His story to tell

Professor Emeritus Reiner Decher chronicles his family history as part of a post-WWII technological migration.

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A truck flips on a war-torn German road in 1945. A terrified family watches as their three-year-old son nearly dies. For six-year-old older brother Reiner Decher, this moment would become the moment upon which his family's entire future balanced—and unknowingly, a small but crucial piece in the global redistribution of aerospace knowledge that would shape aviation for decades to come.

"We came within a couple of inches of having spent six or seven years in the Soviet Union," reflects Decher, now A&A Professor Emeritus. This near miss forms the emotional core of his newly published book, The Fate of Nazi Germany’s Jet Engineers, which weaves his family's remarkable story into the larger context of post-WWII technological migration.

At the center of the personal narrative stands Reiner’s father, Siegfried "Sig" Decher—a brilliant engineer who designed the control system for Germany's first operational jet engine. As the war ended, Sig became one of thousands of pawns in a technological talent redistribution conducted by the victorious Allies.

The Russians, Americans, and French each pursued different strategies to acquire German engineering talent. While the Russians forcibly relocated 3,000 engineers and their families at gunpoint, the Americans recruited selectively, bringing only about two dozen experts to their laboratories as part of “Operation Paperclip.” The French, desperately rebuilding their devastated aviation industry, sought entire engineering teams.

Through a combination of timing, luck, and an American evacuation that rescued his hospitalized younger son and his wife from what was to be the Soviet Occupation Zone, Sig Decher eventually found himself first in France, then in the United States in 1954. At Lycoming Gas Turbine Division of AVCO Corporation, he rose to become Director of Research and Development, where he pioneered critical innovations in high-bypass engine technology.

"While he was not alone in advancing this technology, he was the first to run and patent the high-bypass engine design we use on all jet airliners today," Decher notes with pride. "That first engine is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C."

While researching his book, Decher tracked down the families of other displaced engineers, filling in historical gaps to understand how these migrations shaped global aviation development. The scattered German expertise seeded crucial innovations across nations: in Russia, engines for the massive Bear turboprop bomber; in France, propulsion systems for the supersonic Concorde and the later versions of the Boeing 737; in America, gas turbine engines that would power the iconic Huey and Chinook helicopters and many other aircraft.

"Had the Americans decided to move all these German engineers to the West," Decher observes, "the Russians might really have been delayed in their efforts to build a jet engine industry."

The Fate of Nazi Germany’s Jet Engineers is a deeply personal window into how individual lives intersected with sweeping historical forces. Through one family's extraordinary journey from the chaos of postwar Germany to the cutting edge of American aerospace innovation, Decher illuminates a critical but often overlooked chapter in aviation history.