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10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Samuel Goudsmit.md

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+---
+aliases:
+  - Samuel Goudsmit
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - Physicist
+  - Military
+---
+Samuel Goudsmit was a Dutch-American nuclear physicist who served as the scientific head of [[Operation Alsos]], an elite U.S. scientific intelligence effort during [[World War II]]. The mission of Operation Alsos was to investigate the German nuclear energy project and to prevent German scientific and technological knowledge from falling into Soviet hands[^1].
+
+In July 1945, after the defeat of [[Nazi Germany]], Goudsmit and his team sought to gain access to the former headquarters of [[Heinrich Himmler]]'s [[Das Ahnenerbe|Ahnenerbe Institute]] at 16 Pücklerstrasse in Dahlem, Berlin. Goudsmit was only vaguely familiar with the Ahnenerbe's research, which included human experiments conducted through a division called Applied War Research[^1]. He described finding "remnants of weird Teutonic symbols and rites" and "strange dummies which at first looked like bodies of victims" in the basement of the villa[^1].
+
+Goudsmit emphasized the critical importance of preventing the Ahnenerbe's supernatural secrets from becoming part of the [[Cold War]] arms race. He ensured that the Ahnenerbe relics were crated up and sent to U.S. Army headquarters in Frankfurt[^1].
+
+### Footnotes
+[^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.