Germany

Is anabolic usage of the Nazi’s really a Myth?

First I want to rectify all these writing about the Nazi’s. Well there is no such thing as Nazi-steroids. What people are referring to, is a short period in the World- and German history. A time span that had a huge influence though.

On several boards and articles you can read about the first usage of anabolic steroids and their stacking. Most of the known writers like Hoberman or Yesalis wil argue that there is no shred of evidence in the German literature, but that has a reason and there is a lot of anecdotical evidence. Let’s try to put it all in place. I try to keep all political issues short and post those in the last part of the blog-post for those interested.

The National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) better known as the NSDAP. The NSDAP was formed in 1919 well before Hitler and had nothing to do with Hitler at all until he got into power in 1933. The term “NAZI” is something Churchill made up. Some claim it was a merging of the words National-socialists and Zionism.

The source of all Evil

After World War 1 the "Big Four" the United States, Great Britain, France, and Italy imposed particularly stringent treaty obligations upon the defeated Germany.

The Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of just over 13% of its territory. The treaty also reduced Germany's economic productivity by about 13%. Germany told to pay substantial reparations for 'civilian damage'. While the 1919 treaty included a "guilt clause", the definite sum was decided in 1921.

But, in 1919, the victors of the war wrote Germany's guilt into the Versailles Treaty at the infamous Hall of Mirrors, and collectively decided that it should pay a high price for that guilt. About 269bn gold marks, to be exact - the equivalent of around 100,000 tons of gold.

Aware that Germany would probably not be able to pay such a towering debt, Clemenceau and the French nevertheless greatly feared rapid German recovery and a new war against France. Hence, the French sought in the postwar treaty system to limit Germany's efforts to regain its economic superiority and to rearm.

'Bitter resentment'

The treaty took complex negotiation and was undoubtedly controversial. The allies - mainly driven by France - wanted to ensure Germany would not be capable of war for many years. But the plan backfired, with modern-day historians claiming that Versailles was a key factor in the lead-up to World War II.

There was bitter resentment in Germany over the sum, and also over article 231, the so-called "guilt clause", which ruled that Germany was responsible for the conflict. The sum was met with disbelief in Germany. Germany tried to push back the payments, and very little was paid back in the 1920s - not only because Germany was struggling financially, but because Germany didn't accept them.

Hitler refused to pay back the reparations after coming to power. Faced with hyperinflation and soaring unemployment, people sought refuge in a movement that promoted national pride, and signed up to Hitler's NSDAP - which used the reparations as a propaganda tool. These reparations were as important politically as economically. It was what it [the reparations] stood for. The Germans hated it.]

Freikörperkultur(FKK)

The first nude beach in Germany was established in 1920 on the island of Sylt.In 1933 after the National Socialists came to power, nudist organizations were integrated into the NSDAP. Who preached nude bathing as a revival of Ancient Greek attitudes toward nudity.

The first dissertation about the FKK movement was written in the 1930s. Himmler and the SS supported Naturism. The ‘Kampfring für völkische Freikörperkultur’, established in May 1933, was a National Socialist völkisch umbrella body for German Freikörperkultur nudist groups, which excluded Jews and communist nudist groups.

The Germans identified their culture with the ancient Greek. Typically, the Germans favored works by sculptors who characteristically exemplified strength, beauty, power, and the beauty of the human body. They rediscovered the Greek art, there has been a long tradition of taking the ideal of the male body from Greek sculpture. The slim but well-muscled torso, the elegant symmetry of form, the balanced turn of the head or twist of the athlete’s shape.

The general German idea of beauty was linking the classical Greek sculptures to Aryan bodies. Hitler’s favorite sculptor was Arno Breker. Part of the German self-consciousness was physical fitness and the obsession of the athletic and aesthetic (Aryan) body.

The drug use of Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler had his personal physician Dr Theodor Morell who administered him drugs on a daily basis.

In their new book "War Hitler Krank?" ("Was Hitler Ill?"), historian Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann, a professor emeritus of medicine at Berlin's Charité University Hospital, have combined the use of documentary material with modern medical analysis to separate myth from verifiable facts. The book purports to offer nothing short of "conclusive findings" on Hitler's state of health.

Hitler took massive amounts of Mutaflor a drug to combat flatulence. The drug contained small amounts of the nerve agent strychnine, which had long been used as a rat poison.

