Concerning the fate of German prisoners of war, it should be noted that more German soldiers died or were murdered while in Soviet captivity than were killed or wounded on the Western front from D-Day to the May 7, 1945 surrender. Hundreds of thousands of Germans soldiers and civilians suffered the same fate in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland. ** And in the French sector, 40,000 German POWs were coerced into joining the French Foreign Legion. Ironically, these veterans again found themselves facing a communist-inspired adversary as most were sent to French Indochina (Vietnam) to fight against the Vietminh insurgents seeking to "free" the region from French colonial rule.

By 1944, the western Allied "Operation Paper Clip" was under way, named after the clips on the file cards of German scientists. Those engaged hunted "living science," and also pursued German patents and business secrets. They finally succeeded in stealing both. According to a statement released by the U.S. Department of Defense in February 1950, 24,000 German scientists and technicians were "questioned in detail," and 523 of them were "brought into the U.S.A." Of these, 362 were "requested" to take steps for the acquisition of U.S. citizenship. These German scientists, according to the manager of Operation Paper Clip, "saved at least $1 billion in weapons expenditures and at least 10 years in development time already by May 1949."

Although the Americans were the initiators of the intellectual plundering of Germany, it was practiced by all the victors - the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union.

When World War II came to an end, the experts of the French, the Soviets and the British were just as ready as the Office of Technical Services in Washington (OTS). The London office of the British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee said proudly, "The production secrets we take away from Germany are a bigger blow than the loss of East Prussia." Even the prime minister of Australia, Joseph B. Chifley, admitted in a radio address in September 1949 that "the booty of 6,000 German industrial reports and of 46 German scientists given to Australia" possessed a value that could not be calculated in money and now enabled Australian producers to also play a prominent role in industrial world production.

This booty was so great that very soon one was unable to count the documents, and they were measured by weight of paper. The U.S. Air Research and Development Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in this way received "without doubt the greatest collection of captured secret methods in the world," and it weighed 1,554 tons.

An official of the OTS called this office with the mission to distribute the techno-scientific progress of Germany "the first organization in the world with the purpose to bleed dry the inventive power of an entire people." It disposed of more than 3,000 tons of documents seized in Germany.

So that nobody could come along and denounce all this wholesale robbery and plunder as a war crime, it had to be arranged that all Germans of those times would be continuously defamed and treated as criminals, barbarians, "war criminals," "militarists," "fascists" (with the propaganda-meaning of satanic evil) - so that none of these undesirable people who might hold such opinions should occupy any position from which the public could be reached. That is the reason for Allied control officers at German universities, for Allied writers or assistants in the rewriting of German historical textbooks, and for as many as possible foreign lecturers for history and political sciences at German universities.

And while the certainly not timid Nazis had removed 1,628 university teachers (with pensions), the anti-Nazis in 1945 victimized no less than 4,289 professors and teachers. And they did not receive any pensions. As Christ und Welt calculated in 1950, the Nazis removed 9.5 percent of the university personnel. The Allies removed 32.1 percent.

Nearly every third German university professor in the Western sectors was deprived of his teaching or research position by the victors. And in all of Germany, it was every second teacher. By 1946, 1,028 professors and teachers had come from the eastern territories and from central Germany into the area of the later Bundesrepublik as unemployed refugees, and later on thousands more followed. But in 1946 the denazification had just begun, which ordered, according to Control Council Directive No. 24 of January 1, 1946, the immediate removal of former National Socialists "from all offices and from numerous professions" alone in the American Zone. For example, 373,762 persons by the end of 1946 were found "unsuited for any public function or work in the economy except as laborers." (Zischka, Anton, War es ein Wunder)

** At the time the author of this sidebar, Udo Walendy, wrote these words, Eisenhower's criminal treatment of German POWs, wherein he deliberately penned them in barbed wire enclosures - an atrocity which, according to James Bacque's Other Losses claimed the lives of some 900,000 defeated German men - was unknown to him. [Udo Walendy, The Brainwashing of the German Nation, 1999]

The Great Patents Heist
One of the greatest ripoffs of all time was the theft of German patents after World War II

If the public would have ever know the truth at the time, they would have been astounded. The facts seem to indicate that the plane was being constructed in Canada by a British engineer named John Frost along with other engineers such as Ray Gibson of AVRO. The project was supposed to build a saucer aircraft with the best performance possible but it changed during experimentation into a sleek plane. AVRO was a British company that had a subsidiary in Canada. One of the things that was to make this plane revolutionary were small jet nozzles which were designed to give the aircraft increased thrust making the plane fly faster. The goal was Mach 5 or fives times the speed of sound. This seemed impossible in the early fifties. The plane would takeoff by standing on it tail. It is hard to see in the picture but notice the flat area on the tail.

