T-Force

The program was designed to loot German intellectual assets and impede its ability to compete in the postwar political and economic spheres while giving a boost to the nations conducting it.

[1] Though unacknowledged at the time, the T-Force mission also included preventing advanced Nazi technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union—destroying whatever could not be seized and spirited away before Red Army troops arrived.

[2]T-Forces were ordered to "identify, secure, guard and exploit valuable and special information, including documents, equipment and persons of value to the Allied armies".

A subcritical experimental nuclear reactor, uranium ingots, heavy water and several dozen atomic scientists and their staffs were seized, including Werner Heisenberg.

By that time, in accordance with the terms of the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath, Allied troops had been ordered not to move north past Bad Segeberg but the T-Force group, led by Major Tony Hibbert, was given permission to advance to Kiel and seize the targets there.

A strong German force present in the city was unaware of the Lüneburg Heath surrender and reluctant to stand down when asked by the T-Force, until Admiral Karl Dönitz instructed them to do so.

[9][10] Aggressive actions such as Hibbert's on behalf of T-Force and the bombing of the Auergesellschaft atomic materials processing plant in Oranienburg can be seen to foreshadow the Cold War, which together with the scope and nature of how operations were carried out account for the scarcity of publicly available information on its role.

There were wider political and economic implications, including the significance of the early liberation of Kiel, which prevented the Russians from adding Schleswig-Holstein and the Jutland Peninsula to their area of influence, as indeed they temporarily did with the Danish island of Bornholm.

"Yet whereas the British and Americans entered the Reich well-prepared for the document hunt—Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) had assigned special Target Forces—the French could not keep pace.

In its charter, issued at the end of May 1945, FIAT was authorized to "coordinate, integrate, and direct the activities of the various missions and agencies" interested in scientific and technical intelligence, but prohibited from collecting and exploiting such information.