Morell routinely administered a solution of dextrose and vitamins to help Hitler combat fatigue. Because Hitler was skeptical of pills and capsules, the solution was injected intravenously or intramuscularly.

Morell then prescribed the barbiturate Brom-Nervacit, the morphine-based drug Eukodal, bulls’ semen, to give him a testosterone boost, and Pervitin, a pill containing crystal meth.

Morell also gave him two artificial stimulants, Coramine and Cardiazol. To counteract the effect of the stimulants, Morell gave Hitler more sedatives.

In 1944, Morell began giving him injections of the testosterone, particularly when Eva Braun was around. How often he injected Hitler with androgens we do not know, but each time it was a Testoviron ampoule of 25 milligrams of testosterone enanthate. Made Schering.

Before his rendezvous with Braun, Hitler occasionally had Morell inject an extract derived from the seminal vesicles and prostate glands of young bulls into his bloodstream. Hitler was not the only world leader full of drugs. During the “Bay of Pigs disaster” (1961-1962) and the “Cuba Missile crises” President John Kennedy , was “treated” with amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine analogues and anabolic steroids (testosterone, methyl testosterone and Halotestin), not just occasionally but consistently over many years.

The wonders made by the Testes

Scientists all over the world but especially in Germany, focused on rejunivation of people. In the early 20th century, injections of glandular materials and testicular transplants had a heyday. Just like “Orchic Extracts” (Bull Balls Extract). In the 1920s and 1930s, experimentation culminated in the discovery of testosterone.

Most scientific researches hoped to find the “Fountain of Youth” and in some way testosterone is just that.

In 1931 four Swedish Olympic athletes admitted to using the drug, Rejuven as a training aid. Rejuven was a German manufactured drug that contained the anabolic agent testosterone (derived from a natural source). Athletes were not aware that they were taking an anabolic steroid at the time.

One of the first athletes to use anabolic steroids for the purpose of performance was the great Swedish distance runner Paavo Numi. In 1931 Numi and three other Swedish Olympic athletes admitted to using a product called Rejuven, which contained testosterone. Numi said he was ".. astounded by Rejuven's effects on the body. By using Rejuven it is possible to train much more intensely."

There were no rules against anabolic steroid use, because anabolic steroids as a class of drugs did not exist. The use of Rejuven in sports appears to have been an isolated incident. But of course very few world class athletes like to admit to have used anything to defeat their fellow competitors. Clinical studies associating these drugs with anabolic effects first led to the suggestion in 1939 that anabolic steroids had potential for improving athletic performance. It seemed steroids effects, and anabolic steroid information was getting very popular.

Throughout this period, researchers tested the androgenic effects of substances isolated from large quantities of animal testicles and from human urine. Adolf Butenandt isolated milligram amounts of androsterone from 15,000 L of policemen’s urine. Adolf Butenandt was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party since May 1936. Finally, Karoly G. David, Ernst Laqueur, and colleagues isolated crystalline testosterone from testicles and published the results in 1935. Within a few months, groups led by Adolf Butenandt and G. Hanisch (funded by Schering Corp. in Berlin), and Leopold Ruzicka and A. Wettstein of Ciba, developed synthetic methods of preparing testosterone. But research was meant to increase human capacities thus research also expanded to other drugs.

The Nazi leadership had a lot of hopes about the use of D-IX wonder drug

New research shows that Nazis were going to turn their soldiers to robots with the help of a special chemical. Until recently, the chemical has been kept secret. So-called Experiment D-IX started in November of the year 1944 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Eighteen prisoners were marching on the semicircular square, which was used for daily call-overs. The prisoners were carrying backpacks that weighed 20 kilos each. They were circling the square non-stop, while Odd Nansen, Arctic explorer's son, was watching them from the window of his barracks. Years later, after the war was over, he said that those marching people on the square were called "pill patrol." They could march without a rest up to 90 kilometers a day. Everyone knew that they were like guinea-pigs that were used for testing the new method for preserving the energy of a human body.

