Operation Paperclip: How America Recruited Nazi Scientists After World War II

By Cade Shadowlight 

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Operation Paperclip was the codename for a secret U.S. intelligence program that, between 1945 and 1959, recruited more than 1,600 German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and technicians, many of them former Nazis and SS members. They were put to work for the American military and intelligence agencies. Launched in the final months of World War II and accelerated after Germany’s surrender, the operation’s original goal was to deny valuable scientific talent to the Soviet Union and keep it out of French or British hands. What began as a temporary wartime measure quickly morphed into permanent resettlement, complete with new identities, scrubbed backgrounds, and immunity from prosecution for war crimes.

The most famous recruit was Wernher von Braun, the brilliant rocket scientist who designed the V-2 missile that terrorized London (killing thousands of civilians with slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp). Von Braun and roughly 120 of his team were brought to Fort Bliss, Texas, and later to Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the rockets that eventually put Americans on the Moon under NASA. Other Paperclip scientists worked on jet fighters (Messerschmitt designers), nerve agents and chemical weapons (IG Farben chemists), aviation medicine (former Dachau experimenters), and even the CIA’s early MKUltra mind-control program. To make recruitment possible, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) deliberately falsified or omitted incriminating records, rewriting biographies to erase Nazi Party membership and SS ranks.

The program operated in near-total secrecy. Immigration laws, presidential directives against admitting former Nazis, and the ongoing Nuremberg trials were quietly circumvented. When journalists or Jewish organizations raised alarms, the Army and State Department stonewalled or denied everything. Declassified documents released decades later revealed that some recruits had directly participated in slave-labor programs, human experimentation, or the Einsatzgruppen death squads. One particularly notorious case was Arthur Rudolph, von Braun’s production chief, who was later forced to leave the U.S. in 1984 after evidence showed he personally approved hangings at the Mittelwerk V-2 factory.

Paperclip’s legacy is double-edged: it undeniably accelerated American rocketry, aviation, and space exploration by a decade or more, but it also meant that men who built weapons on the bones of concentration-camp prisoners were rewarded with comfortable suburbs, U.S. citizenship, and parades. The operation set a Cold War precedent that moral compromise was acceptable if it meant beating the Soviets, and it foreshadowed later programs like MKUltra (see my previous article), which eagerly employed some of the same ex-Nazi researchers.

For Further Reading

1. Annie Jacobsen – Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (2014) – The most comprehensive and best-sourced modern account.
2. Eric Lichtblau – The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (2014) – Pulitzer-winning journalist on the broader cover-up and the human cost.
3. Linda Hunt – Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945–1990 (1991) – Classic exposé that forced many of the original declassifications.