial firms wanting access to presumably useful or even cutting-edge technologies. O'Reagan's aim lies, however, not so much in reconstructing in detail the organization of this encompassing knowledge transfer and how the receiving party put it to use; rather, he is asking more fundamentally what the conditions and, more important, the obstacles for efficient technology transfer have been.
His method to reach a clearer picture is twofold: In the first four chapters, he compares the efforts of the four Allies (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the USSR) in their various approaches to taking the technology from German firms and research institutions and channeling them to, for example, their business communities (in the case of the western Allies). In the following chapters, he widens the scope to put the collecting programs into a larger context of information gathering and processing.
One main finding of the first comparative part is that the United States set its hopes on taking some scientists to the western zones of occupation (and employed a confusing variety of competing task forces to comb the various academic and business research institutions) or even, as in the prominent case of Wernher von Braun, to the United States, whereas the French saw little value in taking researchers out of their familiar scientific environment. France foresaw in this a reduction in the researchers’ productivity and therefore tried instead to take control of their work in the French zone of occupation itself. The overall conclusion that the worth of the information gathered was probably very limited is plausible, although from a business history perspective the use of firm archives might have been worthwhile. So, only scattered judgments by firms or business associations, sometimes optimistic, sometimes skeptical, found their way into official documents. One main conclusion the United States reached as a result of the different intelligence programs was, according to O'Reagan, that Germany's technological level was in general not that far ahead of its own, if at all, and at least this finding made the huge effort of sending teams into each part of Germany seem worthwhile.
Apart from this comparison among the four Allies, the specific strength of the book lies in widening the scope from a concentration on the various collecting programs and institutions toward a more general discussion of how issues such as the transferability of “know-how” (or tacit knowledge) came to the consciousness of the actors. One might ask, however (as the author does), whether the technology-exploitation programs around 1945 were indeed that important for such a finding, since already after World War I the limited worth of explicit knowledge embodied in patents had become obvious in the wake of German patent expropriation in the United States and elsewhere. In chapter 5, O'Reagan highlights Allied science politics toward Germany in the postwar period between exploitation and cooperation, whereas in chapters 6 and 7 he embeds in detail the postwar knowledge-exploitation efforts in the various traditions of information management. By doing so, he is able to show that the various intelligence programs around 1945 did not appear out of the blue but stood in a longer continuity of information processing by both state and private agencies.
This book is, in general, meticulously worked; however, some irritating inexactnesses or even mistakes remain that the publisher should have corrected: the frequent and ahistorical use of the term “European Union” when dealing with just the beginnings of European integration; Carl von Ossietzky, who is mentioned (if not by name) on page 123, was not a Jew; nor was Italy on the side of the Central Powers during World War I, as is suggested on page 5; nor did Britain declare war on France in 1939 (p. 159). These remarks shall not, however, denigrate an informative study that broadens our understanding of information and technology transfer across national and system boundaries.
