This discussion was copied to the MapHist list and here is a reply that
may be of interest to some Maps-L subscribers.
Angie
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [MapHist] Captured Nazi Maps and Scientific Data
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:44:28 -0500
From: John Cloud <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Discussion group for map history <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list)
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The USGS Heringen Collection materials are a small part of the vast
materials recovered in Europe by the Allies in World War II.
Essentially, the Cold War began well before V-E Day, with the western
Allies on one side and the Soviet Union and its bloc on the other
systematically dismembered as much of the scientific and technical
infrastructure of the Axis as they could. Everything from steel mills
and and machine shops and vast data sets to proverbial Nazi rocket
scientists were captured and hustled away east and west.
The secret Allied programs ALSOS and PAPERCLIP alone employed tens of
thousands of intelligence agents and analysts. Much of the materials and
investigations were synthesized in hundreds of short, incisive
publications on specific scientific and industrial topics, published
under the projects BIOS (British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee)
and FIAT (Field Information Agencies Technical, British, French, U.S.),
the latter a part of OMG (Office of Military Govt. for Germany). I
mention these acronyms because, if you type them into your library's
catalog query system, you might be surprised what comes up.
The references in the Heringen pdf. article online are a good start for
more information, especially:
Gimbel, John. 1990 Science, Technology, and Reparations. Exploitation
and Plunder in Postwar Germany. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
See also:
Renneberg, Monika, and Mark Walker (eds), 2002. Science, Technology and
National Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
From a maphisters' perspective Gimble is more typical of science
scholarship, in that the geosciences and related matters (like
cartography) are relatively invisible in the story. But the Renneberg &
Walker volume includes an English language version of some, but not all,
of Mechtild Rossler's pioneering research on the linkages between Nazi
spatial planning systems designed to implement the General Plan for the
East and Walter Christaller's Central Place Theory. The Allied
discoveries of sophisticated analog map overlay systems developed by the
SS was a major trigger to the post-war development of military
geographic information systems (MGIS), which eventually lost the "m" and
became GIS. About which, see:
http://www.geography.wisc.edu/histcart/v6initiative/11cloud.pdf
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John Cloud
Geographer/Writer/Editor
NOAA Central Library
1315 East-West Highway
SSMC-3, 2nd Floor, E/OC4
Silver Spring, MD 20910
301-713-2607, ext. 126
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aussi:
Chez Cloud Urbanique
1915 Kalorama Rd. NW
Apt. 603
Washington, DC 20009
202-277-4931
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