Comment by rustynails | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rustynails | Hacker News Reader

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I apologise if this sounds bad, because it is. Maybe there's some truth to the "Germany should show compassion like the allies did".

To quote, "he Allies also confiscated large amounts of German intellectual property (patents and copyrights, but also trademarks).[27] Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years the US pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents in Germany"

Reference here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_plans_for_German_indu...

If you do the research, the U.S. Leveraged a similar deal over the UK to obtain all patents royalty free as an incentive to enter WWII.

There may be some leverage that can be applied. These corporate and IP raids netted the U.S. hundreds of trillions of dollars.

I was first devastated when I first found this out. It reminded me that the line between the "goodies" and "baddies" was not so clear.

The US not only confiscated large amounts of intellectual property, they also extracted a significant number of highly qualified academics (e.g. Operation Paperclip). These people weren't all innocent victims of the nazi regime either -- not that we will ever find out as nearly all of them were pardoned in return for working for the US government.

Germans are somewhat aware that the Soviet Union practically strip mined the industry in East Germany after the war but what the other Allies (and the US in particular) did is less widely known. Especially the fact that the original (pre-Marshall) plan was to convert Germany to a pre-industrial level (which would have been a death sentence for a large part of the population which would have been unable to sustain itself on agriculture alone) to avoid a repeat of the mobilization that enabled the Blitz.

Also, there was quite a bit of reparations going on after WW2. I'd wager that every German adult has heard stories from their grandparents about stealing supplies off those trains -- something that became so frequent the archbishop of Cologne (Cardinal Frings) absolved the practice and people began calling it "fringsen".

War means everybody loses -- even the "winners". There are no good guys, just various degrees of badness.

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