Taking Nazi Technology is the latest in a wave of works about the Allied seizure of German science and technology after World War II. It follows Monique Laney's German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie (2015), Brian E. Crim's Our Germans (2018), and Charlie Hall's British Exploitation of German Science and Technology, 1943–1949 (2019). In addition to these scholarly works, Annie Jacobsen's inaccurate and often sensationalistic Operation Paperclip (2014) received much notice. The literature tilts heavily toward the US importation of German and Austrian scientists and engineers, particularly the rocket engineers around Wernher von Braun, who constituted at most 20 percent of Project Paperclip. Douglas M. O'Reagan's book, by contrast, compares the American, British, French, and Soviet experiences, focusing mostly on the transfer of information rather than people.

At the end of the war, all four Allied powers set out to seize German science and technology in a manner without parallel in any earlier conflict. This policy was driven by an exaggerated German reputation for scientific and industrial superiority, the deployment of new weapons late in the war, the prospect of total German collapse, and the negative political and economic consequences of extracting monetary reparations after World War I. Instead, reparations would be taken as weapons systems, research equipment, entire factories, and intellectual property. Every Allied state also sought economic and military advantages in a multipolar world quickly turning bipolar.

The American experience, particularly in its occupation zone, already has been carefully analyzed by John Gimbel in Science, Technology and Reparations (1990), as O'Reagan notes in his first chapter. O'Reagan's primary contribution is in reevaluating the massive and sometimes chaotic seizure and copying of documents, which the joint Anglo-American Field Information Agency, Technical (FIAT), struggled to coordinate. O'Reagan questions Gimbel's conclusion that US intellectual reparations actually might have approached the $10 billion figure alleged by the Soviets. What he finds instead is a growing conviction on the part of American industrial engineers and scientists that the United States was technologically ahead of Germany. Millions of pages of German documents were microfilmed, and FIAT produced 29,000 reports, but most of this material was quickly forgotten, never used, or never translated. Patents and industrial documents were found to be of lesser value without the associated personnel-based “know-how” (a term that grew to widespread popularity from the 1940s to the 1960s, as O'Reagan demonstrates). Americans became increasingly convinced they already had the advantage, but when necessary, German know-how could be acquired by bringing over Paperclip specialists or cooperating with revived West German firms.

Britain had more to gain industrially, O'Reagan asserts, plus the geographic advantage of being much closer, allowing for many more tours of German plants and research facilities. This led to extensive contacts with German firms, which benefited both sides. But Britain struggled to balance a desire for close cooperation with the United States against the need to regenerate British export competitiveness to help pay down the massive war debt and improve the balance of trade. The United Kingdom also imported German scientists and engineers, but O'Reagan does not much develop that story. He completed his dissertation and its revisions without the benefit of Charlie Hall's careful and comprehensive recent work, but his research is consistent with Hall's book.

The French probably gained more in relative terms than any of the other Allied powers, O'Reagan argues in his third chapter, because they emphasized keeping German concerns together and mostly in Germany, as well as because France had more to gain as it recovered from occupation and war destruction. But the author overestimates the coherence of French government policies, and his archival and secondary source research is thin. It is true that France remains a difficult place to do research on this topic: the archives are less accessible, and there is reluctance to remember how influential German science, technology, and industry were on French reconstruction. One of O'Reagan's conclusions, which will probably be sustained by future research, is that the Franco-German special relationship, an essential foundation for the European Union, had roots in postwar collaboration with German industrialists, scientists, and engineers.

The chapter on the Soviet Union is the weakest. The author admits that he does not read Russian and bases this chapter on secondary sources. As the endnotes reveal, he most frequently cites Norman Naimark's The Russians in Germany (1997), with its elaboration of the massive, wasteful Soviet program to dismantle German industry. O'Reagan discusses the deportation of German and Austrian science and technology personnel to the Soviet Union, but scarcely touches on the resulting impact, other than to note that the Soviet nuclear weapons program gained at most a few months’ advantage thereby. Christoph Mick's monumental Forschen für Stalin (2000) is in the bibliography but scarcely cited.

The chapters on the four Allied powers are followed by ones on the revival of academic science in the occupation zones, the problem of managing gigantic quantities of information, and the legacies of intellectual reparations. The last two chapters are the book's most original. O'Reagan dives deeply into the early twentieth century documentation movement, as bibliographers and librarians created indexing and abstracting tools to manage the increasingly unmanageable information overload. He argues that the postwar documentation problem helped expand that movement and its use of microfilm. In the last chapter, he describes the rise of “know-how” as a concept and how it influenced Cold War modernization theory, international business, and diplomacy. As for the overall effect on the two Germanies, he agrees with Raymond Stokes, a historian of the German chemical industry, that the ironic effect of the wholesale seizure of German intellectual property was that it strengthened relationships, both scientific and industrial, which integrated the two German states into their respective blocs.

In sum, this book's comparative approach and emphasis on the movement of information rather than people makes an original contribution to the literature on the Allied seizure of German science and technology, whatever its inadequacies in execution.