Nazi Scientists in America: Operation Paperclip

American History Hit

This episode explores Operation Paperclip, the covert U.S. program that recruited over 1,500 German and Austrian scientists and engineers after World War II to accelerate American technological and military capabilities during the Cold War. Host Don

Key takeaways

• Operation Paperclip originally targeted a small group of scientists but expanded to roughly 1,600 personnel due to Cold War competition with the USSR.
• Wernher von Braun oversaw V-2 rocket production at Dora-Mittelbau, where thousands of concentration camp prisoners died from malnutrition, disease, and execution.

Main topics

• Operation Paperclip origins and expansion
• Cold War scientific race against the Soviet Union

Notable quotes

"He thought that whoever will pay me to build my rockets, that will be my benefactor... he was willing to take the support, the logistical and financial and political support of the Nazis in order to further his scientific goals."

Conclusion

The episode serves as a critical examination of how pragmatic Cold War ambitions and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past. alive. Speaker 3 (0:34) At the end of World War II, so many cities and nations are physical and economic ruins. Around the world, more than 60 million people have died. Millions more are displaced. Across Europe, especially in Germany, there are shortages of, well, everything. But for a group of Germans who faithfully served the Nazi regime, a group that will eventually number in the thousands, the end of the war means something else entirely. Their lives will be transformed, in many ways for the better. Some are directly implicated in the Nazi war crimes, for which others will be severely punished, even put to death. Yet these men, of all people, are plucked from the wreckage and given new lives in the land of the free. in an America determined to harness their unique scientific and technological expertise to prepare for a new world order and a new kind of war. Speaker 3 (1:35) Hi everyone, welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Guided missiles, jet engines, aerospace medicine, advanced submarine technology. In World War II, Nazi Germany had developed all of them and were far ahead in many cases. And as the war ended, the United States wanted the people who possessed the knowledge and expertise. Under a top-secret program called Operation Paperclip, the U.S. set out to bring those scientists and engineers to America. But who were these guys? What did they do during the war? And how much of their dark past was America willing to overlook? Joining me to discuss this is Eric Lischblau. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who worked for decades at The New York Times and The L.A. Times. And he authored the best-selling book, The Nazis Next Door, How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men, what we will discuss today. Speaker 3 (2:46) Hello, Eric. Thanks for joining me. Really appreciate the time. My pleasure. Thank you, Don. At the conclusion of World War II, it's a total collapse for the Axis powers, obviously. Allied takeover of Berlin, widespread laying down of arms. There's VE Day, victory in Europe officially happens on May 8th, 1945. Japan, September 2nd, a month after the bombs are dropped. Italy has already surrendered back in 1943. All this is happening, and the Allies have to set up what's called the denazification program. Explain what that means, denazification. Speaker 2 (3:20) Well, in theory, it was the intent of reading the now-occupied Germany of all of the extremist Nazi elements who had served under Hitler. It, in practice, did not quite reach its conclusion. It was a fairly intense effort, but there were certainly elements of... of the Third Reich that continued to exist both inside and outside Germany, despite that massive denazification effort. Speaker 3 (3:46) We all know about the Nuremberg trials, but those are for the leadership and the high-ranking officers. Eventually, 177 Nazis are tried at Nuremberg and then the secondary Nuremberg trials. And thousands are tried in lower German courts. What about the rest? What happens to most Nazis at that point? Speaker 2 (4:05) A lot of them scattered to the wind, really, and saw the writing on the wall even before the final fall of the Third Reich in spring of 1945. And some fled within Europe, some fled to South America, some fled even to Australia. And a large chunk, really more than many people realized for years and years, came to the United States. They came really in three different ways. They came either just slipping through the cracks of immigration, because there was a massive immigration intake into the U.S. from Eastern Europe, from survivors of occupied Nazi countries. And it was fairly easy for lots of ex-Nazis from... low-ranking camp guards up to commandants and senior Nazi officers just slip in, just not with any great difficulty disguising their history and posing as war refugees. But then you also had the element of both spies and scientists coming into the U.S. and working for the U.S., unlike that first group of immigrants who lived out their life in the United States without any real attention, for the most part. But you had, under Operation Paperclip, you had 60 Nazi scientists who were brought into the United States were really courted by the War Department at that time and by senior U.S. officials. And they were seen as a way for the U.S. to exploit their knowledge of the Nazis' great war machine, which had been