Hitler's chemists wanted to find out, how long those people could last. At first, those poor prisoners sang songs and whistled various melodies as they marched. Twenty-four hours later, the majority of them fell down on the ground dead. Nazi chemists tested their new wonder pills on those people. The pills were called D-IX. This was also the work code of the whole experiment. The pills contained cocaine together with other drugs. As the Third Reich leaders believed, the new pills were supposed to turn German soldiers into tireless and fearless warriors.

The use of an amphetamine called pervitin was a usual thing at the Western front in the very beginning of the war. Nazi leaders believed that the use of that stimulant would inspire their troops to noble and heroic deeds for the sake of the victory. A factory of the Berlin company Temmel, which manufactured pervitin, supplied the Nazi Army and the Luftwaffe with 29 million of pervitin pills during the period of April-December of 1939. The Ground troops high command ordered to keep that a secret. Official documents mentioned the drug under the code name obm.

A group of researchers, presided by pharmacology professor Gerhard Orchehovsky came to conclusion after several months of hard work at Kiel University labs that he finally created the needed substance. One pill D-IX contained five milligrams of cocaine, three milligrams of pervitine, five milligrams of eucodal (morphine-based painkiller), as well as synthetic cocaine that was produced by the company Merk

Researcher Kemper came to conclusion that the results of the tests were very inspiring. That made Nazi leaders continue the experiments, testing the new drug on the people, who walked in circles 24 hours a day, carrying 20 kilos backpacks. Those people were Sachsenhausen concentration camp prisoners. They became like laboratory guinea-pigs in November of 1944. The goal of the experiment was to determine the new stamina limit for D-IX exposed humans. Medical records of that time show that several participants of the experiment felt fine with only two or three short stops a day: "The considerable reduction of the need in sleep is very impressive. This drug disables man's action ability and will." In other words, D-IX made a human being a robot. The results of all those tests inspired their initiators to supply D-IX drug to the entire Nazi Army. However, they failed to launch the mass production of the substance. Allies' victories at both fronts in winter and spring in 1945 resulted in the collapse of the Nazi regime. The absurd dream of the wonder drug was crushed

Anabolic steroids and NAZI troops

In the records of World War II are numerous accounts of hormonal manipulation and experimentation with human prisoners by Nazi scientists . After all, a group of German scientists pioneered the synthesis of testosterone and other hormones. Several anecdotal accounts have been published suggesting that testosterone and its analog, anabolic steroids, were given to NAZI Gestapo and Nazi troops to make them more muscular, sexually aggressive and mean fighters in battle.

Much of the research involving testosterone and human subjects was done in in Germany, before World War II. Heinz Arandt recorded 17 case studies of testosterone use, all of which showed positive results. There is also evidence that the Germans continued their experimentation during the war, and even administered testosterone to some storm troopers to increase their aggressiveness.

1936 Berlin Olympics

On August 1, 1936, Hitler opened the XIth Olympiad. Musical fanfares directed by the famous composer Richard Strauss announced the dictator's arrival to the largely German crowd. Hundreds of athletes in opening day regalia marched into the stadium, team by team in alphabetical order. Inaugurating a new Olympic ritual, a lone runner arrived bearing a torch carried by relay from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece.

Forty-nine athletic teams from around the world competed in the Berlin Olympics, more than in any previous Olympics. Germany fielded the largest team with 348 athletes. The US team was the second largest, with 312 members, including 18 African Americans. American Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage led the delegation. The Soviet Union did not participate in the Berlin Games.

Germany skillfully promoted the Olympics with colorful posters and magazine spreads. Athletic imagery drew a link between Nazi Germany and ancient Greece, symbolizing the Nazi racial myth that a superior German civilization was the rightful heir of an "Aryan" culture of classical antiquity. This vision of classical antiquity emphasized ideal "Aryan" racial types: heroic, blue-eyed blonds with finely chiseled features.

Concerted propaganda efforts continued well after the Olympics with the international release in 1938 of "Olympia," the controversial documentary directed by German film maker and Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl. She was commissioned by the Nazi regime to produce this film about the 1936 Summer Games.

Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad. German athletes captured the most medals, and German hospitality and organization won the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed the New York Times report that the Games put Germans "back in the fold of nations," and even made them "more human again." Some even found reason to hope that this peaceable interlude would endure.

Did the USA team or Jesse Owens use ergogenic means?

