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What Was Operation Paperclip?

By: Laura Schumm

Updated: March 4, 2020 | Original: June 2, 2014

As World War II was entering its final stages, American and British organizations teamed up to scour occupied Germany for as much military, scientific and technological development research as they could uncover. 

Trailing behind Allied combat troops, groups such as the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) began confiscating war-related documents and materials and interrogating scientists as German research facilities were seized by Allied forces. One enlightening discovery—recovered from a toilet at Bonn University—was the Osenberg List: a catalogue of scientists and engineers that had been put to work for the Third Reich .

In a covert affair originally dubbed Operation Overcast but later renamed Operation Paperclip, roughly 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf during the Cold War . The program was run by the newly-formed Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), whose goal was to harness German intellectual resources to help develop America’s arsenal of rockets and other biological and chemical weapons, and to ensure such coveted information did not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union . 

Although he officially sanctioned the operation, President Harry Truman forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members or active Nazi supporters. Nevertheless, officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner to the CIA—bypassed this directive by eliminating or whitewashing incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.

One of the most well-known recruits was Wernher von Braun, the technical director at the Peenemunde Army Research Center in Germany who was instrumental in developing the lethal V-2 rocket that devastated England during the war. Von Braun and other rocket scientists were brought to Fort Bliss, Texas, and White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as “War Department Special Employees” to assist the U.S. Army with rocket experimentation. Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which eventually propelled two dozen American astronauts to the Moon .

Although defenders of the clandestine operation argue that the balance of power could have easily shifted to the Soviet Union during the Cold War if these Nazi scientists were not brought to the United States, opponents point to the ethical cost of ignoring their abhorrent war crimes without punishment or accountability.

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• Introduction

Postwar competition for German and Austrian scientists

The creation and conduct of project paperclip, the complicity of project paperclip experts in nazi crimes and the implications of their recruitment, the legacy of project paperclip.

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Project Paperclip

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• Central Intelligence Agency - The World Factbook - Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America
• Table Of Contents

Project Paperclip , U.S. government program that sponsored the post- World War II immigration of German and Austrian scientists and technicians to the United States in order to exploit their knowledge for military and industrial purposes. Project Paperclip itself lasted less than two years, but similar programs continued until 1962. Ultimately, approximately 1,500 German and Austrian professionals and their families were relocated to the United States, the majority of them going on to become U.S. citizens. All of these German and Austrian scientists and technicians, regardless of the program into which they were recruited, are commonly said to have been part of Project Paperclip.

Project Paperclip was one of many ways in which Allied forces extracted “intellectual reparations” after the conquest of Germany . Gaining control of the human sources of advanced technical knowledge was a logical Allied priority in the final year of the war, as it became clear that the defeat of Germany was imminent and would predate the defeat of Japan . With this situation in mind, the team of German and Austrian scientists and engineers who had developed the highly advanced V-2 rocket system abandoned their chief research complex and deliberately put themselves in the path of approaching western Allied forces. After being captured on May 2, 1945, the entire team was transported to the United States as part of Project Overcast and given facilities to continue their research, which was considered vital to the U.S. “national interest” because it had the potential to accelerate the defeat of Japan. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff created a special subcommittee to oversee the further acquisition of German information and personnel, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA). Because the name of the project had become publicly known and even discussed in the press, all future immigration of German and Austrian scientists and technicians to the United States occurred as part of a newly named operation, "Project Paperclip," so-named for the paperclips that held together the many pages of information about the scientists possessing more problematic pasts during the Nazi era. 

Japan’s defeat did not alter the opinion of American military and industrial decision makers that contracting German and Austrian scientists and technicians and bringing them to the United States was in the national interest. On the contrary, something of a competition developed between the U.S. and other Allied powers . The British, French, and Soviets were all known to be actively recruiting such experts who they believed would be able to advance their interests in a variety of ways, both militarily and industrially. German and Austrian professionals, facing the prospect of uncertain employment in a devastated postwar economy, were generally eager to accept such offers. American personnel on the ground reported that, short of putting such experts under guard to keep them in Germany (which actually did happen on occasion), they had no way to prevent other countries from exploiting the experts’ knowledge.

Responding to this competitive pressure, the U.S. State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), in coordination with the JIOA, developed Project Paperclip. The final version of the project appeared in directive SWNCC 257/22 and was approved by Pres. Harry S. Truman on September 3, 1946. It allowed U.S. military departments to sponsor the immigration of “chosen, rare minds.”

Project Paperclip was not given carte blanche. Experts selected by the program had to be screened by the JIOA, and, according to official policy, anyone who had been more than a nominal member of the Nazi Party was to be excluded. The ethical and moral concerns of the project were immediately obvious to many within the U.S. government. Some considered these experts to be a national security risk, given their change in loyalty. Nevertheless, U.S. policy at the time called for pressure to be put on other countries—particularly those in the Americas—to repatriate Germans who had fled their country. At the same time, denazification policies in the U.S.-occupied sector of Germany set a notably higher bar than Paperclip. Indeed, Samuel Klaus, the U.S. State Department representative in the JIOA, demanded background checks on Paperclip candidates so thorough that he was widely believed to be deliberately delaying the implementation of the program.

When news of the project was released, there were protests from prominent public figures in the United States, including Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt . Nonetheless, the increasingly urgent sense of competition ultimately led the State Department to back down and issue visas to designees of Project Paperclip.

As the Cold War developed, it was increasingly used as the core justification for Project Paperclip. In 1946 the Soviet Union had carried out its own version of the project, called Operation Osoaviakhim, and it continued to contract experts in the Soviet-occupied portion of Germany. In 1948 Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia wrote an article in which he publicly defended Project Paperclip in utilitarian terms, arguing that giving up invaluable knowledge to the Soviet Union because of moral qualms related to the holders of that knowledge would be foolish.

Many of those who came to the U.S. through Project Paperclip and related projects achieved great success. The most famous is likely Wernher von Braun —the scientist who had led the development of the V-2 rocket for the Wehrmacht and who later played a prominent role in the U.S. space program. After completing the government contracts that had brought them to the U.S., many other scientists and engineers who had come to the U.S. through Paperclip-related programs went on to have profitable careers in the private sector.

While Project Paperclip scientists and engineers were said to have unwillingly joined the Nazi Party, solely as a condition of securing employment in the Third Reich , the truth proved to be far more complicated. There were numerous instances when U.S. military staff covered up information about the backgrounds of former Nazis who the Americans had determined would be national security assets . To achieve scientific success in the Third Reich, it had often been necessary to demonstrate loyalty to the regime and to develop close relationships with Adolf Hitler ’s inner circle. Moreover, weapons factories and labs that had conducted experiments in Nazi Germany had employed slave labour . While experts recruited through Project Paperclip often said that they had been ignorant of the breadth and criminality of the slave labour and concentration camp system, their claims were questioned by later analysts. Some infamous cases came to light in which Nazi experts who had acted as persecutors had been granted residency in the United States or had been allowed to enter the country through Paperclip-related projects. One of the most notable examples was Otto Ambros, a German chemist and a convicted war criminal, who had at least twice been granted visa waivers to visit the United States.

Investigative journalism in the 1970s led to a series of hearings on Project Paperclip in the U.S. House of Representatives, which concluded that American military leaders had made morally bankrupt decisions on the grounds of national security. Partially as a result of the hearings, in 1979 the Justice Department opened the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Its mission was to find and bring to justice any Nazi war criminals who were living in the United States. While the OSI did not bring to trial any of the scientists or engineers involved in Project Paperclip, its investigations did lead to a deal under which Arthur Rudolph, who had been a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) executive and a close collaborator of Braun’s, left the U.S. permanently and surrendered his American citizenship to avoid prosecution.

The legacy of Project Paperclip remains the subject of debate and investigation to this day. The moral and ethical questions it has raised about complicity, accountability, and necessity are difficult to answer. Did the V-2 development team’s awareness that their rockets were being built through slave labour make them fully complicit in war crimes? Records indicate that Braun himself went to Buchenwald concentration camp to recruit skilled prisoners to work on his rockets. Apparently, however, he treated such prisoners respectfully. For his part, Rudolph maintained his innocence of war crimes until his death, insisting that he had advocated for improvements in prisoners’ living and working conditions and had even helped them get increased rations. The breadth and depth of these men’s knowledge of and participation in the systematic war crimes being committed around them is difficult to gauge objectively, but the fact of their knowledge and participation is inarguable.

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Operation Paperclip. The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America

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Project Paperclip was the second name for a program to bring German and Austrian engineers, scientists, and technicians to the United States after the end of World War II in Europe. Known by many today as “Operation Paperclip,” which is actually a misnomer, it was originally called Project Overcast. Its official objective was to bring these experts to the United States for six months to a year to help America in the war against Japan. But that war suddenly ended in August 1945 and the program continued anyway. In fact, the U.S. armed forces and civilian agencies sought long-term advantages for the United States through the seizure of Third Reich technologies that they saw as superior to, or competitive with, Allied ones—notably aircraft, rockets, and missiles. The people who had invented or designed these weapons were needed to help transfer the technology. So what began as a short-term advisory project quickly evolved into a program of permanent immigration. 

Many of Project Paperclip's scientists and engineers had Nazi records, which were seen as an inconvenient problem by the project's administrators. Roughly half of the early Paperclip specialists had been members of the Nazi Party, many opportunistically. A minority were true believers who had significant party records or had joined the SS  (Schutzstaffel) , or SA (Sturmabteilung)   also known as Brownshirts for their brown uniform. The rapid deterioration of relations with the Communist-run Soviet Union, which by 1948 led to a Cold War that threatened to turn hot, made the immigration of ex-Nazis more palatable to the American government and public. It became easier to sweep their past under the rug. The argument was that we needed them for our weapons programs or, at the very least, we needed to deny their knowledge and talents to the Soviets.  

A case in point was the V-2 ballistic missile group led by Dr. Wernher von Braun. He had been a party member and SS officer and was at least tangentially involved in the murderous exploitation of concentration-camp prisoners in missile production, as were several associates. The U.S. Army kept that information classified and brought von Braun and about 125 colleagues to Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, Texas. The Germans helped Americans launch V-2s and were tasked with developing an experimental cruise missile. In 1950, von Braun’s group was moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and became the heart of the Army’s nuclear-armed ballistic missile development. In his spare time, von Braun made himself world-famous by advocating spaceflight in magazines and on TV. Soon after the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, he and his German-led group, now numbering in the thousands (almost all native-born Americans), helped launch the first United States satellite, Explorer I. In 1960, von Braun’s division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was transferred to a new civilian space agency, NASA. The Huntsville Germans, most naturalized in 1954-1955, went on to lead the development of the Saturn rockets that put Americans on the Moon in 1969.

That spectacular Cold War story has long overshadowed the project to the point that, even today, members of the general public and the media often equate the von Braun group with Paperclip. In fact, the Huntsville Germans, numbering closer to 200 by the mid-fifties thanks to later arrivals, were never more than 15 to 20 percent of Paperclip’s intake. The U.S Air Force, not the Army, brought over the most experts, and other specialists went to Navy facilities or those of the Commerce Department and private companies. It was part of a broad program to exploit German science and technology, one that paralleled projects in the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and several smaller countries. Most Paperclip specialists were dispersed as individuals or small groups to military laboratories, universities, and private companies, with the result that they did not have the public profile of the Huntsville Germans.  

Another common fallacy is that von Braun’s group, and by extension, all the Paperclip arrivals, came to help the United States space program. But before the Eisenhower Administration started the Vanguard satellite project in 1955, there was no space program . The aerospace specialists, who constituted most of the Paperclip program, were here to help the United States in the rapidly developing arms race with the Soviet Union. Notable areas of focus were guided missiles, supersonic aerodynamics, guidance and control, rocket and jet engines, and aerospace medicine. In missile development, von Braun’s group accelerated the integration of German liquid-propellant rocket technology. But American rocket groups and companies had already formed in World War II—notably Reaction Motors in New Jersey and Aerojet and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California—which meant that the Germans were only one part of a complex story of technological change and adaptation. The driving force in rocket development after World War II, and especially after 1950, was the nuclear arms race. Until Vanguard and Sputnik, space exploration was only a side effect and an afterthought. V-2s and new United States sounding rockets reached into the extreme upper atmosphere and near-space to understand the environment that missiles would travel through. 

In sum, Project Paperclip made a significant contribution to American technology, rocket development, military preparedness and, eventually, spaceflight. But there was a moral cost to the program: the coverup of the Nazi records of many of the specialists. In a small number of cases, the United States hosted and integrated people who should have faced war crimes trials. These facts often lead to black-and-white judgments: either the Paperclip scientists and engineers were all Nazi criminals or all technological geniuses. In my assessment, the project and related efforts to seize German knowledge did greatly benefit American science, technology, and national security in the Cold War, but we needed a better filter to screen out some of the worst offenders. In the late forties and early fifties era of anti-Communist anxiety especially, it was all too easy to obscure and excuse their Nazi past. The facts came out only in the 1980s, when their files were declassified. Only then was it possible to make a balanced judgment about Project Paperclip.  

Michael J. Neufeld is a Senior Curator in the Space History Department and the author of The Rocket and the Reich and Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War.   

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Operation Paperclip

After the collapse of the Third Reich, the U.S. secured German rocket technology and scientists during Operation Paperclip.

This article appears in: Fall 2024

By Don Smith

At first, Major Robert Staver seemed to have plenty of time. An Army Ordnance officer with a mechanical engineering degree from Stanford, he had been sent to Germany as part of the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee. The CIOS was a British-American organization tasked to search for and exploit scientific and technical targets in defeated Germany. Staver’s specialty was rocketry, and in May 1945 he hit paydirt. Operation Paperclip—the American effort to bring German scientists and technicians to the U.S.— began two months later in cooperation with the hunt for components of the V2 ballistic missile, one of Hitler’s terror weapons.

Staver and other American investigators had reached Nordhausen, a town in the central German state of Thuringia. Nordhausen was home to the primary V2 rocket production facility; Staver was looking for the scientists and technicians who built the rockets. Most had scattered into the surrounding towns or other parts of Germany. But American troops had firm control of their occupation areas and the Nazi armies were long gone. It seemed only a matter of time before Staver and his fellow investigators from CIOS and other technical search teams would ferret out their targets and round them up—until politics intervened.

Negotiations between American, British, and Soviet leaders led the United States to decide to withdraw its troops from large sections of central Germany. As these areas contained many key Nazi scientific and technical facilities, Staver and his colleagues now had just a few weeks to finish their work. This led to a frantic, sometimes haphazard rush to find and secure as many German technical assets as possible before the U.S. Army pulled back.

The American armies’ push into central and eastern Germany had exceeded expectations. U.S. forces advanced far into Thuringia and the neighboring state of Saxony—both of which were part of the Soviet occupation zone. Army historian Earl Ziemke estimated that when the war ended American troops held over 16,000 square miles of territory that had officially been allocated to Russia. One-third of the area American troops had conquered would have to be relinquished.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had other ideas. After Germany had surrendered in two separate ceremonies—to the U.S. and U.K. on May 7 and to Russia on May 8—Churchill had become convinced that the Soviets would be untrustworthy postwar partners. At the Yalta Conference in February, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had said the Soviets would allow Eastern European countries to elect new governments through fair and democratic elections.

By early May, it was clear that democrats in Poland and other Soviet zone countries were under pressure from Soviet-sponsored Communists. Churchill felt the Americans and British needed leverage against Stalin. The Soviet zone territory then in British and American hands could provide that leverage.

“Churchill felt strongly that the Americans should display no undue haste in withdrawing from the heart of Germany,” wrote James McGovern in Crossbow and Overcast, his 1964 account of the American search for Nazi scientists and technology. Instead, the Americans “should delay their departure at least until the Potsdam Conference in July, when some troublesome problems that had arisen with the Soviet Union could be settled.”

General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied troops in Europe and President Harry Truman disagreed. Robert Murphy, a U.S. State Department official, served as Eisenhower’s political advisor. In September 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had told Murphy that he “regarded Germany as the testing ground for Soviet-American cooperation.” Ike “was determined to do nothing which might increase Russian distrust” of the West, which was intense. In the summer of 1945, Eisenhower and Truman not only wanted Russian cooperation—they needed it.

U.S. leaders expected a long, costly fight to defeat Japan. At Yalta, FDR told Churchill and Stalin that Japan might not be conquered until 1947. The Americans desperately wanted the USSR to wholeheartedly and forcefully join that fight. They also hoped the fledgling United Nations could develop into a potent force that could prevent future world wars. If the Soviets declined to use their military and diplomatic power to support the UN, it would fail. Eisenhower, said Murphy, “chose to politely disregard Churchill.” The Soviets refused to let American and British occupation forces enter Berlin until they first committed to leave Soviet zone territories. Truman consented and agreed that American and British forces would retire to their own zones by July 1, 1945.

The decision wasn’t a total surprise to the American investigators in Germany. McGovern’s Crossbow and Overcast notes that Colonel Holger Toftoy, chief of the U.S. Army Ordnance Branch Technical Intelligence Division in Europe, had known by late April that the V2 plant at Nordhausen and many other prized Nazi technical sites in Americans hands were actually inside the Soviet Occupation Zone.

“Given the fact of American control” of those facilities and their surrounding areas, though, Toftoy initially felt his teams would have enough time to analyze and exploit the Nordhausen site “in orderly fashion.” In May, though, Toftoy and CIOS and all the other American technical investigators were warned that the Russians wanted to fully occupy their zone by June 1, later extended to July 1.

In May, much of the real work to find and analyze Nazi technologies was just beginning. One of Colonel Toftoy’s subordinates, Major James Hamill, led V2 exploitation operations at Nordhausen. A graduate of Fordham University with a degree in physics, Hamill’s task was to ship 100 V2s (or as many as possible) to the U.S. Unfortunately for him, wrote McGovern, the Nazis had not left “completely assembled rockets…conveniently available for shipment.” Instead, V2 pieces were scattered throughout the Nordhausen facility. When the Germans retreated, newly-freed concentration camp prisoners who had worked as slave laborers in the rocket factories “destroyed many priceless rocket components and machine tools.”

POWs and locals looted the site before the Americans arrived. The Americans had no list of V2 parts. On May 8, 1945, the day of Nazi Germany’s final surrender, the “V2 technical documents had not been discovered, and not one leading German rocket specialist, who could have been used as a guide to the selection of parts required for [reassembling] an engineering device of awesome complexity had been found in the Nordhausen area.”

The looming July 1 deadline was complicated by another directive, signed in Berlin on June 5 by all the Allied powers. It ordered that “all [Nazi] factories, plants, shops, research institutions, laboratories,” equipment and documents were to be preserved and left for the Allied power who owned the zone where the items were found. This order, if followed, meant that Toftoy and his colleagues would have to leave their newly-found treasures to the Russians.

American technicians across Germany disregarded the order. The treasures were simply too good to give up. CIOS and other technical investigation teams had confirmed what many American military and scientific leaders suspected: the Germans were years, even decades ahead of most countries in many technical fields. “The Germans were ahead of us, in some instances from two to fifteen years” said U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) Chief of Staff Henry “Hap” Arnold, “in the fields of rockets and guided missiles, jet engines, jet-propelled aircraft, synthetic fuels and supersonics.”

As American troops entered Germany, “Wind tunnels of incredibly large dimensions were discovered with simulation characteristics American scientists could only dream of,” wrote retired U.S. Air Force colonel Wolfgang Samuel in American Raiders, an account of the USAAF’s hunt for Luftwaffe technologies and their inventors.

In 1945, American airframe designers were pursuing jet aircraft designs that used traditional straight wings. But the Messerschmitt Me-262 and other German jets had swept wings. When American investigators captured German aeronautical research specialists, they learned that the Germans had discovered that swept wings reduced air turbulence for planes flying at faster speeds. Other German scientists had deduced how to photograph the airstreams around wing edges and surfaces, making it easier to study and measure airflows. The Germans had learned how to weld plastics, developed ribbon parachutes to use as landing brakes for aircraft, built a prototype helicopter that powered its main rotor with jets on the rotor tips (which eliminated the need for a tail stabilizing rotor). The list of Nazi technological breakthroughs went on and on.

In a June 9 memo “Disposition of Secret Weapon Installations and Armament Factories in Ultimate Russian Zone of Occupation,” the American-British Combined Chiefs of Staff determined it was “undesirable that any equipment of vital importance…should be left behind in the Russian zone.” This was counter to the terms of the June 5 declaration, which said that Nazi technical facilities and their contents were to be left undisturbed. But the U.S. wasn’t about to let other countries just have all those treasures. They also feared that, if the Soviet Union turned out to be a future foe instead of a friend, the Russians would use these technologies against Western militaries.

American technicians started to gather up, crate, and cart away whatever they could. Army Major Hamill told McGovern that Colonel Toftoy instructed him “that officially nothing was supposed to be removed from the Russian Zone. ‘But unofficially,’ Tofoty told Hamill, ‘I’m telling you to make sure that those V2s [are sent from Nordhausen into the American Zone]. Remove all the material you can, without making it too obvious that we’ve looted the place.’”

The Nordhausen V2 factory was housed in two huge tunnels bored into a mountainside. They were filled with V2 components and subassemblies, which Hamill’s team now had to extract, inspect, label for reassembly, and ship. Hamill hired former slave laborers who had worked on the rockets to assist teams of U.S. soldiers.

“The enlisted men,” wrote McGovern, “quickly learned how to recognize parts and sections of the unfamiliar V2.” The “small and intricate control devices which had guided V2s” had been manufactured in villages around Nordhausen. When the Americans arrived, German technicians hid the devices “in nearby barns, schools and beer halls. The Americans had to organize scouting parties which searched the area around Nordhausen for a radius of thirty miles before the control systems, without which the V2 would be almost useless, were located.”

Hamill’s team assembled enough rocket subassemblies and support components for 100 V2s, which he planned to ship to the port at Antwerp on captured German railcars. Then he heard Army Transportation Corps teams were en route to Nordhausen to divert the cars to other uses. Hamill had no written orders authorizing him to use the railcars, because, officially, he wasn’t supposed to be removing any equipment!

Fortunately for Hamill, one night someone sabotaged the railroad near Nordhausen with dynamite. McGovern speculates that one of Hamill’s subordinates knew of his dilemma, put two and two together, and chose to exercise some initiative. This froze the railcars in place and gave Hamill time to convince the Transportation Corps to relent. He also convinced Army engineers to build extra rail spurs connecting the V2 works to the local railhead. On May 22, the first train left Nordhausen for Antwerp. Hamill sent nine trains in total, with an average of 40 cars per train. The last train left Nordhausen at 9:30 p.m. on May 31, just hours before the expected arrival of Russian troops. Eventually more than 400 tons of sensitive rocket technology reached Antwerp en route to New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range and other facilities in the U.S.

The USAAF investigators who found the large wind tunnels and the Germans who’d pioneered swept-wing technology had zonal border problems of their own, but not with the Russians. After the war ended, American and British officials agreed to several adjustments in the borders between their zones for a variety of reasons. Also, some American forces had advanced into portions of the British Occupation Zone and stayed there after Germany surrendered. Now the time had come for all Allied Powers to retire to their official zones.

The Hermann Göring Research Institute at Völkenrode, west of Braunschweig, was one of the American-held facilities in the British zone. It was a “scientific gold mine,” wrote Samuel. He quotes Dr. Theodore von Karman, General Arnold’s scientific advisor, who visited Völkenrode and assessed its value. Karman reported that “probably 75 to 90 percent of the technical aeronautical information in Germany was available at this establishment…the information on jet engine developments available at this establishment would expedite the United States development by approximately six to nine months.”

USAAF Colonel Donald Putt directed American exploitation efforts at Volkenrode; he decided to spirit as much equipment out of the facility as he could before the British took over. He acquired the services of one B-24 bomber and one B-17 bomber and started a nighttime mini-airlift. “The trick was to get whatever test equipment and documentation [we could] out of the place without the British noticing,” Putt recalled in an interview for Samuel’s book. British technicians had visited Völkenrode, and the British knew the site was valuable. “As soon as everyone was in bed and the lights were out, we would spring into action. There was an airfield just across town, and with trucks we’d haul this stuff over there, and quickly load it on my B-17 or B-24. By the time people woke up the next morning, they were in Lakenheath or Ireland…This went on for some time until the British caught on. At the Potsdam Conference [in mid-July] the British threw this up to General Arnold. I’m sure he must have pleaded ignorance.”

Another American officer, Major Robert Staver, also had the British on his heels. Staver was still in the Nordhausen area in early May looking for key V2 technicians. On April 3, one week before the U.S. Ninth Army arrived, the Nazis had moved V2 program lead Werner von Braun and hundreds of his key personnel to Bavaria for safekeeping. Von Braun realized the Third Reich was finished, and he wanted to continue his rocketry research postwar, presumably with American or British support. He tasked two of his engineers to collect the most important V2 technical documents and hide them. The engineers found an abandoned mine, filled some of its chambers with crates containing, as McGovern described them, “papers [that] represented thirteen years of research work and the complete plans” for the V2, and sealed the mine entrance with dynamite. The engineers then joined von Braun and his team in Bavaria, but not before telling the general location of the mine to Karl Otto Fleischer, a manager at the Nordhausen factory.

Fleischer did not go to Bavaria. He stayed in the Nordhausen region, and by mid-May Staver had found him. By then von Braun was in U.S. custody and American investigators who had questioned him tipped Staver that Fleischer might know the general location of the documents cache. Fleischer hadn’t volunteered this information, so Staver tried to trick him. He confronted Fleischer and told him that von Braun, now in U.S. custody, had said that Fleischer knew where the documents were and he (Fleischer) could help the Americans find them. Von Braun had said no such thing, but Fleischer didn’t know that.

The ruse worked. Fleischer agreed to search for the hiding place. On May 21, Fleischer found the mine near the town of Dörnten. Staver had his documents, but now he had another problem. Because of the American-British zonal border adjustments, Dörnten would become part of the British zone in just six days.

Staver needed Army Ordnance headquarters to dispatch enough trucks to haul away the 14 tons of documents. Army Ordnance headquarters was in Paris, and there were no reliable communications between Paris and Nordhausen. Staver convinced a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot who was flying to Paris to bring him along as a passenger, wedged into a small space behind the pilot’s seat. Staver got the authorization for his trucks, returned to Nordhausen, and found that British survey teams had been scouting the mine. Staver had detailed a team of Germans, supervised by an Army Ordnance officer, to clear away the debris blocking the mine entrance. When the British appeared, the American officer, who was dressed as a workman, pretended to be German. Fleischer told the British they were geologists looking for ore samples. The British eventually left, but Staver was concerned enough to accelerate the pace of activity at the mine. The shafts were cleared, and Staver’s team found all the documents and loaded them on trucks. The trucks drove away from Dörnten early on the day the British took control of the area.

The Americans left lots of technology for the Russians and British. Many of the test facilities and production works were too large to dismantle and remove. But the efforts of Staver, Hamill, Putt and other American technicians did have an impact. Boris Chertok, a key figure in creating Russia’s space program, served on a Soviet technology exploitation team (similar to CIOS) during the war. He was part of the Russian contingent that finally occupied Nordhausen.

In his memoirs, Chertok recalled “out of all the tail and middle sections, tanks, instrument compartments and nose sections [we found] we could assemble at least 15, and maybe even 20, missile bodies. But the situation was a lot worse with the innards. We did not have a single control system instrument that we could use. There were also no engines and no turbopump assemblies that we could clear for installation” into the reassembled rockets.

The Soviets had to recruit German technicians to recreate many of the V2’s critical components. In contrast, when the Americans brought Von Braun and much of his team to the U.S., they were able to work with the V2 parts and support assemblies Hamill had spirited out of Nordhausen, as well as the technical documents Staver found. The German rockets and the German scientists who built them helped the U.S. create its ballistic missile program and then its space program. The high-tech scavenger hunt had paid off for the Americans, yielding technologies and technicians that would be instrumental in the looming Cold War.

Don Smith is a retired Army Field Artillery/ Military Intelligence officer. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Virginia and a master’s in strategic intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Joint Military Intelligence College (now the National Intelligence University). He teaches Geographic Information Systems (GIS). His book, Steinstuecken: A Little Pocket of Freedom, the story of a West Berlin community surrounded by Communist territory during the Cold War, is now on sale.

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Remembering ‘Operation Paperclip,’ when national security trumped ethical concern

PBS News Hour PBS News Hour

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/remembering-operation-paperclip-when-national-security-trumped-ethical-concern

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Now, a look at a moment when national security interests trumped ethical concerns.

Jeffrey Brown has our book conversation.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Nazi scientists, some of them tied to war crimes including horrific concentration camp experiments, brought to the U.S. in a secret program to advance American security interests during the Cold War. It sounds like the plot of a film drama, but it actually happened and on a large scale.

The story is told in the new book "Operation Paperclip." Author and journalist Annie Jacobsen joins us now.

Welcome to you.

ANNIE JACOBSEN, Author, "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America": Thank you.

These were top scientists in the German war effort sought out by the U.S. military in the — as the war was coming to an end.

ANNIE JACOBSEN:

That's right.

These were Hitler's top weapons makers. And Operation Paperclip became a classified military program to bring them to the United States.

It also had a public face. So, there was on the one hand the truth about the program kept secret and on the other hand the idea that we will tell the public that these are the good Germans.

The good Germans. But they were dedicated Nazis, the ones you write about. We should say, there were many, 1,600 in all. Right?

You document about 21, dedicated Nazis, some, as I said, involved in horrific stuff.

What they did was known, right, to the people who were — to the Americans who were seeking them out?

Certainly to the American military intelligence officers who were interviewing them.

The idea that they were involved in war crimes was really necessary to be kept secret, and that's exactly what happened. In the book, I think I unveil a lot of the truth about this program that's remained clouded for decades.

So, give us an example of one of the figures that intrigued you.

Well, I think one of the worst-case scenarios was that the United States military made the decision to bring Walter Schreiber. This Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, the surgeon general of the Third Reich. He wound up at a military facility in Texas.

And doing what?

Well, during the war, Dr. Schreiber had been involved in the vaccine program for the Reich, which sounds like a nice program, but it was actually a program to work on protecting German soldiers from these biological weapons that were also being manufactured.

So he was involved in war crimes in concentration camps. He became a prisoner of the Soviets, and then defected to the United States. We saw him as someone who we absolutely wanted here for his knowledge. So, in the United States, it still remains unknown what exactly he did, only that he worked for the U.S. Air Force in Texas.

You know, this becomes, of course, a story of practical vs. ethical choices, right, whether to — decisions made whether to look the other way or forget about the past in order to advance and gain advantage over the Soviets, it should be said, during the Cold War.

Absolutely.

I mean, the Cold War got hot very quickly, and the Soviet threat was this foreboding menace. And the idea was, certainly at the Pentagon and among the Joint Chiefs of Staff who were really running this program, was, if we don't get these Nazi scientists, surely the Soviets will.

Was there much debate at the time about the ethics of it?

Absolutely there was a debate, and I think that's what makes the narrative so compelling, because you have some people, including high-ranking generals at the Pentagon, who are loath to work with Hitler's former scientists. And you have others who say, this must be and it will be done.