AVRO had injected over five million dollars into a secret project including 2 million from the U.S..Today this would have been chump change, but in the early 1950s this was serious money. On December 3, 1954, The Leader Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, ran a front page headline declaring "Saucer project cost too large". The Canadian defence department had cancelled the project stating it was impractical at the time. Some of the engineers thought that the plane could have eventually attained at least some of its goals and were remorseful at the cancellation.

Were these engineers just disappointed at the cancellation of a project that they had invested years of their lives in or did the project actually show some promise? Some people have said that the AVRO plane has some similarities to our stealth aircraft. Of course the SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that even today holds many of the world's speed records did come out in the sixties but how many know that the A12 was a plane that looked almost exactly like the SR-71, was a little faster and first constructed in 1962 and had it's engine tested as early as 1958?

Was the A12 built from lessons learned in building the AVRO plane? We may never know the answer. The A-12's speed is classified but a speed over Mach 3 is admitted to, very close to the 2500 mph of the AVRO project.

THE CANADIAN CONNECTION:

During WWII, Germany had become the undisputed leader in highly advanced aircraft technology. The Me-262 jet interceptor, Horten flying wings, and the Me-163 rocket powered aircraft were decades ahead of allied designs.

Under the direction of Dr. Walter Dornberger, the man in charge of operations at Peenemünde, and Dr. Wernher von Braun's boss, a secret saucer program was started at the BMW/Heinkel factory in Dresden in 1943. This design team was headed by Dr. Richard Miethe, who worked for the BMW rocket division in Berlin. These discs had been originally built in Germany in the fall of 1943, with the first flight occurring during the spring of 1944.

Project Silver Bug Avro Canada History

After the close of WWII, many German aeronautical engineers were sent to White Sands Missile Range under "Operation Paperclip". The remaining group of scientists, were captured by the Russians. The Soviets reached the German plant in Breslau before the Americans, and quickly dismantled many factories, rebuilding them in Russia. It's clear now that the Soviet Union had it's own saucer program (derived from captured German scientist) which explains many of the over-flights in the United States. Dr. Richard Miethe was sent to Fort Bliss, and later worked at Wright Patterson AFB. Eventually, Dr. Miethe went to work for John C. Frost of the Avro Aircraft Company (a subsidiary of Hawker Siddeley) in Malton Ontario Canada. Mr. Frost was a gifted aircraft designer from England, who headed up Avro's "special projects group" in 1952. Avro was currently working on at least 16 different "Flying Saucer" proposals, including project "Y" and project "Y2" (aka "Project Silverbug"). Project Silverbug was a design for a supersonic VTOL flying disc.

By 1953, John Frost and his team had completed most of the "paper studies" on these highly unusual aircraft. The only problem facing Mr. Frost, was the overwhelming costs involved in the development of these designs. It quickly became clear that only one country was capable of providing the necessary "financial backing" to "foot the bill" for Avro's flying saucer programs. USAF Lt. General Donald L. Putt had been briefed on the incredible performance specifications of these aircraft, and visited the Avro Canada plant on September 16, 1953.

Not wanting this incredible technology to be acquired by any other nation, the U.S.A.F. officially took over and financed Avro's saucer program in late 1954. This allowed the Air Force to "farm out" its own saucer program on foreign soil, while at the same time keeping the project strategically close to the United States. By 1955, Dr. Miethe had completed construction of the disc shaped aircraft he had originally built in Germany in 1944. These were the exact aircraft reported as "flying Saucers" in the U.S. during 1947. The first test flight of this USAF/Avro disc occurred in Malton in 1955, with additional test flights taking place at Edwards AFB.