The stimulant ephedrine was used in the medicinal make-up of an amphetamine marketed as “Benzedrine” and produced by the U.S. pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French (now GlaxoSmithKline) in 1931. It was the first real amphetamine (effects: repression of tiredness, hunger, stimulation of nervous system).

Did Hitler shake hands with black 1936 Olympic hero Jesse Owens?

It has long been regarded as the greatest sporting snub in history - when Adolf Hitler stormed out of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin because Germany had been humiliated by a black man.

The moment was 1936 and an incredible American athlete called Jesse Owens had just run his way to the first of four gold medals in the 100 metres.

Hitler, who had shaken hands the previous day with all the German Olympic winners, left the stadium furious that his Ayran supermen had been beaten by their supposed racial inferior.

But now a veteran sports reporter in Germany has come forward to claim that, though Hitler did indeed leave the stadium after the race, it was not before shaking Owens' hand.

Siegfried Mischner, 83, claims that Owens carried around a photograph in his wallet of the Fuehrer doing just that.

Owens, who felt the newspapers of the day reported 'unfairly' on Hitler's attitude towards him, tried to get Mischner and his journalist colleagues to change the accepted version of history in the 1960s.

Mischner claimed Owens showed him the photograph and told him: 'That was one of my most beautiful moments.'

Mischner said: 'It was taken behind the honour stand and so not captured by the world's press. But I saw it, I saw him shaking Hitler's hand.

'The predominating opinion in post-war Germany was that Hitler had ignored Owens.

'We therefore decided not to report on the photo. The consensus was that Hitler had to continue to be painted in a bad light in relation to Owens.'

Mischner, who went on to write a book about the 1936 Olympics, said other journalists were with him on the day that Owens produced the photo and they too did not report on it.

'Owens was disappointed,' he said. 'He shook his head disapprovingly. The press then was very obedient. I can make no excuses, but no one wanted to be the one to make Hitler the monster look good.

'All my colleagues are dead, Owens is dead. I thought this was the last chance to set the record straight. I have no idea where the photo is or even if it exists still.'

Owens later said he was treated better in Germany than in America where blacks faced segregation.

The press was complaining about Hitler not shaking hands with Owens, but nobody reported ever about the fact, that NO black gold medal winner from 1936 was invited to the greeting by the president at the White House.

Only a few, understood that the Berlin glitter was merely a facade hiding a racist and oppressively violent regime.

The Nazi origins of a testosterone implant

US Patent 2,517,513 is a solid-looking document, which describes metallic cylindrical implants. They release hormones such as testosterone, estradiol, insulin, or growth hormone to the body. Nothing in the patent suggests that it was born in Buchenwald concentration camp.

After Hitler came to power, his right hand Heinrich Himmler founded in 1934, a special unit, which had to hunt for gay men. The Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, the organization is called in English. Himmler wanted a medical solution for homosexuality, which according to him, reduced the birth rate in Germany. This development was the opportunity, the Danish physician Carl Peter Vaernet was waiting for.

Vaernet claimed he could help the Nazis to that solution. Like many other doctors in the early twentieth century Vaernet thought men were homosexual due to testosterone deficiency. Since 1932 Vaernet worked on an application that could increase hormone levels in the body: a synthetic gland which issued synthetic hormones.

Carl Peter Vaerne

In Nazi Germany were more researchers experimenting with hormones. Vaernets biggest competitor was Knut Sand. Sand stopped working with the synthetic hormones, and experimented with biological glands that he implanted from one organism into another. With the current knowledge about organ rejection it is clear that the study of Vaernet had more chance of success.

Although Vaernets guinea pigs in the thirties were still exclusively mice - Vaernet would have provided with four thousand artificial glands - the Nazis gave Vaernet the order to solve the "gay problem”. The Dane was given an annual salary of ten thousand Reichsmark and research facilities. In return for this privilege, he would have to hand over all patents to the SS.

It is not clear what research Vaernet all did. He examined not only hormones, but also ultrasound. He limited himself to animal testing. A newspaper interviewed Vaernet in 1941 about his research. The article mentions loudly crowing roosters, who roamed around Vaernets workshop and were provided with testosterone implants.

A year later, in 1942, Vaernet did a first experiment on a human being. Vaernet 'healed' in his own words a schoolmaster from homosexual tendencies. The man was, after he had received the implant, even married. Undoubtedly Vaernets success also had something to do with the Nazi legislation by which homosexuality was punishable by death. Vaernets human guinea pigs had every interest to be "cured".

