| Defense Documents | |||
| Doc. No. | Def. Ex. No. | Description of Document | Page |
| Becker-Freyseng | Becker-Freyseng | Extracts from Harper’s | [65] |
| 31 | Ex. 18 | Magazine entitled “Secrets by the Thousand” by C. Lester Walker. | |
| Testimony | |
| Extract from the testimony of defendant Mrugowsky | [66] |
| Extracts from the testimony of defendant Rose | [69] |
BECKER-FREYSENG DEFENSE EXHIBIT 18
EXTRACTS FROM HARPER’S MAGAZINE ENTITLED “SECRETS BY THE THOUSAND” BY C. LESTER WALKER
Someone wrote to Wright Field recently saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Force answered: “Sorry—but that would be fifty tons.”
Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. If you always thought of war secrets—as who hasn’t—as coming in sixes and sevens, as a few items of information readily handed on to the properly interested authorities, it may interest you to learn that the war secrets in this collection run into the thousands, that the mass of documents is mountainous, and that there has never before been anything quite comparable to it.
One Washington official has called it “the greatest single source of this type of material in the world—the first orderly exploitation of an entire country’s brainpower”.
How the collection came to be goes back, for beginnings, to one day in 1944 when the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff set in motion a colossal search for war secrets in occupied German territory. They created a group of military-civilian teams, termed the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee, which was to follow the invading armies into Germany and uncover all her military, scientific, and industrial secrets for early use against Japan. These teams worked against time to get the most vital information before it was destroyed, and in getting it performed prodigies of ingenuity and tenacity.