pretty darn successful for the early stages of the war with technology, especially in the air, bombing raids and missile programs that none of the Allies had. And then there's a third group, which was the spies who were not scientists. They weren't even good spies, to be honest, in most of these cases, who the U.S. hired as part of what became the CIA later, a few years after the war, to, for the most part, spy on Russia, which, of course, had been our ally during the war. But there was already a sense that was a very fractured relationship and soon became the target of the Cold War and the tensions there. And there was a feeling that No one knew the Russians better than the Germans because they hated each other so much. And the enemy of your enemy is your friend. So we hired as many as a thousand spies working as part of the Cold War, ex-Nazi senior officers. These weren't camp guards. These were people who had been part of the German intelligence operation. And for the most part, they were really either bumbling fools who were not very good at espionage or were... knowingly taking advantage of the U.S. reliance on them and the money that was being provided along with alcohol and cigars and all sorts of kutcherbots and providing almost nothing of any great intelligence value for the most part, while, of course, the U.S. intelligence helped to whitewash their past ties to the Nazi regime. These were not ex-Nazis now working at spies. These were boilerplate people who had officially nothing to do with wartime atrocities. It Speaker 3 (7:14) is a phase of World War II and then early Cold War history that escapes a lot of folks, that there was this transitional phase, institutional transitional phase, where America really retooled itself to fight a different kind of war with an amazing amount of work being done in a short period of time, if I'm not wrong, right? About 1944, this whole thing starts? Speaker 2 (7:35) Yes, the Cold War was... pivoting really on a dime to the new enemy, as strange in some way as that sounds, since we had been in this awkward but still significant partnership with Russia for the entirety of the war. But they were seen as almost the enemy even before the German surrender. And that was the immediate target of men like Alan Dulles, who... was at OSS at that time and a very influential figure in fighting that Cold War. In fact, he was, even before the end of the war, already making plans and, in fact, meeting with Nazis in beginning and, again, at least a year before the end of the war to cultivate them as operatives and agents in what he foresaw correctly would be this new Cold War against Russia. So there were officially supposed to be no... talks of surrender or negotiations with the Nazis, especially given just the magnitude of the atrocities and horrors that they had committed. Yet he held secret negotiations with some of their top commanders, especially those in Italy, about... bridging the gap and relying on them. And in fact, he then became a key part of what became Operation Paperclip in terms of putting that into motion. And the War Department was talking, again, starting in around late 1944 or even mid-1944, when it looked like Victory was likely, certainly not assured, but likely for the U.S. at that point, that they wanted to bring some, and that's important, it was supposed to be originally a small number of scientists, perhaps to the U.S. as part of what became Operation Paperclip later. And there was resistance from the get-go during the war from the State Department. We saw this as basically a deal with the devil. and resisted that in internal memos and correspondence, said that this was a horrible idea, legally, diplomatically, morally, and otherwise. And not only did it happen anyway at the insistence of people at the War Department, but it grew enormously, what was supposed to be a fairly small, discrete program of... perhaps a few dozen or so scientists, eventually bloomed to 1,600 scientists. And some of them, to be honest, weren't even really scientists. They were, for instance, the administrators at some of the horrible slave labor camps that the Nazis used to build the V-2 missiles. They had no scientific knowledge or reason to be coming to the U.S. They had the logistical knowledge of how to put together these incredible missiles that Hitler had used. It was Speaker 3 (10:17) a general recognition towards 1944 that the Germans were way ahead and they were proving it over and over again in so many different quarters, certainly in science and certainly in rocketry. And that understanding was percolating through the intelligence community, especially, obviously. But it also had to sort of retrain the diplomatic circles in that same regard. But it was that central knowledge that, whoa, these guys, we're going to defeat them, but they have already... set a new benchmark for what's possible in these regards. So we need a program that's going to get them, especially from the Russians, to keep them from the Russians getting them, but also to get them on our side and start working on this new science that's happening. And that was essentially Operation Overcast, right? It was first called that? Speaker 2 (11:02) Yes. Yes, it was called that initially, and then it switched to Operation Paperclip. which, according to the reports at the time, was a result of literally taking a paperclip and taking their old Nazi files and paperclipping them together with their new U.S. immigration status, and in the process, really wiping out, whitewashing their true Nazi records