You said we don't really know much about the case of Walter Schreiber and what he did. Some of them, do know. Right?

And the very famous case — most famous one is Wernher von Braun.

Yes, he came here. He was the head of our rocket program and brought 114 fellow V-2 rocket makers with him. And this program again had a very beneficent face.

Only now do we know the facts are very different about what those scientists were involved in at the end of the war in what was called the Nordhausen slave labor factory deep in the tunnels that you had concentration camp prisoners building the V-2 rockets.

So in a case like that and others where we know that they did accomplish things for the U.S. when they came here, then the question — and you write this — does accomplishment cancel out past crimes?

That, I think, is the conundrum of Operation Paperclip.

And I hope that people come to their own conclusion about that, because certainly the idea that you would excuse some of this horrific, horrific behavior during the war becomes, you know, that big moral question.

And what happened to these guys in the end? A number of them just lived out their days quite well here in the U.S.

You know, the obituary for Dr. Theodore Benzinger in The New York Times I think kind of sums it up. He died in 1999. And The New York Times lauds him as a good German scientist who dedicated his life to the U.S. military.

It leaves out the fact that he worked with Himmler very closely during the war and was actually on the original list of Nuremberg war crimes trials. And yet he was released into U.S. custody and came to the United States. So this idea that you can just whitewash someone's past, I think, is important to look into and to investigate, so that that truth can be reconciled.

All right. It's a fascinating story, "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America":

Annie Jacobsen, thanks so much.

Thank you for having me.

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Real History Online

Operation Paperclip WW2

Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip is a  secret operation (program) of the US Office of Strategic Services to relocate scientists from Nazi Germany to work in the United States of America after World War II (1939-1945).

The operation was carried out by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA ) and in the context of the flaring Soviet-American Cold War (1945-1991), one of the goals of the operation was to prevent the transfer of technological knowledge and advanced developments by German scientists to the Soviet Union  and the UK.

Although the recruitment of German JIOA scientists began immediately after the end of the war in Europe, US President Harry Truman issued a formal order to start Operation Paperclip only in August 1945. Truman’s order specifically emphasized that the recruitment of those who ” was a member of the Nazi Party and was more than a formal participant in its activities or actively supported Nazi militarism ” was excluded. Under these restrictions, most JIOA-targeted scientists were to be declared unfit for recruitment, among them rocket scientists Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, and physicist Hubertus Strughold, each of which had previously been classified as a “security threat to Allied forces”.

To circumvent President Truman’s order and the Potsdam and Yalta Accords, the JIOA falsified the professional and political biographies of a number of German scientists and professionals whose knowledge and experience the US required. The JIOA also removed from the personal files of scientists indications of membership in the Nazi Party and involvement in the actions of the Nazi regime. “Whitened” from Nazism, the US government recognized scientists as trustworthy for work in the United States. The codename for the Paperclip project came from the paperclips used to attach the new political identities of “U.S. government scientists” to their personal JIOA files.

Ozenberg’s list

At the beginning of 1943, the German government began to recall many scientists, engineers and technicians from the troops; they returned to research work and development work to strengthen the German defense capability in the context of a protracted war with the USSR. The recall from the front line included 4,000 rocket men returned to Peenemünde, on the northeast coast of Germany:

In one night, doctors of science were released from labor service, masters were recalled from cleaning jobs, mathematicians were dragged out of bakeries, and precision mechanics were no longer truck drivers.

Dieter K. Hutzel, “From Peenemünde to Cape Canaveral”

In the course of recruiting intellectuals for scientific work, the Nazi government first requested the location and identification of scientists, engineers and technicians, and then assessed their political and ideological suitability. Werner Osenberg, an engineer-scientist who headed the “Association for Defense Research” (German:  Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft ), wrote down the names of politically reliable people in the Osenberg list , which became the basis for their restoration in scientific work.

In March 1945, at the University of Bonn, a Polish laboratory assistant found the pages of Osenberg’s list stuffed into a toilet bowl; the list fell into the hands of MI6, which passed it on to US intelligence.   U.S. Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Rocket Weapons Section, Research and Intelligence Division, US Army Ordnance Corps, used Osenberg’s list to compile his list of German scientists who were to be detained and interrogated; Wernher von Braun, the chief rocket officer of the Nazis, headed Major Stiver’s list.

Identification

On July 19, 1945, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), as part of a program called Operation Overcast, received the right to control the fate of German rocket engineers. In March 1946, in order to increase secrecy, the program was renamed Operation Paperclip (Eng.  Operation Paperclip ). Despite efforts to classify, a year later the press interviewed some of the scientists   .

During Operation Alsos, Allied intelligence described nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of the German nuclear program on the eve of World War II, as “… more valuable to us than ten German divisions.” Along with rocket scientists and nuclear scientists, the Allies were looking for chemists, physicists and developers of naval weapons.

In the meantime, the technical director of the German Army Missile Center, Wernher von Braun, was being held in the US at the secret prison PO Box 1142 at Fort Hunt, Virginia. Since the existence of this prison was not made known to the International Red Cross, its operation was a violation by the United States of the Geneva Conventions. Although von Braun’s interrogators put pressure on him, he was not tortured.

Capture and imprisonment

Most of the American efforts were focused on Saxony and Thuringia, which were supposed to enter the Soviet zone of occupation from July 1, 1945. Many of the German research centers, along with their personnel, were evacuated to these lands, in particular from the Berlin area. Fearing that the transfer to Soviet control might limit the Americans’ ability to use German scientific and technical expertise, and not wanting the Soviet Union to benefit from this experience, the US undertook an “evacuation operation” of scientific personnel from Saxony and Thuringia through such orders:

By order of the military government, you are obliged, together with your family and luggage, as much as you can carry, to report tomorrow at 13:00 (Friday, June 22, 1945) to the town square in Bitterfeld. You do not need to take winter clothes. You need to take light things, documents, jewelry and the like. You will be taken by car to the nearest railway station. From there, you will embark on a journey to the West. Please tell the person who delivered this letter how many people are in your family.

In 1947, this evacuation operation involved about 1,800 technicians and scientists, as well as 3,700 members of their families. These people, who had special knowledge or skills, were imprisoned in interrogation centers (one of them was the center with the code name “Dustbin” (English  DUSTBIN ), located first in Paris, and then transferred to Kransberg Castle near Frankfurt), where they detained and interrogated, in some cases for months.

Some scientists were recruited for Operation Overcast, and most were sent to villages where they had neither research equipment nor jobs; they were given a stipend and ordered to report to the police station twice a week so that they could not leave. The Joint Command’s Research and Training Directive stated that technicians and scientists would be released ” only after all the services concerned are satisfied with the intelligence information received from them .”

On November 5, 1947, the Office of the Military Government of the United States (OMGUS), which had jurisdiction over the western part of occupied Germany, held a conference that considered the status of evacuees, their monetary claims against the United States, and “possible violations by the United States of the laws of war and occupation rules. OMGUS Director of Intelligence R. L. Welsh initiated a program to resettle evacuees to Third World countries, called by the Germans the “jungle program” (German  “Urwald-Programm” ) of General Welch, but this program was not implemented. In 1948, the evacuees received 69.5 million Reichsmarks for resettlement.from the United States, which soon fell significantly due to the currency reform, during which the Deutsche Mark was put into circulation as the official currency of West Germany.

John Gimbel concludes that the US froze Germany’s best minds for three years, making post-war reconstruction difficult for Germany.

In August 1945, Colonel Holger Toftoy, head of the Rocket Division of the Research and Development Division of the US Army Ordnance Corps, first offered one-year contracts to the rocket scientists ; 127 of them accepted the offer. In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived at Fort Strong (Boston Harbor): Wernher von Braun, Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard Rees, Wilhelm Jungert, and Walter Schwidetzky.

In late 1945, three groups of rocket men arrived in the United States to work at Fort Bliss, Texas and White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as “special employees of the War Department.”

In 1946, the United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German scientists in the development of synthetic fuels at the Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri.

In early 1950, the right of legal residence in the United States for some of the Project Paperclip specialists was obtained through the American consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico ; thus, Nazi scientists legally entered the US from Latin America.

86 aircraft engineers were transferred to Wright Field, where the US kept Luftwaffe aircraft and equipment captured during Operation Lusty ( Luftwaffe S ecret Technolog y – Luftwaffe  Secret Technology).

The US Army Signal Corps received 24 specialists – among them physicists Georg Goubau, Günter Guttwein, Georg Hass, Horst Kedesdy and Kurt Legowec ; physical chemists Rudolf Brill, Ernst Baars and Eberhard Both; geophysicist Dr. Helmut Weikmann; optician Gerhard Schwesinger; engineers Eduard Graeber, Richard Günther and Hans Ziegler.

In 1959, 94 people from Operation Paperclip arrived in the United States, among them Friedwardt Winterberg and Friedrich Wiegand.  In total, during the Operation Paperclip until 1990, 1,600 people were imported into the United States, as part of the intellectual reparations of Germany to the United States and Great Britain, about 10 billion US dollars in patents and industrial technologies.

In the last decade, the activities during the war of some scientists who went through Operation Paperclip have been investigated. For example, the aviation medicine library at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, was named in 1977 after Hubertus Strughold. However, it was renamed because documents from the Nuremberg Trials link Strughold to medical experiments in which Dachau prisoners were tortured and killed.

Arthur Rudolph was deported in 1984, although no charges were brought against him, and West Germany granted him their citizenship.  Similarly, Georg Rickney, who arrived in the United States in Operation Paperclip in 1946, was returned to Germany in 1947 to face the Dora-Mittelbau war crimes tribunal, was acquitted and returned to the United States in 1948, later became a US citizen.

Key Figures

• Rocket science: Rudi Beichel, Magnus von Braun, Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, Werner Dam, Konrad Dannenberg, Kurt H. Debus, Ernst R. G. Eckert, Krafft Arnold Ehricke, Otto Hirschler, Hermann H. Kurzweg, Fritz Müller, Gerhard Reisig, Georg Rickney, Arthur Rudolf, Ernst Stuhlinger, Werner Rosinski, Eberhard Rees, Ludwig Roth, Bernhard Tessmann, Oskar Holderer
• Aircraft : Alexander Martin Lippisch, Hans von Ohain, Hans Multhopp, Kurt Tank, Anton Flettner
• Medicine : Walter Schreiber, Kurt Blume, Hubertus Strughold, Hans Antmann (Human Factor)  
• Electronics : Hans Ziegler, Kurt Lechovec, Hans Holmann, Johannes Pland, Heinz Schlicke
• Intelligence : Reinhard Gehlen
• Anti-aircraft artillery weapons, large-caliber weapons with a rotating block of barrels : Otto von Lossnitzer (former head of military production at the Reich Ministry of Armaments and a member of the board of directors at the Mauser company),
• Small arms : Karl Mayer

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Inside Operation Paperclip, America’s Secret Program That Employed 1,600 Nazi Scientists In Its Labs

During operation paperclip, the records of premier german scientists were expunged so that they could secretly work in american labs to give the u.s. a leg up over the soviets in the cold war..

In the immediate wake of World War II, the Allies were widely venerated for their role in ending the reign of the Third Reich. But the Allied powers also made controversial decisions in secret that were kept classified for decades. Perhaps their most contentious action was the creation of Operation Paperclip, a covert intelligence project that brought over 1,600 Nazi scientists to the United States for research.

At the end of the war, the Allies scrambled to collect German intelligence and technology that may otherwise fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. As an impending Cold War threatened to destroy the hard-won peace, the United States granted a slew of Nazi scientists immunity for their war crimes so that they could work in their labs instead of in Russian ones.

Though these scientists were responsible for such milestones as Apollo 11’s Moon landing , was America justified in its decision to pardon war criminals in exchange for a political advantage?

The Osenberg List And The Depth Of Nazi Research

Despite numerous costly efforts, from the Siege of Leningrad to the Battle of Stalingrad , Nazi Germany failed to beat back the U.S.S.R. as World War II wound down. As the Reich’s resources neared depletion, Germany became desperate for a new strategic approach against the Red Army.

Thus, in 1943, Nazi Germany collected its most invaluable assets — scientists, mathematicians, engineers, technicians, and 4,000 rocketeers — and stationed them all together in the Baltic seaport of Peenemünde in northern Germany to develop a technological defense strategy against the Russians.

Wikimedia Commons Kurt H. Debus, a former V-2 rocket scientist who became a NASA director, between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Werner Osenberg, the head of Germany’s Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (or Defense Research Association), was responsible for determining which scientists to recruit by creating an exhaustive, thoroughly-researched roster. Scientists had to be considered sympathetic to or at least compliant with Nazi ideology in order to be invited. Naturally, this index came to be known as the Osenberg List.

Meanwhile, the U.S. had become increasingly more aware of the Nazis’ covert biological weapons program and, according to Annie Jacobsen’s 2014 book Operation Paperclip , the discovery of these scientific efforts shocked the U.S. into action.

Flickr President Truman signing the Atomic Energy Act in 1946. Meanwhile, 1,600 Nazi scientists were being recruited into the U.S.

“They had no idea that Hitler had created this whole arsenal of nerve agents,” explained Jacobsen.

“They had no idea that Hitler was working on a bubonic plague weapon. That is really where Paperclip began, which was suddenly the Pentagon realizing, ‘Wait a minute, we need these weapons for ourselves.'”

In 1945, as the Allies began to reclaim territory across Europe, they also began confiscating German intelligence and technology for themselves. Then, in March of that year, a Polish lab technician discovered pieces of the Osenberg List hastily stuffed into a Bonn University toilet and delivered it to U.S. intelligence.

Establishing Operation Paperclip

At first, the United States was concerned merely with capturing and interrogating the scientists identified on the Osenberg List in a mission called Operation Overcast. But as the United States discovered the extent of Nazi technology, this plan rapidly changed.

Instead, the States would collect and recruit these men as well as their families to continue their research for the American government.

And so, on May 22, 1945, Allied troops invaded Peenemünde and captured the men who were hard at work there on the V-2 rocket, which was the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.

Wikimedia Commons A V-2 rocket test launch at Peenemünde, Germany in 1943.

A newfound Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was eventually rebranded as the CIA, was responsible for putting the program now officially called Operation Paperclip into action. However, even though President Truman had sanctioned the project, he had also ordered that the program could not recruit any documented Nazis. But when the JIOA realized that many of the men they wanted off the Osenberg List were Nazi sympathizers, they found a way to circumvent the law.

The JIOA thus chose not to vet any researchers before they were brought into the U.S. and only once they had arrived. They also whitewashed or erased incriminating evidence from their records.

The Nazi Scientists Behind The Project

Among the scientists that were recruited under Operation Paperclip was premier German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun , who also forced prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp to work on his rocket program. Many of them died from overwork or starvation, yet Braun would go on to become the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

Wikimedia Commons Wernher von Braun used Buchenwald concentration camp prisoners for slave labor.

“When they were running low of good technicians, Wernher von Braun himself traveled nearby to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he hand-picked slaves to work for him.” added Jacobsen.

“He is a great example, because you wonder where the deal with the devil really happened in terms of his whitewashed past,” said Jacobsen. “The U.S. government, NASA in particular, was so complicit in keeping his past hidden.”

To Jacobsen’s point, Wernher von Braun was nearly awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the Ford administration. Only the objections of a senior advisor made Ford reconsider.

Upon arriving in the States in 1945, von Braun worked on rocketry at the U.S. Army in Fort Bliss, Texas. There, he oversaw the launching of several V-2 test flights.

