Underground Knowledge — A discussion group discussion

Excerpt from The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy:


Britain’s equivalent of the US Government’s Project Paperclip (in which it is documented the US Government secretly ushered in to America hundreds of Nazis after WW2) is known as Operation Matchbox.

Various international media reports have also confirmed Britain and other countries outside the US were extremely active in pursuing Nazi scientists. Many of these high-ranking Nazis were transported to Australia by Britain.

There are quotes from declassified Australian Government papers which confirm the German scientists sent to Australia under a top secret deal included high-ranking SS and Nazi party members.

Also The Guardian newspaper which states: “The leading Nazi-hunting watchdog, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in Jerusalem, yesterday demanded an investigation into the recruitments ordered by Britain and the US, and said Australia was a haven for ‘holocaust perpetrators and mass murderers’.”

UK arranged transfer of Nazi scientists to Australia -- http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/au...

Britain secretly organised the recruitment and transfer to Australia of scores of leading Nazi scientists and weapons specialists after the second world war, newly declassified Australian government papers disclosed yesterday.

The German scientists sent to Australia under a top secret Anglo-American project codenamed Operation Matchbox included SS and Nazi party members. The leading Nazi-hunting watchdog, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, yesterday demanded an investigation into the recruitments ordered by Britain and the US, and said Australia was a haven for "holocaust perpetrators and mass murderers".

According to documents obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald, the British government decided within four months of the end of the war to poach "a limited number of German scientists and technicians… on defence research to develop military potential at Germany's expense."

The Anglo-American moves, at the onset of the Cold War, were also sparked by fears that Stalin's Soviet Union would kidnap the weapons specialists if they remained in Germany.

The scientists were sent to Australia despite a blanket ban on Germans entering the country at the time.

"There's never a ban for the privileged," said Herbert Schneider, an investigating magistrate at Germany's main Nazi-hunting centre in Ludwigsburg. "The Americans in particular were recruiting scientists in Thuringen and Saxony-Anhalt at the end of the war to prevent them being taken to Russia."

In a statement issued in Jerusalem yesterday, the Wiesenthal centre demanded an official inquiry into the activities of the Nazi scientists in Australia in the late 1940s and 50s. According to press reports in Sydney and Melbourne, at least 127 German scientists and engineers were sent to Australia between 1946 and 1951. They included 31 Nazi party members and six members of the elite SS.

One was said to have been a senior German official in Nazi-occupied Poland. Others were experts with IG Farben, the notorious chemicals giant which exploited tens of thousands of slave labourers.

The disclosures contradicted an Australian government study of 1986 which noted that scientists were barred "if they were considered unacceptable due to their association with the Nazi party".

The Wiesenthal centre said: The failure of the Australian government to deal with this issue is a continuing source of pain for the survivors and their relatives."

Mr Schneider said he suspected "some of these people" were war criminals, but he could not be sure without the names of individuals and details of specific alleged offences. "Many people were recruited by the Americans in those years who had nothing to do with war crimes."

Confidential diplomatic traffic between the British and the Australian high commission in London after the war showed that London had drawn up a recruitment list of 120 German scientists within a year of the war's end. The Kremlin had pledged not to enlist Germans with Nazi backgrounds, but was failing to honour that pledge.

"Both the US and the UK are planning to prevent this moving of German scientists and technicians eastwards since it would increase significantly the war potential of Russia," said an Australian government telegram.

The experts sent to Australia included the chief of the Messerschmitt jet aircraft factory and a nuclear physicist engaged in atomic research for the German military, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which named no names. The scientists were given special security clearance to work on missile research and weapon development.

Two of the Germans worked on Australia's guided missile rocket tests at Woomera in the 1950s, while 10 worked in government defence laboratories, the newspaper said.

Australian Jewish organisations joined the calls for an official inquiry.

"It is a deplorable and shocking revelation that fully paid-up Nazi party members, including those who belonged to Nazi killing units, were permitted to enter Australia and start new lives, often at taxpayers' expense," said Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.

The one question I would raise is what should have happened to these people? Assuming they were not direct war criminals themselves, and had not committed personally any atrocities, then what do you do? You can hardly blame them for being members of the Nazi party because first, you would get much better jobs if you were, and second, contrary to hindsight, by 1935 Hitler had transformed Germany from utter chaos through what was effectively an economic miracle. They could hardly have predicted what was going to happen, and if they could, suppose you were one of them, would you have the courage to oppose Hitler and go into Dachau as a matter of principle? I do not think too many people would.

