4 ms·

> A lot of this had to do with the rise of Nazism which led to a lot of these high powered intellectuals fleeing Germany and Eastern Europe for the US. The Naz

> A lot of this had to do with the rise of Nazism which led to a lot of these high powered intellectuals fleeing Germany and Eastern Europe for the US. The Nazis managed to drive out a large portion of Europe's best scientists & mathematicians (Von Neumann, Einstein, Gödel [eventually... it took him a while to realize how bad things were] just to name a few). Most of which ended up in the US or the UK. Which in turn meant that in WWII Nazi Germany was at something of a scientific disadvantage without realizing it was of their own making. Add to this the Nazi critique of of what they called "Jewish science" - things like relativity, quantum mechanics, even Gödel incompleteness theorem got this label - did not allow them free inquiry into many of these areas.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
To add to this, the USA was lucky enough to hustle a bunch of Nazi scientists out of Germany and into the US just AFTER the war, too. Werner Von Braun comes to mind, but there were others. Von Braun did not give a shit about Nazi philosophy and only wanted money so he could build and test his rockets. That’s what we promised him to get him to come to to the USA. But as I recall, there was a “secret” operation created with the singular goal of getting Nazi scientists out of Germany and to the US in ‘45 and ‘46 before the British or Soviets could recruit or just plain kidnap them. EDIT: Operation Paperclip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
- colinb 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro