• mkwt@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    At first I thought you were implying the dad was a part of Operation Paperclip. But that would require Nazis to have recruited an ethnic Slav for missile work.

    Then I wonder if you’re implying dad might have been a Soviet spy targeting the stuff in Huntsville. And that seems more plausible. Under that scenario it is likely that significant parts or all of the refugee story are real, and that can be fashioned into decent cover.

    And then it’s also plausible that there is no meaning, and a refugee settling in Huntsville is mere coincidence.

    • Corn@lemmy.ml
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      8 days ago

      Operation Paperclip

      So the idea of apolitical nazi scientists just working on rockets is kinda not true when you look closer, but the real meat is Operation Bloodstone, where nazi officers were brought over snd given immunity to help run anticommunist programs.

      • mkwt@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        I went to Paperclip because of the connection to Huntsville specifically with Redstone and NASA.

    • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      “Settled in Yugoslavia after WWI” means White Russian, so not really Soviet agent material.

        • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          Oh, yeah, Interwar Yugoslavia was full of Russians who weren’t necessarily politically slanted, but took one look at the mess and went “fuck that”. They’re commonly referred to as ‘whites’ because the ‘reds’ are presumed to have stayed in Russia.

          I was more saying that jumping from “ethnic Russian” to “Soviet spy” is going the wrong direction. Presumably, someone pro-Soviet would go back when the revolution ended, whereas I can’t help but notice this dude stayed until '41, disappeared just about when the Nazis rolled in, and then reappeared just about when the Soviets were releasing Nazi POWs.

      • mkwt@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Well if you’re saying he was in paperclip, paperclip has been mostly declassified. You can look him up in the rolls here. Not a lot of Russian names on that list, but there might be a few.

        • derfunkatron@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          Spakovsky or Shpakovskii isn’t in there, but I wouldn’t have expected a sociologist who had been out of work in his field for over a decade to be paper clipped.

        • Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          7 days ago

          No point, he was a white emigre born in Russia and an ethnic slav mystery solved. He was also a Nazi. He started teaching in Yugoslavia and then suddenly stopped in 1941. Then yada, yada, yada it was suddenly 1950 and he popped up in Germany and then Huntsville, Alabama.

          Now his son is in the Heritage Foundation, he’s destroying everything, and he looks like he intentionally modeled himself off the nazi villain from Indiana jones