The hidden Nazi history of the microchip


Chip designer honoured, but no mention of the shameful history of most modern tech.

Garry was one of those who covered the death of Jack Kilby, inventor of the semiconductor.

Kilby's work was significant in the development of much modern science. But like other seminal researchers such as Farnsworth (TV's inventor) and Tesla (radio), he was mostly unsung.

But perhaps the greatest untold story was how the post-WWII rocketry race spurred the climate that led to innovations such as the microchip. That race was fueled by Nazi technology stolen from the battlefield by US-UK T-Force (technical intelligence) in the dying days of the war. More significantly, the intel gathered from those secret ops was used to compile dossiers on key Nazi researchers -- people such as the V2's creator Wernher Von Braun -- who would be squirrelled away by the US when hostilities ceased. If Von Braun and many of his colleagues who were put to work in Operation Paperclip were to have been tried for war crimes they would have spent considerable time in prison and possibly hung for crimes against humanity.

Certainly, for the terror that the V-program rained on London, Von Braun would have been executed.

Instead, he is honoured by citizens of his adopted home, Huntsville, Alabama deep in America's south.

Without the rocket aerospace program computers as we know them today would not exist. And neither would the communications and IT we take for granted. Every information technology from the mobile phone and iPod to supercomputer that predicts the weather spawned from these Nazi horrors.

Posted: Sun - June 26, 2005 at 01:35 PM          

©