Intellectual Reparations

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe observes in the Introduction to his book Democracy: The God That Failed, America’s unnecessary entry into WWI caused it to convert from “an old-fashioned territorial dispute” into “an ideologically motivated conflict” which “quickly degenerated into a total war.” This led to the harsh war reparations imposed on Germany (only paid off last year), which ultimately led to the rise of nationalism in Germany, Hitler’s rise to power, and WWII. At the end of WWII, even more reparations were imposed on Germany–this included the transfer of much property, including “industrial” and “intellectual” property, from Germany, as well as forced labor, i.e. slavery.

In one interesting phase of the aftermath of WWII, the US initiated “Operation Paperclip,” a program from 1945 to 1990–basically coextensive with the Cold War–designed to

recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of World War II (1939–45). It was conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), and in the context of the burgeoning Soviet–American Cold War (1945–91); one purpose of Operation Paperclip was to deny German scientific knowledge and expertise to the USSR and the UK.

… Throughout its operations to 1990, Operation Paperclip imported 1,600 men, as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the US and the UK, some $10 billion in patents and industrial processes.

As noted in the Wikipedia article on WWII reparations by Germany, “The Allies confiscated significant values of German patents, copyrights and trademarks.”

As noted in Wikipedia general article on war reparations,

Beginning even before the German surrender and continuing for the next two years, the United States pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents and many leading scientists in Germany (known as Operation Paperclip). Historian John Gimbel, in his book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, states that the “intellectual reparations” taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to $10 billion dollars.^[2] German reparations were partly to be in the form of forced labor. By 1947, approximately 4,000,000 German POWs and civilians were used as forced labor (under various headings, such as “reparations labor” or “enforced labor”) in the Soviet Union, France, the UK, Belgium and in Germany in U.S run “Military Labor Service Units”.

Wikipedia’s article on Bayer observes:

As part of the reparations after World War I, Bayer had its assets, including the rights to its name and trademarks confiscated in the United States, Canada, and several other countries. In the United States and Canada, Bayer’s assets and trademarks were acquired by Sterling Drug, a predecessor of Sterling Winthrop.