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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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I mean they did have better machining and chemistry infrastructure, but that's more of a result of poor material conditions forcing inovations. Their presses and processes were really good. We did beat them easily with slightly worse technology because we could mass produce it. The US had more crudely tooled industry but we had a lot more industrial capacity.
One of the major looted items after the war from both the US and the Soviets was the shrviving German metallurgists and chemists. Both also looted tooling and machinery.
Operation paperclip was a lot more than rocket scientists
Well, also Germany was one of the world leaders in science and technology in the early 1900s all the way up to WWII. Just look at the list of winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry and how many of them are German. You could even see this in the recent Oppenheimer movie, where they showed him travelling to the University of Göttingen because that was where you needed to be to study cutting edge theoretical physics. And this was the 1920s when Germany was already suffering having to repay massive war debts after WWI.
What happened? When Hitler rose to power the Nazis drove off all the Jewish scientists, and scared off a lot of the gentiles. It's almost exactly the same situation as in the US today. Even the chaotic Weimar Republic wasn't enough to cause Germany's lead on science to collapse. But, when Hitler came to power, the scientists left, and a lot of them came to the US. This was the start of the US dominating science for decades, something which may collapse now due to Trump.
But the reason Germany was so full of those scientists is because Germany lacked access to good coal seams and to petroleum reserves and also its massive dye industry from the 1800s. In a similar fashion, Germany learned to use metals like magnesium because they were abundant while pure iron was not
Fun fact: in both world wars, Germany was absolutely dependent upon Swedish iron ore to produce high-quality steel. In WWI, it was only the High Seas Fleet of battleships and battlecruisers that prevented the Royal Navy from sailing into the Baltic and choking off this supply and ending the war (an under-appreciated reason for Germany building all those capital ships in the first place while being generally unwilling to risk losing them all in a major fleet engagement). In WWII, it was Hitler's quick occupation of Norway and the Luftwaffe that preserved the supply of Swedish ore.
Germany was also critically dependent upon Swedish ball-bearings, but at least Sweden sold those to both sides.