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FBI's struggle with Nazi agents

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by LairigGhru (U14051689) on Tuesday, 19th July 2011

  I've noticed that Film4 is periodically showing the 1945 film 'The House on 92nd Street' and that it appears to be of real interest to folks like us who like to immerse ourselves in the ins and outs of a certain period of history. The film appears to be almost a documentary showing how the FBI had to struggle against determined efforts by Nazi agents to find out about the state of atomic research in the U.S. I recommend that you keep an eye open for its next transmission.
  
  I haven't yet found the time to sit and watch the film and this is merely to alert others that it is of potential interest. No doubt I will have specific comments to make in due course.

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by LairigGhru (U14051689) on Wednesday, 27th July 2011

  Anyone wishing to be whisked back to Washington and New York as they were in 1945 will enjoy this film. The fledgling sorting technology used for fingerprint recognition was interesting to see working, as were also the radio and spectrograph equipment (in the story the latter was used to work out which particular New York beauty parlour was likely to have supplied the lipstick found on a cigarette end).
  
  Because of the Nazi threat, perceived as early as approx 1938, the FBI investigated rings of German saboteurs and spies starting in that period, and it had primary responsibility for counterespionage as the film depicts. The first arrests of German agents were made in 1938 and continued throughout the war. In order to cope, the number of FBI agents rose from 2,000 to a wartime peak of 15,000.
  
  Given the record, President Truman was clearly justified when he wrote in his memoirs: "The country had reason to be proud of and have confidence in our security agencies. They had kept us almost totally free of sabotage and espionage during World War II".
  
  No less a figure than our own R.V. Jones was impressed by what he saw in America when he visited these organisations after the war, and this film helps to explain why he was so impressed.
  
  If nothing else, watching this film helps us to appreciate our wonderful smoking ban all over again!

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  , in reply to message 2.

  Posted by LairigGhru (U14051689) on Wednesday, 27th July 2011

  I omitted to mention that I was left puzzled by the chronology of the pursuit of an atomic weapon, for it was implying that secret research was going ahead in various remote centres prior to Pearl Harbor. Perhaps the storyline was false in that regard and it was included just to benefit from the natural public interest in that topic in late-1945.
  
  The true facts were, I believe, that it was only after Albert Einstein's warning letter to FDR in, I think, 1942, that the Manhattan Project was launched. Before the alarm was raised about what German scientists were up to, the world's scientists were only interested in the physics. Oppenheimer's interests, for instance, was collapsing stars.

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