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Did the Germans ever expoit their acquisition of the Norden bomb sight? I read somewhere that the Norderns were removed from the B-25s that went on the Doolittle raid to avoid allowing the Japanese to recover one from a downed plane. (Begs the question - will you only use them when you are bombing friendly territory?) Also, the plan for the Doolittle raid called for low-level bombing runs, so they didn’t need the sophisticated technology. I take it the Americans assumed the Japanese hadn’t gotten the Norden technology as a present from their Aryan allies.

From my understanding, the removal of the Norden from Doolittle's aircraft was primarily due to the plan for low level bombing which the Norden was not designed for. But certainly the thought of the Japanese getting ahold of one must have been a concern as well.

As to the German's acquisition of the Norden bomb sight. I decided that since I really didn't feel like reading about the Boxer War this evening I would look at this a little further. Using some of the same resources in which I've found those interesting tidbits on the Abwehr's failure in Ireland, I found some interesting stuff on the failures in this coup of intelligence as well.

I had always thought it strange that when you do a general search on the German acquisition of the Norden technology they refer to Carl Zeiss' Lotfernrohr 7. If you look at the Lotfernrohr 7 it doesn't even bear a slight resemblence to the Norden.

So sure, this doesn't mean that the internals are not the same as the Norden, but the configuration makes it very unlikely that it is at least a total reproduction of the American design.

Now we do have our case against Herman Lang which is a legitimate case of espionage and did achieve a moderate success, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Allow me to give you some more background on the William Sebold mentioned in the article. Sebold, a naturalized American citizen, was recruited by the Abwehr while on a trip to visit his relatives in Europe in the Summer of 1939. The Abwehr threatened harm to his family unless he cooperated. Unknown to the Abwehr, he took this information to the American consulate in Cologne where he began his career as a double agent for the Americans.

Sebold would prove to be disastrous for the Germans as he would make contact with and turn over to the FBI several German spy rings in the United States. First among these were two German organizations, one in New York headed by Frederick J. Dunquesne (Also in article), and then another in New Jersey under Carl Reuper, a German automobile mechanic. He also managed to trap a number of couriers on American ships and finally he tipped off the FBI to both the agents working on the Norden bombsight and those infiltrated in the Sperry gyroscope plants.

In the case of the Norden agents (Everett Roeder was also arrested for his involvement), it was determined that while they had acquired some of the technology in their efforts to steal the plans for the Norden bombsight, "they were hardly of sufficient quantity or quality to warrant the efforts expended on their procurement." (United States v. Herman Lang et al., Manuscript Transcript of Record, District Attorney's Office, U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn)

The Germans’ flirtation with strategic bombing died with Walter Wever. Between Udet’s fixation with putting dive brakes on anything and everything, Hitler’s desire for masses of aircraft ASAP, and the reality that the Luftwaffe was going to be, basically, a tactical, ground support air force, the brass decided that the the Norden had no practical apllication for what they were doing.