Please join us for a free virtual history seminar about World War II in northern Virginia!
The seminar will feature authors of outstanding scholarship interviewed by park rangers from Fort Hunt and Prince William Forest. Please register to receive a Zoom link to attend this virtual program. To register:
https://librarycalendar.fairfaxcounty.gov/event/14294542
In the first decade following the Second World War, the United States endeavored to bring hundreds of German scientists and engineers to America. One of them was named Heinz Schlicke. Schlicke earned a doctorate degree in engineering in Dresden, Germany. During World War II, Schlicke served in the Germany Navy (Kreigsmarine). In May 1945, a submarine carrying Schlicke surrendered to the United States. Schlicke was taken to Fort Hunt in Alexandria, Virginia.
At Fort Hunt, intelligence officers were assigned to convince Germans like Schlicke to live in the United States after the war. The officer assigned to work with Schlicke was John Gunther Dean. Like others working at Fort Hunt, Dean was born to a Jewish family in Central Europe. His family (known in Germany as the Dienstfertigs) had fled from Breslau after Kristallnacht and moved to the United States when Dean was young to escape the Holocaust. During the war, Dean and others with similar backgrounds were recruited to work at Fort Hunt due to their fluency in German.
Schlicke had been identified as an asset to the United States during the upcoming Cold War. But according to Dean, it took “quite some time before [Schlicke] was willing to cooperate” with him because “[Schlicke’s] wife was—at that point—in the Russian zone,” and Soviet-American relations were frosty. Dean travelled to Europe and escorted Schlicke’s wife and two children to the United States.
Afterwards, Schlicke accepted a job in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1950 and lived the rest of his life in the United States. At the time of Schlicke's death in 2004, he held twenty patents. After the war, Dean would continue to serve the United States as a diplomat. Dean was the ambassador to five different countries under four different presidents. He died in 2019.
One of the speakers during the seminar, Brian Crim, is the author of Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State, a book containing similar stories. Register for the seminar to learn more!
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