Von Braun was transferred to NASA in 1960 where he helped the agency to launch its first satellites into orbit on July 20, 1969, as part of America’s effort to win the space race. By this point, he had been accepted by U.S. officials as an invaluable mind and he lived out the rest of his days in peace until dying of pancreatic cancer in 1977.

While he had certainly been the most famous of the German scientists, nearly every key department at the Marshall Space Flight Center was filled with former Nazis. Kurt Debus — a former SS member for Nazi Germany — ran the launch site now known as Kennedy Space Center.

Others, like Otto Ambros — Adolf Hitler’s favorite chemist — were tried at Nuremberg for mass murder and slavery, but given clemency in order to help America’s space exploration effort. The man was later even given a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.

In The Wake Of Project Paperclip

Much of Operation Paperclip’s history remains unknown, but the most up-to-date and informative work on the subject is Annie Jacobsen’s 2014 book.

Throughout the latter part of the last century, journalists have attempted to uncover more about Operation Paperclip, but their requests for documentation were often met with lawsuits. When a few requests were finally honored, countless documents were missing.

Many of the German researchers whose Holocaust-related atrocities were simply expunged by the JIOA later went on to work on MK Ultra , a top-secret program backed by the CIA whose main objective was to generate a mind-control drug to use against the Russians.

Apologists for Operation Paperclip might claim that the JIOA only sought to bring over benign scientists but this is demonstrably false. In 2005, the Interagency Working Group established by Bill Clinton determined in its final report to Congress that “the notion that they [the U.S. military and the CIA] employed only a few ‘bad apples’ will not stand up to the new documentation.”

Getty Images Nazi scientist-turned-NASA director Kurt H. Debus (right) gives French President George Pompidou (center) a tour of Kennedy Space Center in 1970.

The threat of the Cold War may have convinced certain American powers that granting clemency to Nazi scientists was acceptable, but was Operation Paperclip actually one of the biggest blemishes in American history — or a difficult decision that had to be made in the name of progress?

After learning about Operation Paperclip, read about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s plan to infiltrate the media. Then, learn about the Nazis’ Lebensborn program and its quest to breed a master race .

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Operation Paperclip

[Declassified Documents on Operation Paperclip Follow This Brief Introduction]

At the twilight of World War II, as the embers of battle subsided and the world began to reimagine its new geopolitical landscape, the United States launched an audacious covert operation. Termed “Operation Paperclip,” this classified mission sought to capitalize on the scientific prowess of Nazi Germany, aiming to bolster American defense, research, and space exploration capabilities for the decades to come.

Background and Objectives

When the dust of World War II settled, the global powers, especially the U.S. and the Soviet Union, were already eyeing the spoils of war. Both nations understood the scientific and military advantage the German technological innovations presented. Operation Paperclip, initiated in 1945, was the U.S.’s answer to this strategic opportunity.

Its primary objective was to recruit and relocate top German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States. In doing so, America hoped to prevent their expertise from benefiting the Soviet Union, or from contributing to any resurgence of power in post-war Germany.

Key Figures and Accomplishments

The breadth of talent acquired through Operation Paperclip was vast, but among the recruits, certain names stood out:

• Dr. Wernher von Braun : Arguably the most renowned figure of the operation, von Braun was instrumental in the development of the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. Once in the U.S., he became a linchpin in the development of the American space program, playing a pivotal role in the Apollo moon landings.

Through the acquired German expertise, the U.S. made significant leaps in:

• Aerospace Technologies : These experts were foundational in shaping what would become NASA and propelling the U.S. to its eventual moon landing.
• Missile and Defense Systems : Beyond space exploration, the German scientists were pivotal in advancing U.S. missile technology, which would prove crucial during the Cold War era.

Ethical Concerns and Controversies

The benefits of Operation Paperclip to the U.S. are undeniable. However, the program’s legacy is not without its shadows. Many of the scientists recruited had affiliations with the Nazi Party, and some were even implicated in war crimes, including conducting heinous experiments in concentration camps.

The U.S. government, in its quest for technological superiority, often chose to overlook these dark histories. These ethical oversights have, over the years, become a significant point of contention and debate.

Operation Paperclip underscores the intricate dance of science, ethics, and geopolitics. It is a chapter in history that presents a mix of admiration for scientific advancements and introspection on the moral lines crossed in the process.

As you delve into the declassified documents archived below, the magnitude and nuances of Operation Paperclip will unfurl, offering a more profound understanding of this pivotal moment in history.

[Below: Declassified Documents on Operation Paperclip]

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The horrible secrets of operation paperclip: an interview with annie jacobsen about her stunning account.

Annie Jacobsen is a journalist and the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51. A graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.

Launch of a V2 in Peenemünde; photo taken four seconds after taking off from test stand, Summer 1943

The journalist Annie Jacobsen recently published Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little Brown, 2014). Scouring the archives and unearthing previously undisclosed records as well as drawing on earlier work, Jacobsen recounts in chilling detail a very peculiar effort on the part of the U.S. military to utlize the very scientists who had been essential to Hitler’s war effort. 

As I read your book I started thinking about the various Nazi genre films such as; The Boys from Brazil, The Odessa File, and Marathon Man — they all hold to a similar premise, key Nazi’s escape Germany after the war and plot in various ways to do bad things. Apparently truth is stranger than fiction. What was Operation Paperclip?

Operation Paperclip was a classified program to bring Nazi scientists to America right after World War II. It had, however, a benign public face. The war department had issued a press release saying that good German scientists would be coming to America to help out in our scientific endeavors.

But it was not benign at all, as seen in the character of Otto Ambros, a man, as you explain, was keen on helping U.S. soldiers in matters of hygiene by offering them soap, this soon after they had conquered Germany. Who was Ambros?

Otto Ambros I must say was one of the most dark-hearted characters that I wrote about in this book. He was Hitler’s favorite chemist, and I don’t say that lightly. I found a document in the National Archives, I don’t believe it had ever been revealed before, that showed that during the war Hitler gave Ambros a one million Reichsmark bonus for his scientific acumen. The reason was two-fold. Ambros worked on the Reich’s secret nerve agent program, but he also invented synthetic rubber, that was called buna. The reason rubber was so important — if you think about the Reich’s war-machine and how tanks need treads, aircraft need wheels — the Reich needed rubber. By inventing synthetic rubber, Ambros became Hitler’s favorite chemist.

Not only that when the Reich decided to develop a factory at Auschwitz, — the death camp had a third territory, there was Auschwitz, there was Birkenau — they did it in a third territory called Auschwitz III also known as Monowitvz-Buna. This was where synthetic rubber was going to be manufactured using prisoners who would be spared the gas chamber as they were put to work, and most often worked to death by the Reich war machine. The person, the general manager there at Auschwitz III, was Otto Ambros. Ambros was one of the last individuals to leave Auschwitz, this is in the last days of January 1945 as the Russians are about to liberate the death camp. Ambros is there according to these documents I have located in Germany, destroying evidence right up until the very end.

After the war, Ambros was sought by the Allies and later found, interrogated and put on trial at Nuremberg, where he was convicted of mass-murder and slavery. He was sentenced to prison, but in the early 1950s as the Cold War became elevated he was given clemency by the U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy and released from prison. When he was sentenced, the Nuremberg judges took away all his finances, including that one million Reichsmark bonus from Hitler. When McCloy gave him clemency he also restored Otto Ambros’ finances, so he got back what was left of that money. He was then given a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.

He actually came to work in the United States?

Otto Ambros remains one of the most difficult cases to crack in terms of Paperclip. While I was able to unearth some new and horrifying information about his postwar life, most of it remains, “lost or missing,” which I take to mean classified. We do know for a fact that Ambros came to the United States two, possibly three times. As a convicted war criminal traveling to the United States he would have needed special papers from the U.S. State Department. The State Department, however, informed me through the Freedom of Information Act that those documents are lost or missing.

You describe quite well the pushing and pulling on how this program came about — and the compulsion to accelerate things once the Cold War hit full steam. The rationale being if the U.S. didn’t employ these men — and they were all men — then the Soviets would have. How do you see that type of argument having these characters so vividly in front of you?

It was really one of the most traumatic elements of researching and going through the documents, seeing how there were different factions in the Pentagon — because the program was run out of the Pentagon by Joint Chiefs of Staff. They created a specific unit called the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), which was in charge of Paperclip. In these documents you can see the tug-of-war between generals who were absolutely opposed to the idea of bringing anyone who participated in the Reich’s rise to power, they were loathe to bring these scientists here, they did not want to. I quote transcripts where certain generals saying exactly that. On the other hand, there were other individuals, generals and colonels, who were gun-ho about the prospect about making America’s arsenal, the aggregate of our military strength, the strongest in the world, and certainly stronger than the Soviets. To that end they did not see any problem in bringing these scientists to the U.S. and were seemingly willing to not only overlook the past of these Nazi scientists, but to white wash them.

The former Nazi Surgeon General, Walter Scheiber, had an advocate in the U.S in the person of Colonel Charles Loucks. You describe a photo taken of Loucks in Japan where he is standing by an “enormous pile of dead bodies” that in turn lay “next to a stack of incendiary bombs,” with a look of detachment.” This reminded me of the famous quote by U.S. General Curtis LeMay: 

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.”

LeMay and Louck’s justifications do not sound much different than the Nazi rationale of, “I was only following orders.” How do you see this and has your thinking changed in the course of writing this?

Certainly with some of the individuals involved a kind of necessary detachment in their perception of what they needed to do to serve their country. Mindful of the fact that I was not there during the Cold War and looking at history, one must take into account how high the stakes were — thermo nuclear war. Some of the individuals involved in Paperclip, i.e. the American officials, as a journalist I was able to consider that and see the paradox and conflict and empathize with having to make those very tough decisions.

General Loucks, however, stuck out as an exception to me because he didn’t only see work with Hitler’s closest confidants as a matter of national security for the United States moving forward, he grew to actually respect and appreciate the Nazi scientists. I found these quotes from him in his diaries, which he left posthumously to the Military History Institute in Pennsylvania. You see him discussing his fondness for example, a former Brigadier Fuhrer, Walter Schrieber, who was on Himmler’s personal staff and was so close to Hitler he was given a gold Party badge, which meant he was in favor by the Fuhrer. Sheiber was involved in concentration camp experiments, he was the liaison between Otto Ambros and Reich’s chemical committee, he had direct knowledge of the most horrific elements of the concentration camp, including genocide. Here he was being invited into the home of General Louck. At one point in the diary, I learned, he would even spend the night at the General’s home as a houseguest.

Now you point out an interesting passage in the book that I think gives a little perspective on General Loucks and made me wonder about how much the war had possibly transformed him? He was in charge overseeing the chemical weapons intelligence in Japan after the war. As I describe in the book going out into the Japanese countryside and taking a look at these incendiary bombs that he was in charge of manufacturing for the Americans during the war. He talks with this peculiar detachment about coming across a pile of what was left of these incendiary bombs and a pile of dead bodies, Japanese civilians who had been killed. He talks about them with such a strange perspective where he is only interested in seeing if his incendiary bombs had worked that it... gave me pause.

Former Vice President Henry Wallace, under Franklin Roosevelt, is perhaps best known for running for President, and refusing to renounce the support of U.S. Communists. What did he have to do with Operation Paperclip?

That’s such an interesting detail for you to pick up on and it was such an interesting element to write about. Although he had been Vice President and Truman later became Roosevelt’s Vice President, then of course fate and circumstance elevates Truman to the President. Henry Wallace is then Secretary of Commerce. What was interesting is that the Secretary of Commerce had a place on the JIOA, and was privy to some, but not all of the information regarding Operation Paperclip that was being run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wallace as Secretary of Commerce was incredibly gung-ho about getting Americans back to work. He had this book called, Sixty Million Jobs, and he intended to help America reach that milestone, the post-war prosperity that everyone in the nation was hoping for. Wallace saw science as a means to do that. Without knowledge of who these Nazi scientists were and what their pasts were Wallace endorsed this program, to such a degree that he wrote a letter to President Truman himself, saying you need to get on board with this program. That had a huge impact on Operation Paperclip which at that very moment in time, this is just a few months after the end of the war, the Joint Chiefs were struggling with the idea of Paperclip because the perception was that it was a deal with the devil. When Wallace stepped in, and said this is brilliant for commerce, it was exactly what the Joint Chiefs had been looking for.

How did you happen on this topic? How hard was it research and writing this?

I came across Operation Paperclip when I was writing Area 51, which involved the two Nazi aircraft designers who were brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten. The Horten brothers did not come to America as part of Paperclip, but their boss certainly did. His name was Siegfried Knemeyer, he was Herman Goering’s most important scientists for the Luftwaffe. Gorring liked him so much that he referred to him as ‘my boy‘ and made him chief of all technical engineering. When I learned that shortly after the war Knemeyer came to the United states with his seven children and his wife, had a long and prosperous career with the U.S. Air force, and that when he retired in the mid 1970s the Defense Department awarded him with the Distinguished Civilian Service Award — the highest award a scientist can get from the Pentagon — I thought to myself, how does that happen? How do you go from having Herman Goring as your boss then to having the U.S. Defense Department as your boss, and to be so important to both? That is where I became instantly curious about Operation Paperclip.

I was able to track down Knemeyer’s grandson who lives in the United States. He is about my age and is a very courageous fellow who believes in transparency. He agreed to let me interview him. There began a dialog between Dirk Knemeyer and myself about what this really meant. In those interviews I realized there was a way into Operation Paperclip in a manner that had not been reported before. Of course I was writing my book on the shoulders of so many amazing journalists; including Clarence Lasby, Linda Hunt and Tom Bower — people who have written about Paperclip before, but with limited access — we all sort of go along, and build on things as more informationgets revealed. I believe, though, that what gave me a lot of insight into the characters in Operation Paperclip was access to their family members.

As for the second part of your question, the subject matter is so complex, certainly when you are reading about the war, it is dark and evil. Then when you read about what happened after the war it is complicated and thought provoking. For a journalist that is challenging territory. I’m someone who always welcomes the challenge because I don’t believe stories are black and white. And I don’t believe stories are one-sided, or easily made simple. I believe this is a subject matter that deserves serious consideration and I also think there is so much more to be revealed. I hope my book inspires journalist sin the coming decade to look at this more. Because I absolutely know that there is so much out here that is still classified.

Operation Paperclip

Apr 26, 2012

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Operation Paperclip. By: Klaus-Peter Mr. Michael Battey. Mission:. U.S. effort to capture German material and personnel related to Nazi research conducted during WWII . Mainly involved the V-1 and V-2 rocket programs but also : Chemical weapons Atomic weapons Jet engines

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Presentation Transcript

Operation Paperclip By: Klaus-PeterMr. Michael Battey

Mission: • U.S. effort to capture German material and personnel related to Nazi research conducted during WWII. • Mainly involved the V-1 and V-2 rocket programs but also: • Chemical weapons • Atomic weapons • Jet engines • and many other things….

V-1 Flying Bomb • Robert Lusser • Developer of the V-1 with the Fieseler company • Initial test flight at Peenemünde in 1941 • First attack launch in June of 1944

V-2 Rocket • Since the 1930’s Dr. Wernher von Braun and the Spaceflight Society had been studying liquid- fueled rockets. • Initial test launch in October of 1942. • First attack launch in 1944 at Paris.

Peenemünde/Nordhasen • Research facilities during WWII • Housed the V-1, V-2 programs • Massive bombing raids by the British caused the scientists to move to underground locations.

Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp • Production Facilities for the V-2 program • 10,500 forced laborers • Many died due to the conditions: cold and heavy labor

Vengeance Weapons • V-1’s were launched to attack targets in England • 30,000 were manufactured, 10,000 fired, and 7,000 hit England. • In London about 5,000 people died because of the attacks. • V-2’s were fired at targets in Paris, London, Antwerp, The Hague • 3,000 V-2’s were fired before the end of the war. • 1,115 hit England • 2,700 people died

Overcast • Originally called Operation Overcast • Began when important Nazi scientists turned themselves over to American forces. • Allied forces were eager to find as much information before the Soviets could. • Allen Dulles an American intelligence officer working in Germany towards the end of the war and was the chief recruiter.

Collection • German bases/research facilities were found by American troops, materials were collected and the bases were blown with explosives to keep the Soviets from getting anything. • Scientists were found and transferred, hundreds of train cars of materials were moved to America. • President Truman ordered that only non-Nazi’s may be allowed to enter the country – but many files were “rewritten” to clean up their histories. • 700 Nazi’s were brought over to the US, some were still Nazi supporters. • It was renamed Paperclip because all Germans approved for transfer had paperclips clipped to their folders.

Wernher Von Braun • Of all the scientists involved Dr. Braun was the main asset. • Personally led development of V-2 program. • Member of the Nazi party and held a SS rank. • Guided a group of 200 of his own staff to find the Americans

Other Key Figures • Robert Lusser • The V-1 Flying Bomb • Arthur Rudolph • Developed the V-2 with Dr. Braun • Hans von Ohain • Jet Engines • Alexander Lippisch • Developer of the Messerschmitt Me 163 • Kurt Blome • Chemical weapons expert • Reinhard Gehlen • Chief military expert on the Soviet Union

In America • Personnel were secretly brought over to the U.S. • Scientist’s were deployed to White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico and Fort Bliss, Texas and Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. • They did not qualify for visas, Passports, green cards, or any identification. • They considered themselves “Prisoners of Peace”

Projects • First ICBM’s built using V-2 technology • Redstone Rocket • Jupiter • Jupiter-C • Atlas • Titan • Most scientists were given U.S. citizenship during this period.

NASA • NASA was established on July 29, 1958 • Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph • Saturn V Rocket • Apollo Program

Continuing Research • Wernher von Braun • In charge of the Marshall Space Flight Center • Left NASA after Saturn V went to Fairchild Industries. • Encouraged non-space based weapons. • Robert Lusser • Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Navy. • Alexander Lippisch • Helped with new jet aircraft designs for the Air Force • Arthur Rudolph • Director of Saturn V project thought out the space program.

Cold War And Other Nazi’s • Reinhard Gehlen • Continued to work for the Americans during the Cold War years against the Soviets • He ran an intelligence network against the Soviets that included 2,000 of his former Nazi comrades. • This network was extremely important to the U.S. so when Reinhard Gehlen helped some of his old Nazi friends get out of Europe the CIA turned the other way. • Klaus Barbie • Known as the “Butcher of Lyons” for his direct involvement in the execution of French Resistance forces during the war. • Helped the Americans with “policing duties” in the occupied territories.

Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act • In 1994 congress became aware of the Nazi's and US research after the war. • Petitions of classified information was denied on several occasions. • Finally, in 1998 the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act was enacted and the CIA began to release about one million pages of text concerning the Nazi’s after WWII. • As of 2005 the CIA is still declassifying reports.

The End Bibliography: www.wikipedia.com www.wsmr.army.mil www.nasa.gov www.redstone.army.mil/history www.msfc.nasa.gov

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Excerpt: 'Operation Paperclip'

This is a book about Nazi scientists and American govern­ment secrets. It is about how dark truths can be hidden from the public by U.S. officials in the name of national security, and it is about the unpredictable, often fortuitous, circumstances through which truth gets revealed.

Operation Paperclip was a postwar U.S. intelligence program that brought German scientists to America under secret military contracts. The program had a benign public face and a classified body of secrets and lies. "I'm mad on technology," Adolf Hitler told his inner circle at a dinner party in 1942, and in the aftermath of the German surrender more than sixteen hundred of Hitler's technologists would become America's own. What follows puts a spotlight on twenty-one of these men.

Under Operation Paperclip, which began in May of 1945, the scientists who helped the Third Reich wage war continued their weapons-related work for the U.S. government, developing rockets, chemical and biological weapons, aviation and space medicine (for enhancing military pilot and astronaut performance), and many other armaments at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War. The age of weapons of mass destruction had begun, and with it came the treacherous concept of brinkmanship — the art of pursuing dangerous policy to the limits of safety before stopping. Hiring dedicated Nazis was without precedent, entirely unprinci­pled, and inherently dangerous not just because, as Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson stated when debating if he should approve Paperclip, "These men are enemies," but because it was counter to democratic ideals. The men profiled in this book were not nominal Nazis. Eight of the twenty-one — Otto Ambros, Theodor Ben-zinger, Kurt Blome, Walter Dornberger, Siegfried Knemeyer, Walter Schreiber, Walter Schieber, and Wernher von Braun — each at some point worked side by side with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, or Hermann Göring during the war. Fifteen of the twenty-one were dedicated members of the Nazi Party; ten of them also joined the ultra-violent, ultra-nationalistic Nazi Party paramilitary squads, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troopers) and the SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protection Squadron); two wore the Golden Party Badge, indi­cating favor bestowed by the Führer; one was given an award of one million reichsmarks for scientific achievement.

Six of the twenty-one stood trial at Nuremberg, a seventh was released without trial under mysterious circumstances, and an eighth stood trial in Dachau for regional war crimes. One was con­victed of mass murder and slavery, served some time in prison, was granted clemency, and then was hired by the U.S. Department of Energy. They came to America at the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some officials believed that by endorsing the Paperclip pro­gram they were accepting the lesser of two evils — that if America didn't recruit these scientists, the Soviet Communists surely would. Other generals and colonels respected and admired these men and said so.

To comprehend the impact of Operation Paperclip on Ameri­can national security during the early days of the Cold War, and the legacy of war-fighting technology it has left behind, it is impor­tant first to understand that the program was governed out of an office in the elite "E" ring of the Pentagon. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was created solely and specifically to recruit and hire Nazi scientists and put them on weapons projects and in scientific intelligence programs within the army, the navy, the air force, the CIA (starting in 1947), and other organizations. In some cases, when individual scientists had been too close to Hitler, the JIOA hired them to work at U.S. military facilities in occupied Germany. The JIOA was a subcommittee of the Joint Intel­ligence Committee (JIC), which provided national security infor­mation for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The JIC remains the least known and least studied U.S. intelligence agency of the twentieth century. To understand the mind-set of the Joint Intelligence Committee, consider this: Within one year of the atomic bomb­ings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the JIC warned the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States needed to prepare for "total war" with the Soviets — to include atomic, chemical, and biological warfare — and they even set an estimated start date of 1952. This book focuses on that uneasy period, from 1945 to 1952, in which the JIOA's recruitment of Nazi scientists was forever on the rise, culminating in Accelerated Paperclip, which allowed individuals previously deemed undesirable to be brought to the United States — including Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, the surgeon general of the Third Reich.

Operation Paperclip left behind a legacy of ballistic missiles, sarin gas cluster bombs, underground bunkers, space capsules, and weaponized bubonic plague. It also left behind a trail of once-secret documents that I accessed to report this book, including postwar interrogation reports, army intelligence security dossiers, Nazi Party paperwork, Allied intelligence armaments reports, declas­sified JIOA memos, Nuremberg trial testimony, oral histories, a general's desk diaries, and a Nuremberg war crimes investigator's journal. Coupled with exclusive interviews and correspondence with children and grandchildren of these Nazi scientists, five of whom shared with me the personal papers and unpublished writ­ings of their family members, what follows is the unsettling story of Operation Paperclip.

All of the men profiled in this book are now dead. Enterprising achievers as they were, just as the majority of them won top military and science awards when they served the Third Reich, so it went that many of them won top U.S. military and civilian awards serving the United States. One had a U.S. government building named after him, and, as of 2013, two continue to have prestigious national science prizes given annually in their names. One invented the ear thermometer. Others helped man get to the moon.

From Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobsen. Copyright 2014 by Little, Brown and Company. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.

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Christopher McFadden

Ellen Wallace/Flickr

Before the dust had settled on one of the worst conflicts in human history, German scientists were being targeted by the United States for capture and relocation to the United States under a secret project called “Operation Paperclip” . 

They were not to be tried for war crimes, but, rather, were seen as potentially useful assets for developing various top-secret technological programs for the United States, and, arguably more importantly, denying the rising threat of the Soviet Union the same benefit. 

Some of these scientists had rather shady pasts, to say the least. But, as President Truman would later explain “ this had to be done and was done”.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the most notable technological outputs of this program , and investigate why “Operation Paperclip” remains one of the most controversial government programs of all time.  

What was operation paperclip?

During the dying days of the Second World War, advancing Allied forces did everything they could to effectively hoover up as much military, scientific, and technological research they possibly could. As armed forces advanced towards Berlin, teams of non-combatants followed in their wake to find and capture as much interesting stuff as they could. 

Of course, it was not only American and British endeavors. The Soviet Union did their own fair share of harvesting German tech and research towards the end of the war too. From around  1946, the Soviet Union forcibly recruited more than 2,200 German specialists, and their families, of their own during  Operation Osoaviakhim , much of which allegedly occurred in a single day. 

One group of Allied agents, t he Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS), confiscated documents, and captured and interrogated German scientists and engineers as, and when, research facilities were occupied. 

One of the most fruitful pieces of intelligence gleaned during this operation was a document called the “ Osenberg List “. This document contained the names of the who’s who of scientists , engineers, and technicians. The list was compiled on Hitler’s orders when, in 1943, he officially recalled  scientists, engineers, and technicians from combat duty and reassigned them to research units to assist in the war effort. 

At this point in the war, Germany’s attempt to conquer the USSR (“Operation Barbarossa”) had summarily failed. This had cost the Wehrmacht significantly in resources, manpower, and materiel, leaving the so-called “Greater Reich” dangerously underprepared for a Soviet counterattack.

Quickly realizing this, it was decided to formulate a plan to shore up defenses in any way they could — including through technological innovation. But, such experts would also need to be filtered for political and ideological “acceptance”. To this end,  Werner Osenberg (a specialist in Hitler’s Defense Research Association), was tasked with compiling a list of the Third Reich’s greatest and most promising minds. Focusing, of course, on those whose ideals aligned with the greater Nazi ideals. 

And so, the “Osenberg List” was born. 

Sometime in March 1945, a Polish laboratory technician at Bonn University found pieces of the list stuffed into a toilet. It would eventually reach the hands of MI6 agents n the United Kingdom before being shared with intelligence agents in the U.S.  It is this seminal document that would later lead to one of the most widely cited covert government programs in history — “ Operation Paperclip “. 

Originally called “Operation Overcast”, somewhere in the order of 1,600 German scientists and their families were brought to the Continental United States to work on America’s behalf.

In fact, a number of former enemy agents would become critical for the United States during the post-war trials and tribulations of the “Cold War”.

One of the main goals for the operation was to put these German scientists to work on helping to first develop, and then greatly improve, America’s fledgling research in rockets, biological and chemical weapons . Managed by  Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) , another goal of this operation was to keep scientific findings and advances made by the Nazis out of the hands of the Soviet Union. 

The operation was officially sanctioned by the then President of the United States Harry Truman but it came with one important caveat. No Nazi members or active Nazi supporters were to be recruited under any circumstances. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your opinion, this restriction was effectively ignored by the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS was the forerunner to the current Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

This allowed them to bypass the mandate by destroying or whitewashing any incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.

Probably one of the most famous German minds acquired during this operation was Wernher von Braun. A dedicated Nazi member, von Braun was the technical director at the Peenemunde Army Research Center in Germany and was instrumental in developing the lethal V-2 rocket. One of the most iconic results of The Wehrmacht’s “Vengeance Weapon” program, V-2 were unleashed en masse on mainland England, devastating infrastructure and lives from afar, effectively making the V-2 the first long-range missile. 

Von Braun and a number of his rocket scientist colleagues were brought to Texas , and White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as “War Department Special Employees” to assist the U.S. Army with rocket experimentation. He was made director of development at the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. His work would prove so fruitful that he would later be made the director of  NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle. This rocket would make history by being a fundamental component in NASA’s effort to propel American astronauts  to the Moon .

The results of “Operation Paperclip” are clear for all to see today, but it is not without some controversy. By some, the project was seen as a necessary evil that helped maintain America’s technological edge over the Soviet Union during the “Cold War”. Critics, however, believe that ignoring potential war crimes, or at least letting them go unpunished, by captured former Nazi scientists outweighs any benefits.

How different history would have been if these scientists, engineers, and technicians were punished with jail, or allowed to fall into Soviet hands, can never really be known. But, the technological achievements made by these scientists and spin-off technologies from the U.S. space program have, arguably, made life much better than if “justice” had been served. 

But more on that later. 

What technologies came out of “Operation Paperclip”?

As we’ve already mentioned, “Operation Paperclip” was devised under the auspices of preventing the Soviet Union from gaining a technological advantage in the post-war world. So what technologies, if any, were yielded? Let’s take a look at some notable examples. 

Please note, this list is far from exhaustive and is in no particular order.

1. There might not have been an Apollo program without “Operation Paperclip”

“Operation Paperclip” led to some very important technological innovations for the United States, and the world at large. One of the most important was the ultimate development of the Saturn V launch vehicle . 

Saturn V, in case you are not aware, was the main launch vehicle used to power much of NASA’s space program throughout the 1960s and 1970s . A super heavy-lift launch vehicle, the Saturn V was a three-stage, liquid-fueled rocket that formed the backbone of the Apollo Program that ultimately put a human being on the Moon’s surface for the first time in history. 

Amazingly, the Saturn V is still the only launch vehicle to have carried humans beyond low-Earth orbit. It is also the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever built and used in operations. The launch vehicle still holds some very important records, including the largest payload capacity and heaviest payload launched into space.

The Saturn V would not have been possible without the groundbreaking work of one of “Operation Paperclip’s main acquisitions — Wernher von Braun. Von Braun spent his early career developing rocket technology for the German war effort in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Among his achievements was the co-development of the V-2 rocket. It was because of his expertise in this area that he was among one of the selected German scientists for relocation to the U.S. at the end of the war. Once in the U.S., von Braun was put to work developing intermediate-range ballistic missiles for the U.S. Army and would prove instrumental in developing the launch vehicle that would ultimately put the first U.S. satellite into orbit — Explorer 1. 

In the 1960s, von Braun, and his team, were subsumed into NASA where he served as Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle program. The rest, as they say, is history. 

2. You can thank “Operation Paperclip” for swept-wing aircraft

Another important technological achievement to come from the scientists and engineers relocated during “Operation Paperclip” was the development of the swept wing. This is the type of wing common in modern aircraft that angles backward, or sometimes forwards, on commercial and military aircraft. 

While normally used to refer to wings that are swept backward, forward (kike the   Sukhoi Su-47 ), variable (like the F-14 “Tomcat” or Panavia “Tornado”), and even oblique variants (like the  NASA AD-1 ) of swept-wing also exist. 

While angled wings of this kind have existed since the early days of flight, the high angles seen in aircraft today are largely thanks to German innovations by Adolph Buseman and Albert Betz during the 1930s. Buseman emigrated to the US in 1947 as part of Operation Paperclip, although Betz remained in Germany.

The benefit of these kinds of wings is to delay the shockwave and accompanying aerodynamic drag caused by fluid compression of air near the speed of sound. For this reason, among others, swept wings are more commonly seen on jet-powered aircraft. 

They can, however, be employed for other reasons such as  low drag, low observability, structural convenience, or pilot visibility. 

3. “Space Medicine” was created by a German scientist who was later brought to the US

Another key area of innovation we can thank “Operation Paperclip” for is the field of “Space Medicine”. Developed by the former Nazi scientist Hubertus Strughold , this field of study is concerned with the study of the physical and psychological effects of spaceflight on human beings. 

Despite allegations that Strughold’s work involved experimentation on prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp, he worked on behalf of the  US Army Air Force after the war and  was brought to the  United States  in  1947  as part of  Operation Paperclip.  

For his work in this field, Strughold is often referred to as the “Father of  Space Medicine”. 

His work, along with his fellow “Operation Paperclip” colleague Dr. Heinz Haber, formed a key role in the design of pressure suits and onboard life support systems vital to the success of both the Gemini and Apollo programs. 

A specialized training program was also developed by Strughold for flight surgeons and medical staff for the Apollo program prior to its pivotal missions to the Moon. 

Of course, this field is primarily concerned with the health and safety of actual astronauts, but like many developments from various space programs, spin-off technologies have filtered down to the general public. 

Foam cushioning, implantable pacemakers, kidney dialysis, and CAT/MRI scanners would not be possible without technology developed as part of this interesting field of scientific study. While not all these developments were directly developed by “Operation Paperclip” scientists, they would arguably not exist without them.

4. Solar powered satellites owe their origins to German scientists relocated after WW2

Another highly influential acquisition under “Operation Paperclip” was the German scientist Hans K. Ziegler . A pioneer in communication satellites, he is widely considered the main driving force behind the existence of solar photovoltaic cells on many satellites today. 

During the war, Ziegler worked for a high tension porcelain company in Bavaria but was brought to the United States in 1947. Once in the U.S., Zeigler made many interesting developments in the field of military electronics, many of which were critical for the early phases of the U.S. Space Program. 

In the 1950s, Ziegler found himself examing early solar cells developed by Bell Laboratories. He immediately saw their potential for not only satellites but also as a potential form of power generation on Earth. 

In a rare moment of accurate foresight, he is actually quoted as saying, “the future development [of the silicon solar cell] may well render it into an important source of electrical power [as] the roofs of all our buildings in cities and towns equipped with solar [cells] would be sufficient to produce this country’s entire demand for electrical power.”

Nostradamus would be impressed. 

Ziegler would push heavily for providing satellites with solar panels, which ultimately led to the development of Project Vanguard and the first solar-powered artificial satellite, Vanguard 1. 

The project proved to be a great success, and although the PV panels were rudimentary compared to modern examples, they managed to power the satellite for seven years. This proved the point, and solar power become the de facto energy supply for satellites thereafter. 

If that wasn’t enough, Zeigler also made critical developments in the field of communication satellites leading to the creation of SCORE , the world’s first communication satellite, which was launched in the late-1950s.

5. We might not have LED bulbs or modern solar cells without “Operation Paperclip” scientists

Another important development that we can thank “Operation Paperclip” for is the P-N junction. A critical concept in various technologies, like transistors and integrated circuits, this is widely considered one of the most important electrical inventions of all time. 

This technology was first invented by one of the scientists relocated under “Operation Paperclip”, Kurt Lehovec . 

He developed the technology while working at the  Sprague Electric Company, and tested his designs successfully. Lehovec’s device was a linear structure, 2.2×0.5×0.1 mm in size, which was divided into isolated n-type cells (bases of the future transistors) by p-n junctions. 

Despite management at the company showing little interest in the product, Lehovec filed a patent on the technology in the early-1960s, from which, apparently, he received no royalties. 

This is impressive enough, but Lehovec was also one of the leading lights, pun intended , in the development of the light-emitting diode (LED).

6. We might not have developed the dot matrix printer without “Operation Paperclip”

Another interesting technology born out of “Operation Paperclip” is the dot matrix printer. Invented, in part, by  Fritz Karl Preikschat , the dot matrix printer is still used today — albeit in a very limited capacity . 

Preikschat was first captured by the USSR just after the war and forced to work on the Soviet  rocket and satellite programs. He was released by the Soviets in 1952 and returned to Soviet-occupied Berlin, where he met an American military policeman who put him into a safe house. Preikschat spent two months in there, getting debriefed by the U.S. Air Force on the Soviet Union’s rocket program before eventually emigrating to the US in 1957  as part of “Operation Paperclip”. 

While still in Germany, Preikschat submitted patents for his invention of a teleprinter with a 7×5 dot matrix, but his employer at the time was unable to interest anyone the device. 

Once in the US, he continued his career as an engineer in the aerospace sector. He invented a blind-landing system for airports, a phased array system for satellites, a new moisture meter, and a particle-size analyzer. 

A prolific inventor, Preikschat also made some significant contributions to the development of hybrid cars. In 1982, he invented an early form of regenerative braking systems for cars. He patented his design but it was never prototyped or commercialized. 

7. Synchcopters and rotors sails exist thanks, in part, to “Operation Paperclip”

Yet another key innovation to come out of “Operation Paperclip” is the development of modern helicopter technology. While a number of examples had existed prior to World War II, it was the work of Anton Flettner that really brought the technology to fruition. 

During WW2, Flettner designed and help build the famous   Flettner FI 282   Kolibri , aka the “Hummingbird”. The first production helicopter, this craft was a single-seater, intermeshing rotor helicopter (or “synch-copter”).

Only a few dozen were built, and they served as spotter craft for German artillery positions. After the war, Flettner emigrated to the U.S. as part of “Operation Paperclip,” where he was employed by Kaman Aircraft as chief designer. 

He also formed his own company, the Flettner Aircraft Corporation, but it never actually proved successful. 

Under Kaman’s employment, Flettner was instrumental in the development of the famed  HH-43 “Huskie”  which would later become an icon of the Vietnam War. 

Kaman Aircraft is still in business today, and intermeshing rotor helicopters are still one of their biggest exports. 

Another interesting innovation by Flettner was the so-called “Flettner motor”. Used a supplemental propulsion system on some transport and research vessels, this technology is currently being explored as a potential sustainable propulsion system on large freight ships today. 

8. The popularization of nuclear power in the 1950s might not have been possible without “Operation Paperclip”

Another notable acquisition during “Operation Paperclip” was  Heinz Haber . A former member of the SS, Haber studied physics in his youth, learned to become a fighter pilot, and was later employed at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik conducting military research for the Wehrmacht. 

After the war, Haber was brought to the United States under “Operation Paperclip” and would prove to be a very wise choice for the U.S. 

Haber joined the USAF School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base. Together with fellow German  Hubertus Strughold , he and his brother Dr. Fritz Haber conducted pioneering research into  space medicine  in the late 1940s, including the use of parabolic flights for simulating weightlessness. 

However, Haber is best known for his work in the popularization of science among the general public, most notable nuclear fission. 

In the 1950s, he became a scientific adviser for Walt Disney productions and played an instrumental part in helping explain the benefits of nuclear fission to the general public, at the request of the Eisenhower administration. Haber consulted on and presented the Disney production “ Our Friend the Atom “, and also co-hosted Disney’s popular science program “Man in Space” with Werner von Braun. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, Haber returned to Germany and is best known there as a popular science spokesperson. He presented shows, wrote news articles, and books explaining complex scientific principles in fun and interesting ways. 

One of his most notable pieces is his explanation of nuclear chain reactions, using a series of mousetraps loaded with ping pong balls. Haber is, in part, a key inspiration for many science presenters in Germany who have followed in his wake. 

9. The ion engine is another product of “Operation Paperclip”

Another technology that might not exist without “Operation Paperclip” is the concept of the ion engine . While not the first to propose a potential model for making a working engine, one former-Nazi scientist, Ernst Stuhlinger , made significant advancements in the field during his time in the United States. 

He earned his doctorate in physics before the war and then worked on cosmic rays and nuclear physics at the Berlin Institute of Technology in the early days of WW2. During the war, he was drafted as a soldier on the Eastern Front and was one of the very few German soldiers to return from the Battle of Stalingrad. 

When he finally made it back to Germany,  Stuhlinger was drafted into the German rocket program under Von Braun, whom he would accompany to the US during the initial stages of “Operation Paperclip”. While with von Braun, Stuhlinger  worked in the field of guidance systems.

His work in the U.S. varied widely including assisting in the development of various U.S. satellites and telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. However, some of his most interesting work was something of a hobby for  Stuhlinger. 

He had something of a fascination with solar-powered spacecraft and would later develop some interesting concepts for ion propulsion using either cesium or rubidium vapor. To this end, he would later write a seminal book on the subject of electrical propulsion, and his work was later recognized by having the  Electric Rocket Propulsion Society’s  “Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Electric Propulsion” renamed in his honor. 

Why is “Operation Paperclip” so controversial? 

We’ve already touched on this above, but primarily many of the scientists and other German experts had very questionable histories, to say the least. While many were former Nazi party members, some were also later shown to have partaken in very unethical crimes throughout the war. 

For example, Arthur Rudolph, a key member of the V-2 rocket program, was accused of organizing forced labor from the Dora-Nordhausen  concentration camp   as part of the program. It has since been estimated that around a third of the 60,000 prisoners lived, worked, and died in the underground tunnels at Mittlewerk . 

The causes of death did vary, but most lives were claimed by untreated diseases, malnutrition, or simply being worked to death. Some others were publically hanged. In light of these accusations, Rudolph would renounce his U.S. citizenship and move to West Germany to avoid prosecution. 

Von Braun, who was also a key member of the V-2 rocket program, is known to have visited the same facility at least once. While his actual input into the logistics of running the facility is up for debate, this link to forced labor has certainly tainted his reputation forever.

However, it is important to note that neither Von Braun nor Rudolph was listed on any war crimes lists drawn up after the war. Other officials at the rocket factory were arrested, convicted, and either jailed or executed after the war. However, some have suggested that some records were destroyed to prevent people like von Braun from being tainted by the accusations.

Epidemiologist Walter Schreiber , who was first captured by the Soviets, then escaped and surrendered to US forces, was eventually given permission to emigrate to the US in 1951. Only weeks after his arrival in the United States, however, he was linked by the Boston Globe to grotesque human experiments during the war at Ravensbruck. He denied his involvement, but the JIOA arranged visas allowing him and his family to emigrate to Argentina, where many former Nazi members also sought refuge after the war.  

Hubertus Strughold, the aforementioned “Father of Space Medicine” was honored in the U.S. with the Strughold Award for contributions to the field. This award was a highly prized one that was awarded between 1963 and 2013. However, it was later revealed that Strughold participated in human experiments on prisoners during WW2. 

In light of this, from 2013, the award was retired and Stughold’s reputation has since become tarnished. 

However, of all the German scientists captured during “Operation Paperclip”, only one has ever been formally tried —  Georg Rickhey . He was returned to Germany in 1947 and stood trial for his connections to the forced labor used during the V-2 program. However, he was acquitted of any crime. 

Scientists brought over to the U.S. under “Operation Paperclip” led to some of the greatest scientific advancements in modern history and helped, in part, put a human being on the Moon for the first time in history. However, some, if not all, of these men have connections, whether proven or tenuous, to some of the worst humanitarian crimes imaginable. 

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For this reason, “Operation Paperclip” remains, and will continue to remain, one of the most controversial government programs in history. Whether you agree that the advancements made under the program outweigh the “costs” over overlooking some very serious criminal accusations or not is ultimately “in the eye of the beholder”. 

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ABOUT THE EDITOR

Christopher McFadden Christopher graduated from Cardiff University in 2004 with a Masters Degree in Geology. Since then, he has worked exclusively within the Built Environment, Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Consultancy industries. He is a qualified and accredited Energy Consultant, Green Deal Assessor and Practitioner member of IEMA. Chris’s main interests range from Science and Engineering, Military and Ancient History to Politics and Philosophy.

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Special operations outlook 2019 digital edition is here, operation paperclip, a deal with the devil.

By Dwight Jon Zimmerman - January 8, 2021

The German rocket team, also known as the Von Braun Rocket Team, is seen in a group photograph at Fort Bliss, Texas, after World War II. The team included many of Dr. Wernher Von Braun’s Peenemuende colleagues, who developed the V-2 rocket for Germany during the war and some 120 of whom Von Braun led to the United States under a contract to the U.S. Army as part of Operation Paperclip. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center photo

“In summary, we have here [in the Soviet Union] a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

-U.S. diplomat and political analyst George Kennan, February 1946

Nazi Germany was the enemy, and its defeat was the goal of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The first signs of divorce in the marriage of convenience that had made them allies appeared during the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where President Franklin Roosevelt , Prime Minister Winston Churchill , and Premier Josef Stalin met at the Crimean resort city to plan not only the war’s end, but the foundation for the postwar world.

Front row from left, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin are seen at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. As the Allied leaders were meeting to plan an end to World War II, some in the United States and Great Britain were beginning to recognize that the political differences between the Soviet Union and both the United States and Great Britain were too severe to be reconciled. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photo

In the final days of World War II, a small group of individuals presciently recognized that in the case of the Soviet Union, the axiom “today’s ally is tomorrow’s enemy” was a rapidly approaching reality. The political differences between the Soviet Union on the one hand and the United States and Great Britain on the other were too severe to be reconciled. Sooner or later, there would be a falling out with enormous consequences. That falling out would be called the Cold War. In its early days, before it got its name, when Germany was collapsing in defeat, an opportunity unlike any other occurred. It was also an opportunity not without moral cost, a “deal with the devil.” But with national security at issue, a special operations mission was authorized. It was called “Paperclip.”

Operation Paperclip, named after the use of the ordinary paperclip attached to the personnel files of select German scientists, was a special operation of breathtaking scope. Instead of highly trained teams tasked for important combat missions, these teams were hunters and gatherers sifting and searching through the wreckage and ruin of a devastated Germany. Theirs was a high-stakes contest against an equally determined Russia and other less malevolent former allies. German scientists and technologies were the pawns, and the prize was nothing less than national security and preeminence as a world power. When it was concluded, hundreds of German scientists and their families, tons of documents, hardware, weapon systems, and technologies would be transferred from Germany to the United States.

As 1945 opened, the shooting war was clearly being won by the Allies. But just as clearly to those capable of looking past national pride, German science was dominating the technological war. Allied blockades and advances shut off one after another the pipelines of essential minerals, chemical, and petroleum products to Germany. And around-the-clock bombing of industrial centers was crippling the enemy’s war-making infrastructure. At least, that’s what the public was told, and also what many in the military believed.

German technicians prepare a V-2 rocket for launch in this undated photograph. The V-2 represented one of a number of advanced weapon systems that Germany alone was able to develop during World War II, leaving a technological gap between itself and the Allies. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center photo

Though the Allied juggernaut was so strong as to be irresistible, there were important technological gaps and weaknesses that did not go unnoticed by the high command. Amazingly, and frighteningly, Germany was able to field a wide array of new and technologically advanced weapons and weapon systems. These included the first operational combat jet , rocket-powered aircraft, air-to-air missiles, superior anti-tank weapons, tanks and tank armor , and other weapon systems both simple and sophisticated . Synthetic products of all kinds were created as well, ranging from the much-maligned ersatz coffee to synthetic fuels and lubricants.

Maj. Gen. Hugh Knerr, deputy commander for administration, U.S. Strategic Air Forces Europe, acknowledged to his boss, Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, “Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research.” He then went on to state, “If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited.”

Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the Air Force Chief of Staff, threw down the post-war gauntlet when he wrote to the secretary of war that in the next war, “The United States must be the world’s first power in military aviation.” What prompted Arnold was a damning incident in the dying days of World War II over Germany. A group of B-17 Flying Fortresses on a mission to Berlin were attacked by six Me-262 jet fighter-bombers, each armed with 60 R4/M missiles. Within a few minutes, 14 B-17s had been shot down. While this isolated victory itself was too little, too late to save Germany from defeat, its technological importance was not lost on Arnold. The R4/M had been used 18 months earlier against Air Force bombers in the catastrophic Schweinfurt raid. Since then, the Allies had not put into production a similar weapon.