Vaernets first patent dated from 1943. It was a Danish patent. Later followed by German and US patents.

In 1944, when the war was coming to an end, Vaernet continued his experiments in Buchenwald concentration camp. A Roman Catholic priest was among Vaernets first victims. According Vaernets notes the man became through the implantation of a synthetic gland in his right groin a younger, more energetic appearance. He was carefree and fantasized about women after surgery. He longed even to visit a brothel, but he was a priest, and priests could not do that, off course.

According to one source operated Vaernet a total of forty gay men, according to another there were fifteen. Two men did not survive the surgery. They died from infections that occurred after surgery.The SS was not satisfied with explanations of men who said they were attracted to women. The SS transported Vaernets new straight men to the women's camp Ravensbrueck, where they were forced to have sex with prostitutes while the soldiers were watching.

Vaernet had now widened his horizons. He also wanted to make glands that released insulin and further hormones. He published articles about who the pituitary that released hormones, that would have a rejuvenating effect. Vaernet was convinced that its applications could provide an "eternal youth." He collaborated with Nazi engineer Holger Winding Christensen to make a machine that could produce the metal glands cheap. The money came from Nazi chief Ernst Grawitz . It is not clear whether that machine is ever built. It’s not only in Germany that doctors were experimenting with gay men.

Experiment of gay men to heterosexuals with testosterone fails

Injections of male hormones to male homosexuals will not make them less gay. That concludes the American doctor Hyman Barahal of Kings Park State Hospital in New York in an article published in 1940.

Barahals article describes medical experiments conducted in 1938 and 1939. During that time, doctors considered homosexuality as a medical problem. They experimented with hormones - and more - on gay men in the hope that they could revert into right-minded heterosexuals. For several years, the focus in these experiments was on synthetic testosterone, which since 1938 was produced large quantities by the factories of Schering.

Homosexuals were, according to the modern understanding of that period, no full-fledged men. Therefore male hormones could possibly cure them, was the medical thought.

German doctors in the thirties and forties treated gay prisoners with testosterone implants.

In America chose Hyman Barahal for a different approach. In his psychiatric hospital, he selected 37 male psychotics who were caught sometimes by the guards if they had sex with other men.

From this group Barahal chose ten men who produced to little male hormones. For example to only had to shave once every three weeks, even though they were already twenty years or older. Whether they had little body hair, little muscle or female fat deposits on the chest and hips.

The men were given the preparation Oreton from Schering - which sponsored the study anyway. The active substance in Oreton is testosterone propionate. The men received three times per week an injection of 25 milligrams, four months consecutively.

The injections were sorting effect. The men became more body hair. They were masculinizing. Some men were easier to handle after the injections. But they were not less gay by. They masturbated more frequently, but still had homosexual fantasies. And they still had sex with other men, according to the guards. But more frequently.

“It is interesting to note, however, that in homosexuals libido doesn’t notes change direction following treatment with testosterone," Barahal writes in the last paragraph of his article. "On the other hand, there results an increasement in gay sexual activity. These results would seem to favor the view that homosexuality or psychic origin."

After World War 1 the "Big Four" the United States, Great Britain, France, and Italy imposed particularly stringent treaty obligations upon the defeated Germany.

The Treaty of Versailles, presented for German leaders to sign on May 7, 1919, forced Germany to concede territories to Belgium (Eupen-Malmédy), Czechoslovakia (Hultschin district), and Poland (Poznan, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia). Alsace and Lorraine, annexed in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, returned to France. All German overseas colonies became League of Nation Mandates, and the city of Danzig, with its large ethnically German population, became a Free City. The treaty demanded demilitarization and occupation of the Rhineland, and special status for the Saarland under French control; plebiscites were to determine the future of areas in northern Schleswig on the Danish-German frontier and parts of Upper Silesia.

Perhaps the most humiliating portion of the treaty for the defeated Germany was Article 231, commonly known as the "War Guilt Clause," which forced Germany to accept complete responsibility for initiating World War I. As such Germany was liable for all material damages, and France's premier Georges Clemenceau particularly insisted on imposing enormous reparation payments. Aware that Germany would probably not be able to pay such a towering debt, Clemenceau and the French nevertheless greatly feared rapid German recovery and a new war against France. Hence, the French sought in the postwar treaty system to limit Germany's efforts to regain its economic superiority and to rearm.

