In the summer of 1945, the war in Europe was over. The Nazi regime was finished. The trials were coming. And the United States government was quietly rounding up the best scientific minds the Third Reich had produced — and offering them a deal.

New identities. New jobs. American citizenship. A chance to keep working.

The program was called Operation Paperclip. Over the following decade, it brought more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States. Many of them had been members of the Nazi Party. Some had designed weapons using slave labor from concentration camps. One — Wernher von Braun — had done both, and would go on to build the rockets that put Americans on the moon.

The Recruitment Drive

The original program, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), was meant to target only scientists with no significant Nazi ties. That standard lasted about five minutes. The US Army wanted Werner von Braun. The Air Force wanted aerodynamics engineers. The CIA wanted intelligence analysts who had worked on Soviet operations. The State Department's objections were systematically overridden.

The fix was simple and cynical: officials at the JIOA rewrote the dossiers. Incriminating references to Party membership, SS rank, or concentration camp connections were removed or softened. The cleaned-up files went to President Truman for approval. He signed off, having been told the men were clean.

They were not clean.

The Scientists

Von Braun is the most famous case. He had been an SS Sturmbannführer (major) who personally toured the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where V-2 rockets were built by enslaved prisoners under conditions so brutal that more people died building the V-2 than were ever killed by it. He later claimed he had no choice. His American handlers chose to believe him.

Other recruits included Kurt Blome, who had run the Nazi biological warfare program and was acquitted at Nuremberg for lack of evidence — and was subsequently hired by the US Army Chemical Corps. Walter Schreiber, former Surgeon General of the German Army, who had overseen medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, was brought to the US before journalists identified him and forced his departure to Argentina.

Arthur Rudolph, who had run the Mittelwerk factory where V-2s were assembled using slave labor, became a senior NASA engineer and received the Distinguished Service Medal before his wartime record was fully investigated. He renounced his citizenship in 1984 rather than face prosecution.

What They Built

The Paperclip scientists were not marginal figures. They were central to the postwar American military and scientific establishment. Von Braun led the team that built the Jupiter-C rocket used for America's first satellite, then the Saturn V that carried Apollo to the moon. Paperclip engineers contributed to the US ballistic missile program, jet aircraft development, and early space research.

The Soviet Union ran an identical program — Operation Osoaviakhim — sweeping up their own share of German expertise. The Cold War was, in part, a competition between two countries armed with the same German scientists.

The Cover-Up

Operation Paperclip remained classified until 1974. The moral compromises at its core — that the US government knowingly harbored war criminals, falsified records, and lied to its own president — were not publicly acknowledged for decades. When they finally were, the official line was that the strategic necessity of the Cold War justified the decision.

That argument has never been fully settled. The scientists were real. The rockets were real. The concentration camps were also real, and the people who died in them did not get new names and American citizenship.

"It was a difficult moral choice. But we didn't have the luxury of letting the Soviets get them first." — common justification, never fully accepted by the families of slave laborers.

Verdict

CONFIRMED. Operation Paperclip is thoroughly documented through declassified JIOA files, Congressional investigations, and the scientists' own records. Annie Jacobsen's 2014 book Operation Paperclip, based on thousands of declassified documents, is the definitive account.