Ian wrote: "The one question I would raise is what should have happened to these people? Assuming they were not direct war criminals themselves, and had not committed personally any atrocities, then what do yo..."

1. Many of them were war criminals (and therefore had their names changed). With the CIA's Operation Paperclip, for example, President Truman, explicitly stated there should be no convicted war criminals allowed into the United States under the Paperclip scheme = declassified CIA documents since reveal this order was ignored and many of the Paperclip Nazi scientists were convicted of war crimes in the likes of the Nuremberg trials.

2. Just because someone had no war criminal record doesn't mean they were not war criminals and part of the Holocaust - really when it comes to Nazi party members the term guilty until proven innocent should apply. Many German scientists were involved in war crimes (for example, all the medical experiments on Holocaust victims), many were not, but remember very few Nazis were successfully prosecuted and when it came to getting enough evidence on the likes of the Joseph Mengele-type doctors and scientists it was damn near impossible. Remember, the Nazis did a very good job in destroying much of the evidence (including gas chambers and even entire concentration camps) before the Allies and Soviets arrived.

3. Doctors and scientists were not forced to become Nazi Party members. Most willingly decided to. For example, 44% of doctors in Nazi Germany happily joined the Nazi Party as it greatly furthered their careers...

4. If allowing these Nazi scientists into America, Britain/Australia and the Soviet Union was so innocuous as you imply, then why did all of these countries make it top-secret? Why, even long after the Cold War, was it still classified, and only leaked out due to America's Freedom of Information Act and whistleblowers in the Soviet Union and the relentless pursuit for justice of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and ADL regarding the British-Australian Operation Matchbox. Why? Because these countries knew they were doing wrong and they knew the public would know have stood for post-WW2 collaborations with Nazis.

Also, the old and dated concept that most Germans, including even doctors and scientists who were Nazis, were not aware of Hitler's intentions toward the Jews is gradually being removed from the history books as more and more historians agree this was simply an incorrect assessment.

Historians like Konnilyn G. Feig who wrote the following in Hitler's death camps: the sanity of madness:
“Hitler exterminated the Jews of Europe. But he did not do so alone. The task was so enormous, complex, time-consuming, and mentally and economically demanding that it took the best efforts of millions of Germans… All spheres of life in Germany actively participated: Businessmen, policemen, bankers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, railroad and factory workers, chemists, pharmacists, foremen, production managers, economists, manufacturers, jewelers, diplomats, civil servants, propagandists, film makers and film stars, professors, teachers, politicians, mayors, party members, construction experts, art dealers, architects, landlords, janitors, truck drivers, clerks, industrialists, scientists, generals, and even shopkeepers—all were essential cogs in the machinery that accomplished the final solution.”

Lastly, if you want to know why I believe allowing these Nazi scientists into the West post-WW2 was a massive moral corruption and lead to a subtle continuation of fascist policies (albeit under a different guise), feel free to listen to this excerpt from a radio interview I gave: https://www.goodreads.com/videos/9119...

I still say, very few will risk being on the wrong side of the barbed wire, and they would join the party as per (3).

I am not trying to justify them, but I do think that if you maintain you are going to kill the defeats because they are war criminals, you need evidence. Yes, I now a lot were sort of accomplices to the murder of jews, but don't forget the allies killed 35,000 in Dresden for no better reason than if they waited a week they would most probably not be able to do it. There was no military value in that, so is that a war crime? There were a lot of german soldiers murdered by allied soldiers after they surrendered, and how many were prosecuted?

I personally think you're all over the show in your arguments, Ian, and you're essentially bringing up a lot of red herrings to delay stating the obvious: that no democratic nation in the West (which remember were all officially anti-Fascist) should have allowed any Nazis, especially those associated with the Holocaust, into their borders post WW2. Let alone put these Nazis in charge of, or else in senior/influential positions within, major programmes that required moral decision-making...programmes like the US-Government's Plum Island or the CIA's mind control project MK-Ultra.

Because, last time I checked, Nazis weren't known for being any good at moral decision making ;)

In the case of Australia alone, I can only reiterate what Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Jewish Affairs Council, was quoted as saying in the aforementioned article in the Guardian: "It is a deplorable and shocking revelation that fully paid-up Nazi party members, including those who belonged to Nazi killing units, were permitted to enter Australia and start new lives, often at taxpayers' expense."

Canada also gave refuge to Nazi scientists post-WW2 as part of Operation Matchbox, as per this article: http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/germ...

