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The Nazis before and during WWII were fastidious about documentating the backgrounds, political affiliations, and connections of pretty much everyone they could

The Nazis before and during WWII were fastidious about documentating the backgrounds, political affiliations, and connections of pretty much everyone they could, but especially their perceived foes. They were assisted in this by tabulating equipment provided by IBM. So they probably had more complete records of this sort of thing than anyone else at the time.

jacquesm 9y ago
Replace a few words and you have the present day situation.
geofft 9y ago
Sure, but don't we think they'll be ... colored by Nazi ideology? Was the US really happy to think that anyone who the Nazis think is a communist and a threat to the Reich is someone that they should also consider a communist and a threat to the republic? Barely two years after sending half a million soldiers to die because this country was too evil that we needed to pay any cost to defeat them? After discovering the Holocaust, which we didn't know about when we made that decision and only learned about as we found the piles of dead bodies? We're not only interested in their intelligence, we trust the Gestapo's judgment? I mean, I guess at some level I always knew the answer was yes, but this is pretty blatant.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  I don't see any evidence of unconditional trust of the Gestapo's judgement. As an intelligent analyst, you would be pretty stupid to ignore information just because its contents might be unreliable. Reliability and utility are two distinct axes (even if not entirely orthogonal). The image quality is too poor for me to spend the time to figure out what all the text and annotation is saying. It looks like it's something like a summary of major leaders of the Chinese branch of the Comintern with supporting documentation, but I'm not entirely certain.
- icebraining 9y ago
  The US recruited actual members of the Nazi party[1], so a few files is not much in comparison. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

jacquesm 9y ago

Replace a few words and you have the present day situation.

geofft 9y ago

Sure, but don't we think they'll be ... colored by Nazi ideology? Was the US really happy to think that anyone who the Nazis think is a communist and a threat to the Reich is someone that they should also consider a communist and a threat to the republic? Barely two years after sending half a million soldiers to die because this country was too evil that we needed to pay any cost to defeat them? After discovering the Holocaust, which we didn't know about when we made that decision and only learned about as we found the piles of dead bodies? We're not only interested in their intelligence, we trust the Gestapo's judgment? I mean, I guess at some level I always knew the answer was yes, but this is pretty blatant.

jcranmer 9y ago
I don't see any evidence of unconditional trust of the Gestapo's judgement. As an intelligent analyst, you would be pretty stupid to ignore information just because its contents might be unreliable. Reliability and utility are two distinct axes (even if not entirely orthogonal). The image quality is too poor for me to spend the time to figure out what all the text and annotation is saying. It looks like it's something like a summary of major leaders of the Chinese branch of the Comintern with supporting documentation, but I'm not entirely certain.
icebraining 9y ago
The US recruited actual members of the Nazi party[1], so a few files is not much in comparison. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip