At the close of WWII, US officials and Allied countries discovered Germany had developed technological superiority far beyond anything previously imagined. How did that happen? Twenty thousand scientists in Nazi Germany had revolutionized the weapons of war. They had Vril technology and aircraft that could zoom around our fighters like they were standing still. They were called foo fighters. German-speaking American spies infiltrated their ranks and collected data. Reports written by these Allied investigators described the Germans’ astonishing achievements and superb inventions.

Russia, France, Britain, and the United States began transporting German experts to their respective countries for interrogation. This marks the beginning of the Cold War. US officials were determined to keep the scientists responsible for Germany’s scientific supremacy of our Russian hands. They aimed to gain a huge technological lead over Russia, so in the name of national interest, the USA began recruiting Nazi scientists.

In 1946, President Truman authorized Project Paperclip, a program designed to bring selected German scientists to work for the United States during the Cold War. The War Department’s Joint Intelligence Agency (JOIA) was to conduct background checks on the scientists. The JOIA, CIA, and Army intelligence concealed incriminating information about the Germans they were hiring. Many of the 1600 Germans and their dependents were deeply involved in Nazi society during the war. US officials were determined to recruit these men and cleansed and re-write their information to eliminate incriminating evidence. To identify the German officials, they put an ordinary paperclip on their personnel files–thus the origin of the operation’s name.

According to William Mills Tompkins who wrote: “Selected by Extraterrestrials” about his work in the military with the Vril ladies. They were more than secretaries, as they had other-worldly telepathic abilities and knowledge about physics that left all the other scientists baffled, which prompted Americans to send German-speaking Americans to Germany as spies. While Maria Orsic was in Germany helping the Nazis develop their spacecraft, Vril women were simultaneously in the USA helping America.

Are the Inner Earthers Anunnaki? Why were they helping both sides in WWII? What made them decide to back the United States since WWII? Did the war really end or did we just call a truce, shift the dynamics and defer it to another day? If the Anunnaki are behind all this, why have they never learned how to stop wars? They’ve been at it for hundreds of thousands of years. Or is there some benefit for maintaining the Earth in a perpetual state of wars–little, big, regional and global?

What Was Operation Paperclip?

Project_Paperclip_Nazis_in_America

From https://www.history.com/news/what-was-operation-paperclip

This controversial top-secret U.S. intelligence program brought Nazi German scientists to America to harness their brain power for Cold War initiatives.

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 Allied forces seized German research facilities. One enlightening discovery—recovered from a toilet at Bonn University—was the Osenberg List: a catalog of scientists and engineers that had worked 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. https://f810bf9b59d4b8b7f2b7f47575356b9d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

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.

Project Paperclip

Click to access Project_Paperclip_Nazis_in_America.pdf

Operation Paperclip

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kurt H. Debus, a former V-2 rocket scientist who became a NASA director, sitting between U.S. PresidentJohn F. Kennedy and U.S. Vice PresidentLyndon B. Johnson in 1962 at a briefing at Blockhouse 34, Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex.

Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 Nazi German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959. Conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), it was largely carried out by special agents of the U.S. Army‘s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). Many of these personnel were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party.^[1][2]

The primary purpose for Operation Paperclip was U.S. military advantage in the Soviet–American Cold War, and the Space Race. In a comparable operation, the Soviet Union relocated more than 2,200 German specialists—a total of more than 6,000 people including family members—with Operation Osoaviakhim during one night on October 22, 1946.^[3]

In February 1945, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) set up T-Force, or Special Sections Subdivision, which grew to over 2,000 personnel by June. T-Force examined 5,000 German targets with a high priority on synthetic rubber and oil catalysts, new designs in armored equipment, V-2 (rocket) weapons, jet and rocket propelled aircraft, naval equipment, field radios, secret writing chemicals, aero medicine research, gliders, and “scientific and industrial personalities”.^[4]

When large numbers of German scientists began to be discovered in late April, Special Sections Subdivision set up the Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section to manage and interrogate them. Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section established a detention center, DUSTBIN, first in Paris and later in Kransberg Castle outside Frankfurt. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) established the first secret recruitment program, called Operation Overcast, on July 20, 1945, initially “to assist in shortening the Japanese war and to aid our postwar military research”.^[5] The term “Overcast” was the name first given by the German scientists’ family members for the housing camp where they were held in Bavaria.^[6] In late summer 1945, the JCS established the JIOA, a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Community, to directly oversee Operation Overcast and later Operation Paperclip.^[7] The JIOA representatives included the army’s director of intelligence, the chief of naval intelligence, the assistant chief of Air Staff-2 (air force intelligence), and a representative from the State Department.^[8] In November 1945, Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip by Ordnance Corps officers, who would attach a paperclip to the folders of those rocket experts whom they wished to employ in America.^[6]

In a secret directive circulated on September 3, 1946, President Truman officially approved Operation Paperclip and expanded it to include 1,000 German scientists under “temporary, limited military custody”.^[9][10][11]

Contents

• 1Osenberg List
• 2Identification
• 3Capture and detention
• 4Arrivals
• 5Major awards (in the United States)
• 6Scientific accomplishments
• 7Controversy and investigations
• 8Key recruits
• 9Similar operations
• 10See also
• 11Notes
• 12References
• 13Further reading
• 14External links

Osenberg List[edit]

In the later part of World War II, Germany was at a logistical disadvantage, having failed to conquer the USSR with Operation Barbarossa (June–December 1941), and its drive for the Caucasus (June 1942–February 1943). The failed conquest had depleted German resources, and its military-industrial complex was unprepared to defend the Greater Germanic Reich against the Red Army’s westward counterattack. By early 1943, the German government began recalling from combat a number of scientists, engineers, and technicians; they returned to work in research and development to bolster German defense for a protracted war with the USSR. The recall from frontline combat included 4,000 rocketeers returned to Peenemünde, in northeast coastal Germany.^[12][13]

Overnight, Ph.D.s were liberated from KP duty, masters of science were recalled from orderly service, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics ceased to be truck drivers.— Dieter K. Huzel, Peenemünde to Canaveral

The Nazi government’s recall of their now-useful intellectuals for scientific work first required identifying and locating the scientists, engineers, and technicians, then ascertaining their political and ideological reliability. Werner Osenberg, the engineer-scientist heading the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (Defense Research Association), recorded the names of the politically cleared men to the Osenberg List, thus reinstating them to scientific work.^[14]

In March 1945, at Bonn University, a Polish laboratory technician found pieces of the Osenberg List stuffed in a toilet; the list subsequently reached MI6, who transmitted it to U.S. Intelligence.^[15][16] Then U.S. Army Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, used the Osenberg List to compile his list of German scientists to be captured and interrogated; Wernher von Braun, Germany’s premier rocket scientist, headed Major Staver’s list.^[17]

Identification[edit]

V-2 rocket launching, Peenemünde, on the north-east Baltic German coast. (1943)

In Operation Overcast, Major Staver’s original intent was only to interview the scientists, but what he learned changed the operation’s purpose. On May 22, 1945, he transmitted to the U.S. Pentagon headquarters Colonel Joel Holmes’ telegram urging the evacuation of German scientists and their families, as most “important for [the] Pacific war” effort.^[16] Most of the Osenberg List engineers worked at the Baltic coast German Army Research Center Peenemünde, developing the V-2 rocket. After capturing them, the Allies initially housed them and their families in Landshut, Bavaria, in southern Germany.^[18]

Beginning on July 19, 1945, the U.S. JCS managed the captured ARC rocketeers under Operation Overcast. However, when the “Camp Overcast” name of the scientists’ quarters became locally known, the program was renamed Operation Paperclip in November 1945.^[19] Despite these attempts at secrecy, later that year the press interviewed several of the scientists.^[16][17][20]

Capture and detention[edit]

The Allied zones of occupation in post-war Germany, highlighting the Soviet zone (red), the inner German border (heavy black line), and the zone from which British and American troops withdrew in July 1945 (purple). The provincial boundaries are those of Nazi Germany, before the present Länder (federal states) were established.