"Under the program name Operation Matchbox, the Allied forces recruited top-notch German scientists at the end of the Second World War. By October 1950, 42 German scientists had moved to Canada. The scientists were screened by a British military and civilian panel and were given temporary migrant status for one year in Canada."

"In March 1987, Canada's Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals (also known as the Deschênes Commission) recommended the investigation."

An example of the lovely individuals recruited by our "democratic" and "pro-freedom" Western governments after WW2:

Friedrich Hoffmann

Surname Hoffmann
Given Name Friedrich
Country Germany, United States
Categor Science-Engineering
Gender Male

Friedrich "Fritz" Hoffmann was a German scientist who conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1945, he testified during the trials at Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany regarding the murder of 324 Czechoslovakian Catholic priests who were exposed to malaria during experiments. After the war, he was recruited by the British as a part of Operation Matchbox. In 1947, he joined the US Army on research programs involving nerve agents (such as sarin), psychoactive agents (such as lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD), and others. In the mid-1950s, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency and continued to work with psychoactive agents, particularly LSD. Around this time, working at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, United States, his test subjects, all US Army enlisted men and federal prison inmates, were experimented upon without being told that they were given doses of various toxins. He also experimented with LSD on thousands of rhesus monkeys imported from South America for that very purpose. In the late 1950s, he worked on the development of chemical weapons codenamed Agent White, Agent Blue, and Agent Orange; the latter, a herbicide used to defoliate vegetation, would negatively affect the health of military and civilian populations alike on both sides of the Vietnam conflict. He also worked on chemicals used in the attempted assassinations on Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He passed away in 1967.

Source: Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America



http://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?perso...

What a charming person. Why aren't the people that recruited him accessories to war crimes?

Ian wrote: "What a charming person. Why aren't the people that recruited him accessories to war crimes?"

They should be.
But history often takes a long time to become clear...Especially when you are dealing with highly secretive projects that often take decades to be fully declassified, if ever.

An important footnote to Britain's and America's Operations Matchbox and Paperclip is that neither have yet been fully declassified. We still do not know the extent of Germans who were brought into the West after WW2. All of those who were Nazi war criminals had their names changed (which was against President Truman orders as he explicitly stated no known war criminals to be allowed in to the US). So we don't even know if more notorious Nazis including the likes of Doctor Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, was even part of Paperclip.

For me tho, the big thing is not what these scientists directly participated in after WW2 in our Western nations. For me, it's more concerning what indirect impact these German men of science had, especially as they were all looked up to and were given decision making power...

Because fascism spreads...

While on this topic, don't forget there were a very large number of Japanese war criminals that were let off so the US mainly could gain access to their records of biological and chemical warfare agents they were developing.

Ian wrote: "While on this topic, don't forget there were a very large number of Japanese war criminals that were let off so the US mainly could gain access to their records of biological and chemical warfare a..."

Yep, most of that relates to the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese...

Unit 731 – the Japanese Auschwitz https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Operation MATCHBOX: administration (The National Archives, UK): http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov...

Operation "Matchbox" - German scientists and technicians appointed as "consultants" to CCG (The National Archives, UK): http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov...

Nazi Scientists in Canada http://www.constantinereport.com/nazi...

Friedrich Hoffmann http://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?perso...

"Friedrich "Fritz" Hoffmann was a German scientist who conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1945, he testified during the trials at Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany regarding the murder of 324 Czechoslovakian Catholic priests who were exposed to malaria during experiments. After the war, he was recruited by the British as a part of Operation Matchbox. In 1947, he joined the US Army on research programs involving nerve agents (such as sarin), psychoactive agents (such as lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD), and others. In the mid-1950s, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency and continued to work with psychoactive agents, particularly LSD. Around this time, working at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, United States, his test subjects, all US Army enlisted men and federal prison inmates, were experimented upon without being told that they were given doses of various toxins. He also experimented with LSD on thousands of rhesus monkeys imported from South America for that very purpose. In the late 1950s, he worked on the development of chemical weapons codenamed Agent White, Agent Blue, and Agent Orange; the latter, a herbicide used to defoliate vegetation, would negatively affect the health of military and civilian populations alike on both sides of the Vietnam conflict. He also worked on chemicals used in the attempted assassinations on Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He passed away in 1967."

I'm still chilled by this statement mentioned The Guardian: “The leading Nazi-hunting watchdog, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in Jerusalem, yesterday demanded an investigation into the recruitments ordered by Britain and the US, and said Australia was a haven for ‘holocaust perpetrators and mass murderers’.”

