German Secrets By The Thousands

Some of the most top-secret German patents were recovered by the Allies after World War II, released into the public domain and sold to any interested parties.

- German Secrets

Someone wrote to Wright (military) Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Force answered: "Sorry... but that would be fifty tons." Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled.

The collection is today chiefly in three places: Wright [military] Field (Ohio), the Library of Congress, and the Department of Commerce. Wright Field is working from a documents "mother lode" of fifteen hundred tons [1,361 tonnes]. In Washington, the Office of Technical Services (which has absorbed the Office of the Publication Board, the government agency originally set up to handle the collection) reports that tens of thousands of tons of material are involved. It is estimated that over a million separate items must be handled, and that they, very likely, contain practically all the scientific, industrial and military secrets of Nazi Germany.

One Washington official has called it "the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, and the first orderly exploitation of an entire country's brainpower."