Arnold’s assessment was seconded by his counterparts in the British Air Ministry and the Royal Air Force. An Air Ministry intelligence summary dated Jan. 26, 1945, acknowledged, “Owing to high speed, the enemy has been able to use his jet fighters in a fighter-bomber role successfully and with comparative immunity from Allied fighters. The Me-262 is equally excellent as an interceptor .” Another memo to Churchill acknowledged, “The United States and Britain are outstripped technologically by the Germans.” British Air Marshal Charles Portal ominously wrote on Jan. 26, 1945, “If Germany has not been beaten before July 1945, she will have dominance in the air war over Germany and above the armies during the period of good flying weather.”

Meanwhile in the field, astonishing reports from more than 200 OSS secret agents already in Germany were pouring in telling of the locations of caches of scientific and technology secrets; of hidden test sites, underground factories. Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) teams tasked with seeking out and assessing such locations found themselves overwhelmed with the staggering scope of sites and materials.

Allied intelligence conception of V-2 storage and launching operations. U.S. Air Force photo

An example of the extent of the treasure trove being uncovered occurred in early April 1945, when elements of the U.S. First Army captured a large complex at Volkenrode in northern Germany. The complex contained workshops, laboratories, parts of airplanes, engines, and wind tunnels larger than anything existing in Great Britain or the United States. Normal Army G-2 and specialized Consolidated Advance Field Teams (CAFT) quickly investigated the find. But it was not until early May when Col. Donald Putt, leader of the Air Force’s “Operation Lusty,” arrived that the American find was fully comprehended. The complex was the Hermann Goering Aeronautical Research Institute, the most sophisticated and advanced of its kind in the world. It was established in 1935, operational when the war started, and was totally unknown to the Allies.

Putt’s discovery proved mind-boggling. In the aerodynamic section alone there were low-speed, subsonic, supersonic, and transonic wind tunnels. There was a camera designed to record jet engine performance that could take many pictures a second. The center had a section that could simulate altitude conditions up to 50,000 feet. In the armament area, there were two firing tunnels, 400 meters long, built to analyze the effect of crosswinds as strong as 500 miles per hour on missiles in flight. One of Putt’s most important finds was German scientist Adolph Busemann, the inventor of the swept wing, who eagerly recounted the work done at the center.

But Volkenrode was not the only place where sophisticated wind tunnels existed. Dr. Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology was at the same time exploring a wind tunnel complex at Kochel near Munich. He reported that the Germans were “many years ahead of all other countries.”

And along with the material, American troops and agents were finding the men. The list included Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, scientists and technicians who worked for the top German aviation corporations, for the I.G. Farben chemical giant, for the steel maker Krupp, and others . Almost all were tainted with Nazi party association. Determining whether the motives of these scientists and technicians were guided by genuine conviction, calculated opportunism, or political extortion would take time.

German rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun (arm in cast) surrenders to U.S. Army counterintelligence personnel of the 44th Infantry Division in Ruette, Bavaria, in May 1945. Von Braun later played an integral role in the U.S. space and rocket programs. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center photo

With the national security of the United States at stake, time was a prohibitive luxury. While the U.S. government officially wrestled with the issues of what to do with the scientists and technicians living in the section of Germany administered by the Americans, the Soviet Union was moving fast and offering powerful monetary and career inducements to lure scientists to its side, no questions asked. France was also turning a blind eye to scientists with tainted pasts. The dilemma wracked the government, and offered no safe and easy answer. If the United States adhered to its stated anti-Nazi policy, it risked losing the services of every noteworthy German scientist and technician available.

This possibility was noted by a Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) memorandum that stated, “Unless the migration of important German scientists and technicians into the Soviet zone is immediately stopped, we believe that the Soviet Union with a relatively short time may equal the United States developments in the fields of atomic research and guided missiles and may be ahead of U.S. development in other fields of great military importance, including infra red, television and jet propulsion. In the field of atomic research, for example, we estimate that German assistance already has cut substantially, probably by several years, the time needed for the USSR to achieve practical results.”

The JIC made three recommendations: that German scientists and technicians should be prevented from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union or being interrogated by that nation; that the American army in Germany should give the scientists and their families all the provisions they needed; and that the American military governor in Germany immediately compile a list of 1,000 scientists and technicians qualified in the fields of aerospace and other strategically important fields useful for the United States.

Putt, who worked on both Paperclip and its predecessor, Overcast, urged swift action in getting the scientists to the United States. In a letter to the Pentagon, he wrote, “The American zone is literally crawling with French and Russian agents whose work has become rather fruitful and facilitated by the sorry fact that German scientists have received no clear-cut, positive offers from this country.” Offers from French and Russian agents guaranteed the scientists generous financial and professional inducements as well as the care and comfort of their families.

Assessment of important scientists was easy for JOIA member Col. Ernest Gruhn. They should include Nobel Prize-winners or candidates, the 30 top-level chemists and physicists, and the leading experts on missiles, fuels, atomic energy, military and chemical gases, electronics, and biological warfare. In a further memorandum, he stated that the list should also include “scientists of outstanding prominence or ability in any field, persons who possess distinguished or unusual intellectual attainments of a scientific or technical nature.”

The first Hermes A-1 test rocket was fired at White Sands Proving Ground. Hermes was a modified German V-2 rocket, utilizing the German aerodynamic configuration, though with a completely new internal design. From these early steps the U.S. space program was born. NASA photo

On Sept. 3, 1946, a new top-secret directive on Paperclip, approved by President Harry Truman , authorized that 1,000 scientists could be brought to the United States by the military. Their families would follow. Salaries would be comparable to equivalent American positions, approximately $10,000 per year. Security restrictions, though relaxed, would remain in place. If background checks discovered unacceptable histories about individuals, they would be deported to Germany. But even with this order, progress in processing scientists moved at a snail’s pace. Then, a Russian action changed everything.

Col. Gen. I.A. Serov, the Russian commandant of East Berlin, initiated “Operation Osvakim,” the wholesale kidnapping of 15,000 German scientists and technicians. It began at 4 a.m. on Oct. 22, 1946. Battalions of Russian soldiers sealed off neighborhoods in East Berlin. Hundreds of arrest squads systematically combed apartment complexes, smashing down doors and ordering husbands and sons into waiting trucks where they were taken to railway stations. From there they would be transported to Russia where they would be “employed” for five years.

This brutal action had the consequence of forcing the American military to resort to new, expedient measures to make sure that the Russians did not get any more scientists and technicians.

Officially, Operation Paperclip concluded on Sept. 30, 1947. In a public statement, the Army announced that the operation had brought into the United States 457 scientists and 453 dependents. But a closed-door decision was made to allow Operation Paperclip to continue, this time as a top secret program. To justify the continuation, the Air Force stated that the 209 German scientists working for it had substantially advanced the development of weapons systems and the scientists were “superlative specialists … the best available in the world today.” They were saving the Air Force millions of dollars and an estimated 10 years in cost and development. The Navy added its praise, stating that German mathematicians, aerodynamicists, and experts in heat transfer had proven that “their professional education and training [were] superior to that of any U.S. personnel available.”

With the help of German scientists brought to the U.S. during Operation Paperclip, a new chapter in space flight began in July 1950 with the launch of the first rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., with the Bumper 2. Bumper 2 was an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a WAC Corporal rocket. The upper stage was able to reach then-record altitudes of almost 400 kilometers. Launched under the direction of the General Electric Company, Bumper 2 was used primarily for testing rocket systems and for research on the upper atmosphere. Bumper 2 rockets carried small payloads that allowed them to measure attributes including air temperature and cosmic ray impacts. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center photo

Separately, Col. H.M. McCoy wrote to Air Force Intelligence in Washington, “The German personnel now engaged are a necessary, vital and irreplaceable factor in the Air Force research and development program. … It is also an incontestable fact that there is a crippling shortage of scientific and technical personnel within the U.S. and more particularly within government agencies.”

Further proof was demonstrated at Fort Bliss , where German scientists and technicians were pioneering work on Hermes II, a $4 million with a ramjet-powered payload in its upper stage, capable of flying at an altitude of 12 miles, at a speed of Mach 3.3, and with a range of 400 miles. Work would continue on future generations of rockets.

Estimates vary with respect to how much time German scientists and technicians saved the United States as a result of Paperclip and other similar operations . Most say the operation cut from two to 10 years of time off strategic programs. What is irrefutable is that, thanks to the efforts of Wernher Von Braun and his team of rocket scientists from Germany, the United States achieved one of mankind’s greatest dreams, the landing of a man on the moon on July 20, 1969 .

This article was first published in The Year in Special Operations: 2005 Edition.

By Dwight Jon Zimmerman

DWIGHT JON ZIMMERMAN is a bestselling and award-winning author, radio host, and president of the...

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2:50 PM September 26, 2012

The Scientific and Technical Information (STI) swept up in Germany by U.S. and U.K. Intelligence at the close of WWII Germany lives on at the Defense Technical Information Center (www.dtic.mil). DTIC has an ongoing backfile conversion program to digitize the ATI card catalog records and their corresponding microform and hard-copy documents. To date, DTIC has digitized 15,623 of the 150,00 ATI documents. Unfortunately, the controlling DoD successor agencies have not responded to DTIC’s request for document review and the majority of the information, dating from the 1920’s through 1950, is still marked classified or controlled unclassified releaseable to DoD only.

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Operation paperclip : the secret intelligence program to bring nazi scientists to america / annie jacobsen, object details.

Operation Paperclip History Presentation with Questions

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This presentation is on Operation Paperclip: the incredible real life story of how the Allies divided up some of the greatest German minds in science and rocketry. Some helped put Russians in space and the Americans on the moon. But what was the ethics behind not allowing the Nazis among them face justice?

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• OPERATION PAPERCLIP

Apple Books

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The explosive story of America’s secret post-WWI science programs, from the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51.

In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich’s scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis’ once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler’s scientists and their families to the United States.

Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?

Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich’s ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century.

In this definitive, controversial look at one of America’s most strategic, and disturbing, government programs, Jacobsen shows just how dark government can get in the name of national security.

Praise for OPERATION PAPERCLIP

“this book is a remarkable achievement of investigative reporting and historical writing, but it is a moral force as well as a literary tour de force. it reminds us, unforgettably, about the wages of war — and the price of victory.”.

— The Boston Globe

“As comprehensive as it is critical, this latest expose from Jacobsen is perhaps her most important work to date…Jacobsen persuasively shows that it in fact happened and aptly frames the dilemma…Rife with hypocrisy, lies, and deceit, Jacobsen’s story explores a conveniently overlooked bit of history.”

“this is an engrossing and deeply disturbing expose that poses ultimate questions of means versus ends.”, “throughout, the author delivers harrowing passages of immorality, duplicity and deception, as well as some decency and lots of high drama. how dr. strangelove came to america and thrived, told in graphic detail.”, “annie jacobsen’s operation paperclip is a superb investigation, showing how the u.s. government recruited the nazis’ best scientists to work for uncle sam on a stunning scale. sobering and brilliantly researched.”.

— Alex Kershaw, author of The Liberator

Operation Paperclip

A secret U.S. Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians (many of whom were formerly registered members of the Nazi Party and some of whom had leadership roles in the Nazi Party), including Wernher von Braun’s rocket team, were recruited and brought to the United States for government employment from post-Nazi Germany (after World War II). The program began on July 20th, 1945 Exchanging immunity for war crimes, these German scientists, doctors, technicians, and engineers were involved in secret lab projects such as MKULTRA, biowarfare experimentation (Lyme disease, etc…), the UFO hoax, eugenics, and other clandestine agendas funded by the new world order globalists.

After WWII ended in 1945, victorious Russian and American intelligence teams began a treasure hunt throughout occupied Germany for military and scientific booty. They were looking for things like new rocket and aircraft designs, medicines, and electronics. But they were also hunting down the most precious “spoils” of all: the scientists whose work had nearly won the war for Germany. The engineers and intelligence officers of the Nazi War Machine.

The U.S. Military rounded up Nazi scientists and brought them to America. It had originally intended merely to debrief them and send them back to Germany. But when it realized the extent of the scientists knowledge and expertise, the War Department decided it would be a waste to send the scientists home. Following the discovery of flying discs ( foo fighters ), particle/laser beam weaponry in German military bases, the War Department decided that NASA and the CIA must control this technology, and the Nazi engineers that had worked on this technology.

There was only one problem: it was illegal. U.S. law explicitly prohibited Nazi officials from immigrating to America–and as many as three-quarters of the scientists in question had been committed Nazis.

Data-Points:

Convinced that German scientists could help America’s postwar efforts, President Harry Truman agreed in September 1946 to authorize “Project Paperclip,” a program to bring selected German scientists to work on America’s behalf during the “Cold War”

However, Truman expressly excluded anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Naziism or militarism.”

The War Department’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) conducted background investigations of the scientists. In February 1947, JIOA Director Bosquet Wev submitted the first set of scientists’ dossiers to the State and Justice Departments for review.

The Dossiers were damning. Samauel Klaus, the State Departments representative on the JIOA board, claimed that all the scientists in this first batch were “ardent Nazis.” Their visa requests were denied.

Wev was furious. He wrote a memo warning that “the best interests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in ‘beating a dead Nazi horse.'” He also declared that the return of these scientists to Germany, where they could be exploited by America’s enemies, presented a “far greater security threat to this country than any former Nazi affiliations which they may have had or even any Nazi sympathies that they may still have.”

When the JIOA formed to investigate the backgrounds and form dossiers on the Nazis, the Nazi Intelligence leader Reinhard Gehlen met with the CIA director Allen Dulles. Dulles and Gehlen hit it off immediatly. Gehlen was a master spy for the Nazis and had infiltrated Russia with his vast Nazi Intelligence network. Dulles promised Gehlen that his Intelligence unit was safe in the CIA.

Apparently, Wev decided to sidestep the problem. Dulles had the scientists dossier’s re-written to eliminate incriminating evidence. As promised, Allen Dulles delivered the Nazi Intelligence unit to the CIA, which later opened many umbrella projects stemming from Nazi mad research. ( MK-ULTRA / ARTICHOKE , OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX )

Military Intelligence “cleansed” the files of Nazi references. By 1955, more than 760 German scientists had been granted citizenship in the U.S. and given prominent positions in the American scientific community. Many had been longtime members of the Nazi party and the Gestapo, had conducted experiments on humans at concentration camps, had used slave labor, and had committed other war crimes.

In a 1985 expose in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Linda Hunt wrote that she had examined more than 130 reports on Project Paperclip subjects–and every one “had been changed to eliminate the security threat classification.”

President Truman, who had explicitly ordered no committed Nazis to be admitted under Project Paperclip, was evidently never aware that his directive had been violated. State Department archives and the memoirs of officials from that era confirm this. In fact, according to Clare[nce] Lasby’s book [Project] Paperclip , project officials “ covered their designs with such secrecy that it bedeviled their own President; at Potsdam he denied their activities and undoubtedly enhanced Russian suspicion and distrust ,” quite possibly fueling the Cold War even further.

A good example of how these dossiers were changed is the case of Wernher von Braun. A September 18, 1947, report on the German rocket scientist stated, “Subject is regarded as a potential security threat by the Military Governor.”

The following February, a new security evaluation of Von Braun said, “No derogatory information is available on the subject…It is the opinion of the Military Governor that he may not constitute a security threat to the United States.”

Here are a few of the 700 suspicious characters who were allowed to immigrate through Project Paperclip.

