"the Great Patent Heist of 1946." It was made official policy in World War II by President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9604, also known as the "License to Steal," which permitted agents of the U.S. government to execute the greatest robbery in world history: the theft of German intellectual (scientific) property. What technology the Americans and Soviets stole has, in fact, fueled some of the greatest scientific advances of the modern era.
the Allies, chiefly the Americans and the Soviets, simply confiscated all patents, designs, inventions etc they could lay their hands upon - military, industrial and commercial - regardless of international law or the Geneva Conference. Once in the United States or Soviet Russia the German inventions were "reinvented" and stamped "Made in the U.S.A." or "XXXX."
800,000 original patents had been looted by the Allies.
Although Americans today find it hard to believe that the USA was once a laggard nation in science and industrial innovations, it was, America under President Franklin Roosevelt had failed to pull the country out of the doldrums of the depression, and while the economy, after having been put on a wartime basis, was unsurpassed in its volume of production, its products, including wartime hardware, were inferior to those of the German war machine.
Even during the war the United States had been the home of only four Nobel Prize winners in chemistry as compared to 37 recipients in Europe, eight U.S. winners in Physics to 39 in Europe, and six in medicine, to 37 in Europe. Most of these prizes were awarded to Germans and Austrians.
While military analysts the world over now recognize the superiority of German World War II hardware, few, however, are aware that German scientists had done much of the basic scientific pioneer work in the development of many postwar industrial technologies and products for civilian use. In consumer goods and medical advances, Germans under National Socialism were enjoying color TV and color photography a decade before the American public could buy it's first black-and-white sets. The Nazi government had modernized the road system in Germany in the 1930s with the Autobahn, It was not until the 1950s, under President Eisenhower, that the United States undertook the construction of a modern highway system.
In the digital world, for example, German prewar and wartime scientists had been at the cutting edge of important developments, from the quartz clock, semiconductors, silicon technology and transistors to the first computer. They were the first to develop the process for the industrial production of integrated circuits and transistors.
The culmination of these advances in solid-state physics and digital instrumentation in Nazi Germany was the wartime development of a pioneer computer, the Z4.
In the matter of nuclear power, German scientists in Berlin were making feasibility studies of the possible uses of nuclear energy to propel ships and submarines as early as 1941. Moreover, the possibilities of employing nuclear reactors to power land vehicles were also being explored.
To list just a few of the many technological advances of consumer interest, German industry developed synthetic mica, synthetic sapphires, Diesel engines, plastics, magnetic tape, infrared night vision aids, laser guidance and so on. The patents, test models, and prototypes of all of the above were simply taken and exploited by their new proprietors.
Germany had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of development and production as well as every conceivable experimental and operational guidance and triggering systems (radar, radio, wire, continuous radio waves, acoustic, infrared, light beams, and magnetics) for its war effort. The 'rocket' that launched the United States into superpower realm was German. The Soviet Union also copied the German weaponry but largely ignored consumer products.
Germans were streaks ahead of others nations, that is, by five, ten or more years advanced in development.
The Germans spoke of travel into space, about inter-continental ballistic Rockets, artificial satellites, and other no less fantastical plans, such as the establishment of an "island in space", which would be fitted out with a gigantic mirror to catch the sun rays and beam them back to earth in bundled rays.
But especially in the sphere of weapons- and rocket technology, the German Reich was unbelievably advanced in comparison to their allied enemies. Remote control for rockets and torpedoes, Infrared rays, Ultra sound, all methods of Jet-propulsion, Helicopters and rockets were known to them. The Germans had developed airplanes, March flying craft and the so-called flying disks, which reached speeds that were generally thought impossible, top speeds of an unbelievable 8,000 km/ hour were reached.