Department 7

The Département 7, operations scientific , of what was going to become the KGB, born in the tumult of the patriotic Great War, had been created by Stalin in person in order to integrate the enemy technology captured by the Red Army . While the Soviet forces advanced in German territory and captured various laboratories and factories, of the members of the very new scientific Operations were already on the spot in order to take care of the safeguarding of secret work and their transfer towards an immense complex close to Odessa at the edge of the Black Sea.

Hunting for the German Technology

Here some examples of their work: if a site were considered to be important by Department 7, all the buildings were dismantled, packed and dispatched in the USSR, often with the original teams which saw themselves transformed into virtual Esclave S. Thus a factory of Deutérium had been moved surroundings of Berlin to give to Russia its first source of heavy Eau. Another factory close to Warsaw producing the Zyklon B used in the Death camps was transferred in the the Ural and was used as chemical warehouse of weapons as of the be 1945. The officers of Department 7 had seized a workshop Heinkel at the time when the persons in charge tried to destroy the result of their research. The seized documents and models led to the development of the Mig-15, the first Soviet jet fighter.

Concerning the ballistic die, two Russian engineers who had worked on the subject before the bursting of the patriotic Great War were elected to identify the relevant components and to make control on their counterparts of the German die. Their relations were ambivalent, one having denounced before the other which had been found with the Siberian Gulag, from which one had drawn it for this task.

The strategic site of Peenemünde having been evacuated by the Nazis before the Soviet arrival, remained only the factory of production which was it released by the Western Allies; there Department 7 lost the occasion to make control on the technology of the Missile S but managed nevertheless to recover many scientists of high flight and other plans to send them in the USSR.

At the last times of war of 1945, Wernher von Braun had fled in front of the Soviet projection the base of tests of Peenemünde towards the complex of production of V-2, located in the middle of large Reich. The narrowing face, its military superior obliged his team of engineers to flee towards the the Bavarian Alps , from where it contacted the Americans on May 3rd, 1945. Located in future Soviet zone according to the agreements, the Americans had one month to dismantle the factory of production and to take along engineers and material (dismounted parts coming from 100 V-2) by railway until in allied zone, then to the United States (see Opération Paperclip, assembled by American JIOA ).

At department 7 after making only one partially dismounted factory remained, without blue of design. They could only associate of an engineer having collaborated with von Braun to reconstitute the vertical propulsion and to start their own ballistic die. As indicated in the beginning of this paragraph, the engineers and technicians of the die which could gather Russian around this factory finally found themselves in Moscow, in order to develop this technology sector of an major importance.

During the occupation of Berlin, a trunk of an engineer working at Messerschmitt delivered the formula of a synthetic oil necessary to the operation of the engines with Turbine, a newspaper of a leader of Krupp Ag gave the key of the Métallurgie conduits of exhausts of the V2.

Here is how Department 7 offered to the Soviet Scientifique S that which they needed to make evolve/move the Red Army.

Reconversion in research

At the summer 1952, all German technology had been evaluated, essentially used and sometimes abandoned. Its first completed mission, the direction of Department 7 decided to change its objectives.

The scientific Operations had been up to that point a passive agency; they did not have a Secret agent with the usual direction, not more than they did not create anything of original but since they had always dealt with technologies in advance over their time, one ordered to the 800 Scientifique S under his responsibility to concentrate their efforts to exceed current technologies and to develop systems much more advanced than all that trailed on the drawing boards of the whole world.

As the “Skunk Works” of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson at Lockheed had developed the plane tri sonic SR-71 well before are available the materials necessary to its realization, the scientific Operations had started to conceive and test rudimentary ballistic missiles with multiple heads before even the design of Sputnik. A theorist of Department 7 had failed well to discover the Carbon fiber. And a team of engineers had worked on the Printed circuit for Ordinateur whereas the rest of the world concentrated on the Vacuum tube.

But the bureaucratic sclerosis , the worship of the secrecy and the lack of reactivity of the Soviet economy made that its efforts as those of the other research centres Soviet could not make it possible the USSR to maintain a parity technological with the western world out of certain military fields in the Arms race.

See too

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