“A Picayune Detail:” Nazi Science Heads West
April 24, 2026 “A Picayune Detail:” Nazi Science Heads West Jeffrey St. Clair Facebook Twitter Reddit Bluesky Email Werner von Braun (in suit) with the leadership of the Wehrmacht at Peenmunde, outside the Nazi slave labor camp for V-1 and V-2 rockets. As Allied forces crossed the English Channel during the D-Day invasion of June 1944, some 10,000 intelligence officers known as T-Forces were right behind the advance battalions. Their mission: seize munitions experts, technicians, German scientists and their research materials, along with French scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis. Soon, a substantial number of such scientists had been picked up and placed in an internment camp known as the Dustbin. In the original planning for the mission, a prime factor was the view that German military equipment – tanks, jets, rocketry and so forth – was technically superior and that captured scientists, technicians and engineers could be swiftly debriefed in an effort by the Allies to cat...
