I'm playing through the game Sniper Elite 2 at the moment, and the plot is premised around the race to scoop up all of the scientific talent in Germany after the war.
In one of the missions in the game, the American sniper that you play as decides to 'help' the Germans fight off the Soviets in order to slow the Soviet advance on Berlin (after it had already been encircled and everyone knew it was basically over).
I was wondering if anything like this ever happened? Presumably undercover or special ops or something if it did?
I don't mean friendly fire incidents - I'm presuming there must have been a few of those. I mean deliberate attempts to attack their future Cold War opponents.
(And a partially related question - did the US or the Soviets ever seek out to deliberately kill any German scientists rather than capture them for use in their own rocket programmes?).
I believe there was something recently declassified where US and Soviets planes fired on each other at the very end of the war. I'm not sure of the context, I'm going to keep looking for a source.
EDIT: Here it is, The air battle of Nis, According to the source, it was the only direct conflict between US and USSR
Aside from that, Himmler in 1945 sent a proposal to the Western Allies to join forces with the Germans to fight the Soviets. It either never each Eisenhower or was rejected. Source
One of the leading producers of uranium in Germany was Auergesellschaft. They produced high purity uranium at an industrial scale. Likely as a result of the Alsos Mission the US military was aware of the existence of a production plant at Oranienburg and the fact that it was within the Soviet occupation zone agreed during the Postdam conference.
The US Eight Air Force promptly bombed the facility in order to deny access to the Soviets. The USSR was acutely aware of the fact the US had bombed the facility in order to harm them, not to harm the almost defeated Germany.
Similiar incidents happened with the French. A search for Operation Paperclip and the Alsos Mission would lead to further information on this.