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Here is a fascinating story. At the end of WWII American intelligence officers gathered the German scientists who were in charge of designing their successful rocket program. America did not have one, so the US did what it could to get the information regardless of whether these people were war criminals or Nazis. They put these scientists up in the Boston Harbor. WBUR has an interesting story on this period of history: Operation Paper-Clip.
So as you can imagine this information had to be kept secret. Only 3 years ago were the American soldiers released from their gag orders. The person in charge of overseeing these scientists was Henry Kolm. He was a loyal and good American intelligence officer. The other thing that is notable is that he was a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Kolm had reason to hate the Nazis. He was an Austrian Jew who’d seen the Germans march into both Vienna and Prague. His family had lost everything. And believing early on that their family would be killed, his father tried to get them out. Their first attempt failed when they were turned back by the Belgians. But finally the family managed to escape the Holocaust on the last ship to leave Europe, in 1939. Uncles, aunts and cousins who didn’t or couldn’t get out were murdered.
“Of course I was angry,” Kolm said. “But I found it more satisfying to appeal to their conscience. ‘How could you be part of this?’ ” -wbur.org
Can you imagine if this was your job? After the horrors he went through and the death of his family, he was in charge of baby sitting the master minds of the most destructive tools of war to that day.
