OSS (pre-CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual | Hacker News Reader

OSS (pre-CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual

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58 pointssimanyay29 comments

My grandmother had to work in factories under the Nazis toward the end of WWII, and anyone doing this sort of thing would have been taken outside and shot.

She says they were told not to work too slow, because that was sabotage, and not too fast, because that was bad for the morale of the others. Her main problems were with the POW workers (slaves), who tried to kill all the Germans they could. Several times, heavy weights were dropped off railings just above her, etc.

You've been voted up for a post that is ambiguous in its asertion. What did your grandmother do? How old was she at the time?

I'm not sure what's ambiguous. Certainly I'm generalizing ("anyone") from an anecdote; I'm not trying to make a rock-solid historical claim.

I think most of her factory work was making shells. She was born in 1921; this would presumably been in 1943-45 or so.

What I meant say was it isn't clear to me if she was a worker or ran the factory.

Oh! Just a worker.

First I am sorry to hear about your grandmother.

Second, how far you take the instructions in the booklet obviously depends on the work you do, and the higher up you are, the easier it is to screw up something without being found out.

Same with my granddad, he had to work in the Opel factories. Their gig was to make cars that would function when tested, but that would fail within a couple of days of delivery to the field.

So, whenever they could they would structurally weaken some element deep in the engine just enough to make it fail.

This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, it is a study in planned obsolescence, because if you make it fail to soon you get a bullet to the back there is not a lot of room for error.

Finally they settled on making a fairly small cut in the wall of a piston, apparently that was good enough to survive a test or two but would fail quickly enough under actual use.

If I were the OSS I would have written up this section of the booklet and then leaked it directly to the enemy at all possible levels. What better way to cause chaos among the German bureaucracy than to spread paranoia that anyone engaged in normal bureaucratic dithering, patriotic speechifying or bad handwriting might actually be a saboteur?

In Nazi Germany everybody, like in other fascists dictatorships, was suspicious anyways.

Wow, so Dilbert is really about CIA conspiracy!

If you want to read something interesting regarding sponsored subversion, I recommend 'Legacy of Ashes' by Tim Weiner. Fantastic hacks and incredible, yet true and widely uncredited events in US and world history executed by the OSS and CIA.

(12) General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion

(e) Act stupid.

-clearly why we won the war

Which one and who is we ?

This, incidentally, reads like a business how-not-to.

But also like a "how it is really done..."

Clearly you have never worked for a big company :)

To me it reads like the current operating guide for just about every politician I've ever met ;)

Could be partly the little bureaucrats guide to heaven.

Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to, expedite decisions.

Ahahaha.

Post-war and enduringly postmillenial corporate America, anyone?

At first I thought this was the training manual of French Administration personal...

is this for real?

The PDF certainly seems authentic to me. The language and technology seems correct for the period. I was surprised that some of the units were mixed standard/metric, such as "75-100 grams for each 10 gallons of gasoline".

You meant mix of standard and imperial units? :)

I think this is the playbook that the GOP in congress is playing by.

It's comical how much this sounds like some peoples' workplaces.

a.k.a "Politics & Economics - The Missing Manual"

I'll be keeping this as a HOW-NOT-TO reference.

For people like me, who get a Firefox security error message, try the links without the s in https:

http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabota...

Lol...

39a) All web necessary pages must established on secure servers with custom certs not recognized by any browser...

"svn.cacert.org uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is not trusted."

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