Promises to rearm, to reclaim German territory, particularly in the East, to remilitarize the Rhineland, and regain prominence again among the European and world powers after such a humiliating defeat and peace, stoked ultranationalist sentiment and helped average voters to often overlook the more radical tenets of National Socialists (NSDAP) ideology.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the German chemical industry dominated the world market for synthetic dyes. The three major German firms BASF, Bayer and Hoechst produced several hundred different dyes. These three major firms had also integrated upstream into the production of essential raw materials, and they began to expand into other areas of chemistry such as pharmaceuticals. In 1925 IG Farben was formed from a number of major chemical companies that had been working together closely since World War I. During its heyday, IG Farben was the largest chemical company in the world.

After World War II

The Peenemünde Army Research Center (German: Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde) was founded in 1937 as one of five military proving grounds under the German Army Weapons Office (Heeres Waffenamt). It is widely regarded as the birthplace of modern rocketry and spaceflight.

Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip.

Of particular interest were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas.

An aim of the operation was capturing equipment before the Soviets came in. The US Army destroyed some of the German equipment to prevent it from being captured by the advancing Soviet Army.The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Fort Bliss, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program.

Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified.

Separate from Paperclip was an even-more-secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos). Another American project (TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography.The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946.

U.S. journalist Annie Jacobsen. "Under Operation Paperclip, which began in May of 1945, the scientists who helped the Third Reich wage war continued their weapons-related work for the U.S. government, developing rockets, chemical and biological weapons, aviation and space medicine (for enhancing military pilot and astronaut performance), and many other armaments at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War," writes Jacobsen in "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America."

Proclamation No2 included a catch-all clause which said Germany would "provide such transport, plant, equipment and materials of all kinds, labour, personnel, and specialist and other services, for use in Germany or elsewhere, as the allied representatives may direct".

United Kingdom

Their methods had echoes of the Gestapo: kidnapping at night by state officials who offered no evidence of identity. Recently declassified secret documents reveal how at the end of the second world war an elite British unit (T-Force) abducted hundreds of German scientists and technicians and sent them to Britain against their will put them to work at government ministries and private firms in the UK.

Economic Warfare

In a related programme, German businessmen are alleged to have been forced to travel to post-war Britain to be questioned by their commercial rivals, and were interned if they refused to reveal trade secrets.

The economic warfare programmes are detailed in batches of Foreign Office files, marked "Top Secret", many of which lay unseen at the National Archives at Kew until discovered by the Guardian.

The files detail the way in which the scramble to uncover the Nazis' military secrets during the dying days of the conflict in Europe, to assist the continuing war effort in the Far East, turned rapidly to an early cold war campaign to prevent Germany's scientific and industrial assets falling into Soviet hands. This, in turn, offered the British government an opportunity to exploit the scientific and technical know-how of the defeated nation, with scientists being regarded as a form of human booty who could help give the UK an economic and commercial edge.

During those days all “Allies” where very busy to steal all possible possessions, scientists and knowledge from Germany. They didn’t want the other countries to gain access to information and knowledge. That’s why many documents and archives where destroyed. It is quite obvious who confiscated the knowledge on steroids and physical enhancement, though. Again much information disappeared when the wall between Germany and the DDR came down.

While it has long been known that German scientists and technicians worked in the US and Britain after the war, it has generally been assumed they were all volunteers, lured by the promise of good pay and accommodation. However, the declassified papers make clear that for more than two years after the cessation of hostilities the British authorities were subjecting them to a programme of "enforced evacuation".

The Z1 was the first freely programmable computer in the world which used Boolean logic and binary floating point numbers, however it was unreliable in operation. It was completed in 1938 and financed completely from private funds. This computer was destroyed in the bombardment of Berlin in December 1943, during World War II, together with all construction plans.

The Z1 was the first in a series of computers that Zuse designed. Its original name was "V1" for VersuchsModell 1 (meaning Experimental Model 1). After WW2, it was renamed "Z1" to differentiate from the flying bombs designed by Robert Lusser The Z2 and Z3 were follow-ups based on many of the same ideas as the Z1.