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Comment by hairytrog | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Nazi era exodus of Jews. Strategically, it's not smart to marginalize or eliminate a large portion of your engineering/scientist class. It certainly contributed to Germany losing the war. Escaped German and European European scientists and engineers were crucial to the Manhattan project and later to ICMB and NASA rocket development. Indeed, without their Jewish and non-Aryan scientists, German nuclear efforts were almost comically bad. We couldn't have done it without the Nazis...

Discrimination of Chinese scientists could have the exact opposite effect of preventing supposed Chinese IP theft. It risks pushing out top Chinese talent who will return to China and develop atomic bomb- level breakthroughs.

Much better alternative - offer them top jobs with excellent pay and recruit from top Chinese university programs.

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Many of those German scientists involved in the rocket program came as refugee (voluntary or not) after the war, not very related to the exodus of Jewish scientists during and before the war.

A significant part of America’s tech industry was built by Chinese scientists who escaped Mao’s China. There was one is who was stupidly forced to go back during the red scare who restarted the PRC’s rocket/missile program during the Sino Soviet split.

An Wang, the founder of Wang Computers and the guy who essentially invented RAM (really core memory) came via this route: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Wang

WWII refugees aiding US atomic efforts: https://www.atomicheritage.org/article/scientist-refugees-an...

Your part on history is just wrong.

> It certainly definitely contributed to Germany losing the war

There were no jewish nazi scientists in significant numbers after Wannsee? Like, what do you learn in school?

It's great to provide corrective information, but please do it without taking personal swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.

-- Hannah Arendt

Wernher von Braun and the 1600 Germans who were taken out of Germany by the US in Operation Paperclip to do 'ICMB and NASA rocket development' were also (and it seems you're implying exclusively) 'Jewish and non-Aryan scientists'? That's not what I'm seeing in the wiki, correct if it's wrong instead of downvoting please.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

You shouldn't be getting downvoted as it's the much more accurate representation of the history that led to the rocket programmes.

As near as damn it the whole Nazi V2 team, equipment and production was shipped to the US. Wernher von Braun, the scientists and engineers, and hundreds of train wagons filled with everything they could carry; engines, components, fuel, tools, you name it.

Japan's Unit 731 got the outrageous end of war deal to get some information to the US though.

They escaped the Soviet army

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