An interesting post indeed.

Jason wrote: "An interesting post indeed."

Yeah, it's not just Americans that became some of the secret bad boys of the West, mate :)
We in the UK and/or Her Majesty's (British) Commonwealth territories have a lot of dark secrets too, right?

How about the Soviet equivalent to Paperclip? If you know much about that feel free to share in the following thread (the Soviet end is not something I've studied too much at all, so keen for more info):

Operation Osoaviakhim (the Soviets' equivalent to Operation Paperclip -- Russia's post-WW2 protection of Nazi scientists) https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...---

I'll be writing about this in the follow up to my up coming book Dystopia, it will be called Avalon Rising and will cover the issue of Lebbensborn.

Jason wrote: "I'll be writing about this in the follow up to my up coming book Dystopia, it will be called Avalon Rising and will cover the issue of Lebbensborn."

Hey Jason, best of luck with Avalon Rising. Not many books, especially novels, have ever covered Operation Matchbox (which doesn't get even 1% of the attention Paperclip does).

Re Lebensborn, are you aware of this discussion thread below?

The Lebensborn Program https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I think too many writers are afraid to cover controversial issues. It can get them the wrong attention. I take a leaf out of Dan Brown's book. I remember when he caused a stink with the Davinci Code with the Vatican.
That's the beauty about being an independent author, you can write what you want. I think there are plenty of people out there who want controversial books.

Agreed.
However, Operation Matchbox is very "underground".
In fact, it doesn't even has its own Wikipedia page by the looks!
And this little discussion thread here appears to be the biggest public discussion (at least in the internet age) ever on the subject!
Google it and you'll see.

So you literally may be the first novelist ever to tackle this important and mostly unknown part of British/Commonwealth history...Although I know there have been some movies on the subject and possibly some of them were based on novels.

Asia-Pacific | Call for probe into Nazi workers - BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacif...

Blind eye

The paper says the scheme was codenamed Operation Matchbox and it was shared by the United States and Britain to prevent Russia from recruiting German scientists.

Some scientists, the paper says, were members of Adolf Hitler's stormtroopers and some belonged to the Nazi party itself.

But it says Australia turned a blind eye to their political backgrounds.

The scientists, it says, were scattered across Australia. Some worked for a top secret guided missile site at Woomera in south Australia which later became the focus of Britain's research into rocket science.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacif...

I think it is clear that the allied forces recruited Nazi scientists at the end of the war. I did not know it was so wide-spread and I thought it was only the Americans.
While it is reprehensible as a lot of these scientists at the very least knew that slave labour was used in constructions such as the V2 rockets, it was also possibly real-politics in action. It was better for us to have them than letting the Russians have them.
I think what is more shocking is how few Nazi's, including the SS, ever faced justice.
I have just readThe Cursed Sister which touches on this. It is incredible how many mass murders walked free after the war.

Sophia wrote: "I think it is clear that the allied forces recruited Nazi scientists at the end of the war. I did not know it was so wide-spread and I thought it was only the Americans.
While it is reprehensible a..."

Keep in mind Russia got its share of Nazi scientists, too. It was essentially a three-way grab (between US, Russia and Britain) for German talent and brains at end of WW2.

And yes it was indeed shocking how few Nazis ever faced justice. Many Japanese war criminals evaded justice also.

To be fair it would have been stupid to hang a rocket scientist rather than get him to work for you.

To be fair it would have been stupid to hang a rocket scientist rather than get him to work for you.

Lance wrote: "Sophia wrote: "I think it is clear that the allied forces recruited Nazi scientists at the end of the war. I did not know it was so wide-spread and I thought it was only the Americans.
While it is ..."

To be fair it would have been stupid to hang a rocket scientist rather than get him to work for you.

Not all were rocket scientists tho, some were also holocaust perpetrators...letting in that many fascists into our democratic nations, and putting them in charge of major military/scientific projects (especially with Paperclip in the US) had serious ramifications in my opinion.

Also, I don't personally think it was rocket tech the West and Soviets were after - but rather Nazi classified tech not commonly known or reported. But that's only my assessment.

In the case of the rocket scientists, the US was definitely after their technology. The US had a rather strange history of rocketry, and they did develop the solid-fuel JATO bottles, but the liquid-fueled rockets were a bit beyond them. They had tried, and got into all sorts of difficulties, and the big missiles were the only things that could bomb America, so they wanted to keep every German rocket scientist out of the hands of Russians. They did not succeed, and the Russians were pretty good anyway. Without von Braun et al., I am reasonably sure it would not have been Armstrong first on the moon. (As an aside, it was supposed to have been Aldrin who was first on the moon.)

