Nazis

I'm about halfway through "Operation Paperclip," the book about bringing Nazi scientists -- and not a few administrators -- to America after the war. Some of the "sciences" they were involved with, besides the obvious rocketry and aeronautics you'd expect, read like something out of a horror novel. The US was pretty indiscriminate in who they brought here (they didn't want the Russians to get them).

I mean, I'd read about "Nazi medical experiments" since grade school, all their stuff about trying to revive freezing victims, twin telepathy studies, high altitude and high g-force survivability, not to mention new nerve agents and various other chemical warfare.... real hideous stuff.

You almost don't want to believe it. It reads like war propaganda, ridiculously overblown to try to make the enemy easier to kill.

But apparently all true, ruefully.

Watched a Netflix documentary last night on the Lebensborn, the flip side of the attempted elimination of "undesirables" like Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled and mentally handicapped. Blue-eyed blonde-haired babies were produced on almost an industrial scale, with German SS officers encouraged to impregnate suitable Aryan women, who were then housed in homes for unwed mothers, their children raised communally without any fathers. There were something like 160,000 progenitors of this "master race" born 1939-1944, and these individuals are in their seventies now. They feel not only great unease for having been raised in industrial pens, but also heavy guilt for being raised by the state when so many others were deemed not worthy of living.

There were also a lot (150,000 by some estimates) of appropriately Aryan babies that were removed from their mothers in Poland and other conquered lands, to be raised in Lebensborn camps.

I started another docu about the Simon Wiesenthal Center's efforts to track down living Nazis, now all on their late 90s and mostly feeble or Alzheimerish. Prosecution for war crimes seems a hollow victory at best. An unknown number of Nazis lived out full lives in Argentina or other South American countries, dying without ever being discovered. An amazing number of German citizens supported the Reich (I suppose they didn't have much choice). I had to turn it off -- it was too depressing.

I dunno where this post is going. It's just depressing -- like 9/11 -- contemplating man's apparently unlimited, and not too well buried, capacity for evil.