After my 10 yo beat Portal 2, he proudly proclaimed that the ending "Turret Symphony" was the best musical moment in a game, at which point i countered with One Winged Angel (and was promptly talked into buying him FF7 on his switch), and then my wife countered with the RDR2 classics Unshaken, Cruel Cruel World, and House Building Song.
So, what video game music do you consider to have most added to the scene where it appears?
My grandfather may have potentially been the least controversial scientist brought to the US as part of Operation Paperclip, a manic depressive Austrian obsessed with his research with “no derogatory information” to be found in his political, criminal, or military records. He died when I was young and I recently acquired his initial DOD and FBI records through an independent archivist, while files on his career after reaching America remain at least partially classified and have not been requested at this time. He was never an NSDAP member, his military service was as an enlisted radio specialist first on bombers over the eastern front, where he survived 7 plane crashes, later training both operators and technicians in radio usage, refused offers to go to officer training due to a “disdain for the military”, and returned to both teaching and advancement in academia the last year of the war, achieving his doctorate 3 years after the end of the war, was hired for his single minded devotion to science in a space related field just another 3 years after his doctorate, and was forced into retirement in the 80s for refusing a promotion to manage a project which he disagreed with on both ethical and professional grounds.
My grandfather never talked about the war, nor his work for the US government (not that my medical background would have a single chance at helping me understand either the math or theory of his specialized physics research), except the one time he warned me not to trust any government, and that time at the dinner table where he talked about being in a plane crash, which I am now pretty sure was a complex PTSD flashback. Receiving the files from the National Archives answered a lot of questions for me, or at least most of the questions which I wouldn’t need his Berlin to Luftwaffe records, mostly containing information I either knew from the family, or heavily suspected based on what i knew of the man, like that his primary vice was heavy smoking or that he'd get so into his experiments he overwork himself to the detriment of his health. However, I am now left with new, more specific, questions to follow up the answers I've only just received, but especially the title of this post:
What was he doing with the jeep in Bavaria?
To say my grandfather wasn’t a wealthy man would be putting it mildly, when my solidly middle class artisan dynasty grandmother married him it was considered a disappointment by her parents, because he was comparatively lower class, and as such wouldn’t even be rising very high in science due to the Austrian social stratification at the time. He had never owned a car and didn’t drive one in his work for the Luftwaffe. At the end of the war my grandfather disobeyed a third reich order to return to active duty and traveled hundreds of miles atop a train to stage a “dangerous rescue operation” to get my family out of Vienna, out of the path of the advancing Russians, smuggling them into Bavaria to wait out the end of the war on a farm under assumed identities. Had they been found by German forces before they ended up behind the advancing American lines, then they would have been summarily executed. It was here, in the period immediately following VE day, that my grandfather learned how to drive, while he was driving an American jeep.
Hidden between the immigration documents, health records, travel itineraries, sterile employment contracts, educational record, and endless internal government messages establishing why it was in the interests of the State Department to deprive Russia of potentially acquiring my grandfather’s unique understanding of atmospheric radiation, were the handful of intelligence reports on my grandfather's biography and war record I was hoping for when I paid an archivist to copy them. My grandfather’s operation paperclip records, which were the only set fully declassified and unrestricted, were surprisingly sparse with details of his actual research and expertise, beyond a handful of professional references and publication listings, and though his war record was outlined, it was mostly chronological, grouping the entire 8 month period he was actively assigned to bombers on the eastern front simply as “Russian front operations”, before casually dropping the 7 survived crashes, with the last one earning him an Iron Cross, he was the sole survivor. Innocently dropped within these 1951 screening reports were just 2 sentences, said in the most matter of fact manner and with no further elaboration, that counting in his favor towards his hiring my grandfather had been “given the use of a US vehicle to investigate former national socialists for the CIC” because of his knowledge of English in 1945 and that he was later a translator in for the CIG in 1946. Somehow, immediately following American battle lines moving past my family’s hiding spot in Kaufbeuren im Allgaeu the Counter Intelligence Corps and the Central Intelligence Group (successor to the OSS and precursor to the CIA) employed my grandfather to translate for them.
In what ways was he supporting the investigation of former national socialists? What was he doing that he needed to be given his own jeep? What was he translating for US intelligence? Was he in touch with American intelligence before he staged his “dangerous rescue” to get my grandmother and eldest uncles and aunt out of the path of the advancing Russians? Did the experience translating for American intelligence contribute to his being committed with a nervous breakdown in 1947, or was that just complex PTSD, the pressure of his doctorate, the alienation of unusual intelligence, and underlying lifelong severe bipolar disorder?
Unless I come into an amazing, life changing, multiple millions of dollars windfall, then I will probably never have a real answer to those questions, and those like them, because I am but a humble middle class medical professional who cannot afford the cost of pursuing FOIA multiple requests, pursuing American, German, and Austrian archival research, or even just locating files which might be pertinent to answering those questions which don’t immediately bear my grandfather’s name which I could obtain through the assistance of a paid archivist today. I’ve paid for the low hanging unrestricted fruit, which I was able to locate doing my own online search of the National Archives for his name, and that was expensive enough just to confirm things I mostly already suspected.
This is where I ask you, Redditors: What do you think? What was he doing that would motivate the United States to give an Austrian scientist a vehicle he couldn’t initially drive? Do you think that as a radio communications and physics specialist he was already in contact with the OSS or other American intelligence operations, before he fled being called back to service and rescued my grandmother, or was he simply a convenient asset with fluency in English and German utilized as a convenience once he was within the sphere of American Influence? Does anyone know of any specific CIC operations of note in 1945, or CIG operations in 1946, for which an interpreter fluent in scientific jargon in German, English, and French would have been particularly useful?
To the best of my knowledge the information contained above is all declassified, but even so I’d rather not get into too much of the who, what, where, and when of what I know through family oral history topics which I have not seen reflected within the unrestricted files to which I have access, especially as regards his Air Force record and retirement, lest it contain any information the government still considers restricted.