This Times of Israel article my father (Lance) wrote possibly relates to some of the Matchbox Nazis who made it Down Under...

EXCLUSIVE'IT'S THE ONLY ANGLO-SAXON COUNTRY NOT TO TAKE ACTION'

New Zealand still not opening files on ‘resettled’ alleged former Nazi emigres https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-zea...

Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff supplied a list of 50 suspected war criminals decades ago, but successive governments keep classified the immigration documents that could implicate them
By LANCE MORCAN
5 June 2021, 11:26 am

https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-zea...

I would also recommend these books...

Operation Paperclip -- Annie Jacobsen

She describes how the entire ratline process worked along with some dire consequences. It was freed NAZI 'doctors' who created Thalidomide and we know what happened there. So much for the Nuremburg Codes on Human Experimentation. Now we have the Covid19 'vaccine'.

Trading with the Enemy -- Charles Higham

Messerschmidt shot down in Britain with ball bearings made in -- Pennsylvania? American oil companies refuelling German U-boats in Mexico and South America? You got it The 'dollar a year' men were on interlocking boards with industrialists of the Third Reich.

Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II -- James Bacque

Eisenhower a mass murderer? Starving a million Germans to death after the war was over? The evidence outlined here is quite compelling.

Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia -- Paul L. Williams

German Intelligence co-opted straight across to work for the 'good guys'. 'Stay Behind' groups becoming Bader Meinhoff Gang and Red Brigades to scare the public into believing anything the 'authorities' say. The behind the scenes story of the corrupt and secretive Vatican Bank and CIA connections.

Ian wrote: "In the case of the rocket scientists, the US was definitely after their technology. The US had a rather strange history of rocketry, and they did develop the solid-fuel JATO bottles, but the liquid..."

I love the line in Ice Station Zebra where Rock Hudson said something to the effect that "I hope our captured German scientists are better than the Russians' captured German scientists."

Perhaps, but Buzz was supposed to have said that he muscled Armstrong aside after Splashdown. "I may not have been the first on the Moon, but I was the first one back."

It is still creepy the Von Braun was so prominent with Walt Disney. But then again, Disney has always been creepy for me. I wonder if the Mouseketeers knew that Von Braun had thousands of slaves worked to death building his rockets. Disney is still sexing up young girls to become pillars of society like Brittany Speers or Christina Aguilera.

Ian wrote: "In the case of the rocket scientists, the US was definitely after their technology. The US had a rather strange history of rocketry, and they did develop the solid-fuel JATO bottles, but the liquid..."

Ian, given the Nazis' mastery of rocketry I always marveled that the Americans beat them to the first atomic bomb. I understand it may have been a close run thing?

As an aside I watched the A-bomb episode of 'WW2 in Color' on Netflix this week (excellent series!) and it really brought home the human devastation of that bomb on Hiroshima. Horrible long-lasting injuries. I understand those images were censored for years in the US for fear of a public backlash. Just as images of the Dresden bombings were censored in UK.

My parents (both Christians) both served in the NZ Army during WW2 and both swore the bomb was justified to end war earlier and thereby save Allied lives... I suspect if they'd seen the aforementioned video they'd have had second thoughts.

No, the Nazis were never in the running for a bomb, oddly enough because Werner Heisenberg, who was in charge of the project (and a Nobel prize winner for the Uncertainty Principle) made a howlingly strange and totally erroneous calculation mistake on the critical mass. (Apparently for the neutron flux, he assumed all neutrons would depart their nuclei on a radial path unless they collided on the way out.)

Hard to know about WW2 usage. If you are a soldier fighting a war you did not start maybe you would expect your government to give you the best chance of getting home alive, especially since the Japanese had treated prisoners of war terribly.

But that leaves now. I gather the American military now thinks the use of tactical nukes will gain them a big advantage. I once spoke to a pilot who, during the cold war, flew for NATO over the Iron curtain boundary, and they all had live nukes. Apparently in 1958 General Laurence Kutner (USAF Pacific commander) recommended some preemptive nuking of some Chinese facilities. The likelihood that the USSR would retaliate against Taiwan, and probably the US base at Okinawa, were "acceptable consequences". Ike put an end to that piece of stupidity, but it is scary that this type of thinking could emerge again.