ARTHUR RUDOLPH

During the war, Rudolph was operations director of the Mittelwerk factory at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camps, where 20,000 workers died from beatings, hangings, and starvation. Rudolph had been a member of the Nazi party since 1931; a 1945 military file on him said simply: “100% Nazi, dangerous type, security threat..!! Suggest internment.”

But the JIOA’s final dossier on him said there was “nothing in his records indicating that he was a war criminal or and ardent Nazi or otherwise objectionable.” Rudolph became a US citizen and later designed the Saturn 5 rocket used in the Apollo moon landings. In 1984, when his war record was finally investigated, he fled to West Germany.

WERNHER VON BRAUN

From 1937 to 1945, von Braun was the technical director of the Peenemunde rocket research center, where the V-2 rocket –which devastated England–was developed. As noted previously, his dossier was rewritten so he didn’t appear to have been an enthusiastic Nazi.

Von Braun worked on guided missiles for the U.S. Army and was later director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He became a celebrity in the 1950s and early 1960s, as one of Walt Disney’s experts on the “World of Tomorrow.” In 1970, he became NASA’s associate administrator.

A high-ranking Nazi scientist, Blome told U.S. military interrogators in 1945 that he had been ordered 1943 to experiment with plague vaccines on concentration camp prisoners. He was tried at Nuremberg in 1947 on charges of practicing euthanasia (extermination of sick prisoners), and conducting experiments on humans. Although acquitted, his earlier admissions were well known, and it was generally accepted that he had indeed participated in the gruesome experiments.

Two months after his Nuremberg acquittal, Blome was interviewed at Camp David, Maryland, about biological warfare. In 1951, he was hired by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps to work on chemical warfare. His file neglected to mention Nuremberg.

MAJOR GENERAL WALTER SCHREIBER

According to Linda Hunt’s article, the US military tribunal at Nuremberg heard evidence that “Schreiber had assigned doctors to experiment on concentration camp prisoners and had made funds available for such experimentation.” The assistant prosecutor said the evidence would have convicted Schreiber if the Soviets, who held him from 1945 to 1948, had made him available for trial.

Again, Schreiber’s Paperclip file made no mention of this evidence; the project found work for him at the Air Force School of Medicine at Randolph Field in Texas. When columnist Drew Pearson publicized the Nuremberg evidence in 1952, the negative publicity led the JIOA, says Hunt, to arrange “a visa and a job for Schreiber in Argentina, where his daughter was living.” On May 22, 1952, he was flown to Buenos Aires.

HERMANN BECKER-FREYSING and SIEGFRIED RUFF

These two, along with Blome, were among the 23 defendants in the Nuremberg War Trials “Medical Case.” Becker-Freysing was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for conducting experiments on Dachau inmates, such as starving them, then force-feeding them sea water that had been chemically altered to make it drinkable. Ruff was acquitted (in a close decision) on charges that he had killed as many as 80 Dachau inmates in a low-pressure chamber designed to simulate altitudes in excess of 60,000 feet. Before their trial, Becker-Freysing and Ruff were paid by the Army Air Force to write reports about their grotesque experiments.

GENERAL REINHARD GEHLEN

It was five years after the end of WWII but one of Hitler’s chief intelligence officers was still on the job. From a walled-in compound in Bavaria, General Reinhard Gehlen oversaw a vast network of intelligence agents spying on Russia. His top aides were Nazi zealots who had committed some of the most notorious crimes of the war. Gehlen and his SS united were hired, and swiftly became agents of the CIA when they revealed their massive records on the Soviet Union to the US.

Gehlen derived much of his information from his role in one of the most terrible atrocities of the war: the torture, interrogation and murder by starvation of some four million Soviet prisoners. Prisoners who refused to cooperate were often tortured or summarily executed. May were executed even after they had given information, while others were simply left to starve to death. As a result, Gehlend and members of his organization maneuvered to make sure they were captured by advancing American troops rather than Russians, who would have executed them immediatly.

Two months before Germany surrendered in 1945, the Gehlen organization made its move. “Gehlen and a small group of his most senior officers carefully microfilmed the vast holding on the USSR in the military section of the German army’s general staff. They packed the film in watertight steel drums and secretly buried it in a remote mountain meadow scattered throughout the Austrian Alps.

General William Donovan and Allen Dulles of the CIA were tipped off about Gehlen’s surrender and his offer of Russian intelligence in exchange for a job. The CIA was soon jockeying with military intelligence for authority over Gehlen’s microfilmed records–and control of the German spymaster. Dulles arranged for a private intelligence facility in West Germany to be established, and named it the Geheln Organization. Gehlen promised not to hire any former SS, SD, or Gestapo members; he hired them anyway, and the CIA did not stop him. Two of Gehlen’s early recruits were Emil Augsburg and Dr. Franz Six, who had been part of mobile killing squads, which killed Jews, intellectuals, and Soviet partisans wherever they found them. Other early recruits included Willi Krichbaum, senior Gestapo leader for southeastern Europe, and the Gestapo chiefs of Paris and Kiel, Germany.

With the encouragement of the CIA, Gehlen Org (Licio Gelli) set up “rat lines” to get Nazi war criminals out of Europe so they wouldn’t be prosecuted. By setting up transit camps and issuing phony passports, the Gehlen Org helped more than 5,000 Nazis leave Europe and relocate around the world, especially in South and Central America. There, mass murderers like Klaus Barbie (the butcher of Lyons) helped governments set up death squads in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and elsewhere.

KLAUS BARBIE

Known as the Nazi butcher of Lyons, France during World War II, Barbie was part of the SS which was responsible for the and death of thousands of French people under the Germany occupation.

HEINRICH RUPP

Some of Rupp’s best work was done for the CIA, after he was imported in Operation Paperclip. Rupp has been convicted of bank fraud. He was an operative for the CIA and is deeply involved in the Savings and Loan scandals. A federal jury has indicated they believe testimony that Rupp, the late CIA Director William Casey – then Reagan’s campaign manager, and Donald Gregg, now U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, flew with George Bush to Paris in 1980, during the election in which Bush was on the ticket with Ronald Reagan. The testimony states that three meetings were held on October 19 and 20 at the Hotel Florida and Hotel Crillion. The subject? According to the court testimony, the meetings were to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign by delaying the release of American hostages in Iran. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, right after Reagan and Bush were sworn into office. Iran was promised return of its frozen assets in the United States and the foundation for the Iran- Contra deal was set into motion.

LICIO GELLI

Head of a 2400 member secret Masonic Lodge, P2, a neo-fascist organization, in Italy that catered to only the elite, Gelli had high connections in the Vatican, even though he was not a Catholic. P2’s membership is totally secret and not even available to its Mother Lodge in England. Gelli was responsible for providing Argentina with the Exocet missile. He was a double agent for the CIA and the KGB. He assisted many former Nazi high officials in their escape from Europe to Central America. He had close ties with the Italian Mafia. Gelli was a close associate of Benito Mussolini. He was also closely affiliated with Roberto Calvi, head of the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank. Calvi was murdered. Gelli’s secret lodge consisted of extremely important people, including armed forces commanders, secret service chiefs, head of Italy’s financial police, 30 generals, eight admirals, newspaper editors, television and top business executives and key bankers – including Calvi. Licio Gelli and others in P2 were behind the assasination of Pope John Paul I.

The central figure in Europe and South America that linked the CIA, Masonic Lodge, Vatican, ex-Nazis and several South American governments, the Italian government and several international banks was Licio Gelli. He, with Klaus Barbie and Heinrich Rupp, met with Ronald R. Rewald in Uruguay to arrange for the Argentine purchase of the French-made Exocet missile, used in the Falkland Island attack to kill british soldiers.

Who is Gelli and why was he so important?

To understand Gelli, one must understand the complex post war years of Europe. The biggest threat to Europe in pre-war times was Communism – it was the great fear of Communism that gave birth to the Fascists and the Nazis. Though both sides were dreaded, the Fascists represented right-wing government, while the Communist represent left-wing government. It was the right-wing that the United States and the Catholic Church desired over Communism – because Communism would destroy the capitalistic system. This is why the CIA and the Vatican had go through with Operation Paperclip. The Nazis had massive amounts of Soviet intelligence, had infiltrated Communist partisans, and were in no way going to be given up to the Soviet Union.

Gelli worked both sides. He helped to found the Red Brigade, spied on Communist partisans and worked for the Nazis at the same time, a double agent. He helped establish the Rat Line, which assisted the flight of high ranking Nazi officials from Europe to South America, with passports supplied by the Vatican and with the full acknowledgment and blessing of the United States intelligence community. While on one hand, the U.S. participated in the war crime tribunals of key Nazi officials and maintained an alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, secretly, the U.S. was preparing for the cold war and needed the help of Nazis in the eventual struggle the U.S. would have with the Soviet Union. Gelli’s agreement with U.S. intelligence to spy on the Communists after the war was instrumental in saving his life. He was responsible for the murder and torture of hundreds of Yugoslavian partisans.

The Vatican provided support to Nazis and Fascists because the Communists were the real threat to the Church’s survival. The Italian Communists would have taxed the Church’s vast holdings and the Church has had a dismal experience with Communist governments throughout the world – where religious freedom was stamped out.

Gelli was well connected with the Vatican from the days of the Rat Line and he worked for American intelligence, as well. Gelli formed the P-2 Masonic Lodge-which did not follow the direction of any Grand Lodge-and it was supplied with a sum of $10 million a month by the CIA. Its membership was a Who’s Who in the intelligence, military and Italian community. So prominent was Gelli’s influence, that he was even a guest of honor at the 1981 inauguration of President Ronald Reagan.

Gelli used blackmail in order to gain prominent members of his P-2 lodge, its membership is estimated at 2400 members, including 300 of the most powerful men in the Western World.. He was a close friend of Pope Paul VI, Juan Peron of Argentina, Libyan Dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, and many high officials in the Italian and American governments – he is also reported to have had some financial dealings with the George Bush for President campaign.

Gelli and his P-2 lodge had staggering connections to banking, intelligence and diplomatic passports. The CIA poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Italy in the form of secret subsidies for political parties, labor unions and communications businesses. At the same time the Agency continued its relationship with far- right and violent elements as a back-up should a coup be needed to oust a possible Communist government. This covert financing was exposed by the Prime Minister of Italy in a speech to Parliament. He indicates that more than 600 people in Italy still remain on the payroll of the CIA. Licio Gelli was an ardent Nazi and a perfect asset of the CIA. As part of Reinhard Gehlen’s intelligence team, he had excellent contacts. Licio was the go between for the CIA and the Vatican through his P2 Lodge.

Project Paperclip was stopped in 1957, when West Germany protested to the U.S. that these efforts had stripped it of “scientific skills.” There was no comment about supporting Nazis. Paperclip may have ended in 1957, but as you can see from Licio Gelli and his international dealings with the CIA in Italy/P2, and Heinrich Rupp with his involvement in October Surprise, the ramifications of Paperclip are world-wide. The Nazis became employed CIA agents, engaging in clandestine work with the likes of George Bush, the CIA, Henry Kissinger, and the Masonic P2 lodge. This is but one of the results of Operation Paperclip. Another umbrella project that was spawned from Paperclip was MK-ULTRA.

A secret laboratory was established and funded by CIA director, Allen Dulles in Montreal, Canada at McGill University in the Allen Memorial Institute headed by psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. For the next several years Dr. Ewen Cameron waged his private war in Canada. What is ironic about Dr. Cameron is that he served as a member of the Nuremberg tribunal who heard the cases against the Nazi doctors.

When it was at its height in drug experiments, operation MK-ULTRA was formed. This was the brainchild of Richard Helms who later came to be a CIA director. It was designed to defeat the “enemy” in its brain-washing techniques. MK-ULTRA had another arm involved in Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) known as MK-DELTA. The “doctors” who participated in these experiments used some of the same techniques as the Nazi “doctors”. Techniques used by Dr. Cameron and previous Nazi scientists include electro shock, sleep deprivation, memory implantation, memory erasure, sensory modification, psychoactive drug experiments, and many more cruel practices.

Project Paperclip brought us MK-ULTRA. Paperclip ultimately brought in key players involved in the Assassination of Pope 1, October Surprise (sabotage of Carter’s peace talks), and a great many other things still classified to this day. The results of Project Paperclip were devastating, and very far reaching. I guess that is what you would expect from collaborating with Nazis.

This research shows that the OSS/CIA that was formed in the National Security Act, the same agency that employed hundreds of Nazis, has been in alliance with the Vatican through various Agency connections such as Licio Gelli. The CIA/Vatican alliance that Assassinated Pope John Paul 1, JFK, and hundreds of dictators of 3rd world countries is the Illuminati.

The Bavarian Illuminati has been around for centuries in one way or another. It’s presence in the 20th century is the direct result of the Nazis. The Nazi connections to the occult and the Bavarian Thule Society were parallel to the American members of 33rd degree Freemasonry. When the Operation Paperclip was successfully executed, the Nazi element of the Bavarian Thule society was fused with the American members of Freemasonry to create the Illuminati.

Operation Paperclip, MK-ULTRA, October Surprise, and George Bush are all facets of the Illuminati, a group whose ideals are rooted in the occult, and dedicated to world domination.

Soon after the American Revolution, John Robinson, a professor of rural philosophy at Edinburgh University in Scotland and member of a Freemason lodge, said that he was asked to join the Illuminati. After studying the group, he concluded that the purposes of the Illuminati were not compatible with his beliefs.

In 1798, he published a book called Proofs Of A Conspiracy , which states:

“An association has been formed for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments and overturning all the existing governments…. The leaders would rule the World with uncontrollable power, while all the rest would be employed as tools of the ambition of their unknown superiors.”

The CIA and the Vatican have rooted out all the religious establishments in the world. The CIA has overthrown and set up dictators under their control all over the world. The CIA and the Vatican have fulfilled the purpose of the Illuminati. The CIA and the Vatican are the Illuminati.

Bibliography:

• It’s a Conspiracy! Michael Litchfield, Earthworks Press
• Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War , Clarence Lasby, Scribner (February, 1975) 1975
• Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 , Linda Hunt, St Martins Pr; 1st ed edition (April 1, 1991)
• Acid Dreams , Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Grove Press; Rev edition (March 1, 1986)
• Journey Into Madness , Gordon Thomas, Bantam; Reprint edition (May 1, 1990)
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• Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans , Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, Mcgraw-Hill (September 1, 1989)
• In God’s Name, An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I , by David A.Yallop, Bantam Dell Pub Group (Trd) (June 1, 1984)
• The Crimes of Patriots – A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA by Jonathan Kwitny, W W Norton & Co Inc (August 1, 1987)
• Mengele: The Complete Story , by Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Cooper Square Press; New Ed edition (October, 2000)
• Blowback, America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War , by Christopher Simpson, Grove Pr; 1st edition (March 1, 1988)
• “Jury Says Story of Reagan-Bush Campaign Deal With Iran Is True,” San Francisco Chronicle May 5, 1990.
• “Hawaii Scheme Cost Napans $500.000,” Napa Register October 3, 1983.
• The Vatican Connection by Richard Hammer, Henry Holt & Co; 1st ed edition (September 1, 1982)
• The Great Heroin Coup, Drug’s, Intelligence & International Fascism by Henrik Kruger, Black Rose Books (October 1, 2000)
• The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection , by Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton, Neal Ascherson, Henry Holt & Co; 1st American ed edition (February 1, 1985)
• “The P-2 Time Bomb Goes Off,” The Economist , May 1984

Read Annie’s book:

In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich’s scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis’ once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler’s scientists and their families to the United States.

Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?

Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich’s ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century.

In this definitive, controversial look at one of America’s most strategic, and disturbing, government programs, Jacobsen shows just how dark government can get in the name of national security.

Chronological History of Events Related to Operation Paperclip