Early on, the United States created the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS). This provided the information on targets for the T-Forces that went in and targeted scientific, military, and industrial installations (and their employees) for their know-how. Initial priorities were advanced technology, such as infrared, that could be used in the war against Japan; finding out what technology had been passed on to Japan; and finally to halt the research.

A project to halt the research was codenamed “Project Safehaven”, and it was not initially targeted against the Soviet Union; rather the concern was that German scientists might emigrate and continue their research in countries such as Spain, Argentina or Egypt, all of which had sympathized with Nazi Germany.^[21][22] In order to avoid the complications involved with the emigration of German scientists, the CIOS was responsible for scouting and kidnapping high-profile individuals for the deprivation of technological advancements in nations outside of the US.^[23]

Much U.S. effort was focused on Saxony and Thuringia, which by July 1, 1945, would become part of the Soviet Occupation zone. Many German research facilities and personnel had been evacuated to these states, particularly from the Berlin area. Fearing that the Soviet takeover would limit U.S. ability to exploit German scientific and technical expertise, and not wanting the Soviet Union to benefit from said expertise, the United States instigated an “evacuation operation” of scientific personnel from Saxony and Thuringia, issuing orders such as:

On orders of Military Government you are to report with your family and baggage as much as you can carry tomorrow noon at 1300 hours (Friday, 22 June 1945) at the town square in Bitterfeld. There is no need to bring winter clothing. Easily carried possessions, such as family documents, jewelry, and the like should be taken along. You will be transported by motor vehicle to the nearest railway station. From there you will travel on to the West. Please tell the bearer of this letter how large your family is.

By 1947 this evacuation operation had netted an estimated 1,800 technicians and scientists, along with 3,700 family members.^[24] Those with special skills or knowledge were taken to detention and interrogation centers, such as at Adlerhorst, Germany or one code-named DUSTBIN (located first in Paris and then moved to Kransberg Castle outside Frankfurt) to be held and interrogated, in some cases for months.^{[citation needed]}

A few of the scientists were gathered as a part of Operation Overcast, but most were transported to villages in the countryside where there were neither research facilities nor work; they were provided stipends and forced to report twice weekly to police headquarters to prevent them from leaving. The Joint Chiefs of Staff directive on research and teaching stated that technicians and scientists should be released “only after all interested agencies were satisfied that all desired intelligence information had been obtained from them”.^{[citation needed]}

On November 5, 1947, the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS), which had jurisdiction over the western part of occupied Germany, held a conference to consider the status of the evacuees, the monetary claims that the evacuees had filed against the United States, and the “possible violation by the US of laws of war or Rules of Land Warfare”. The OMGUS director of Intelligence R. L. Walsh initiated a program to resettle the evacuees in the Third World, which the Germans referred to as General Walsh’s “Urwald-Programm” (jungle program); however, this program never matured. In 1948, the evacuees received settlements of 69.5 million Reichsmarks from the U.S., a settlement that soon became severely devalued during the currency reform that introduced the Deutsche Mark as the official currency of western Germany.^[25]

John Gimbel concludes that the United States held some of Germany’s best minds for three years, therefore depriving the German recovery of their expertise.^[26]

Arrivals[edit]

A group of 104 rocket scientists (aerospace engineers) at Fort Bliss, Texas

In May 1945, the U.S. Navy “received in custody” Herbert A. Wagner, the inventor of the Hs 293 missile; for two years, he first worked at the Special Devices Center, at Castle Gould and at Hempstead House, Long Island, New York; in 1947, he moved to the Naval Air Station Point Mugu.^[27]

In August 1945, Colonel Holger Toftoy, head of the Rocket Branch of the Research and Development Division of the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Corps, offered initial one-year contracts to the rocket scientists; 127 of them accepted. In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists (aerospace engineers) arrived at Fort Strong, located on Long Island in Boston harbor: Wernher von Braun, Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, William August Schulze, Eberhard Rees, Wilhelm Jungert, and Walter Schwidetzky.^[16]

Beginning in late 1945, three rocket-scientist groups arrived in the United States for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as “War Department Special Employees”.^{[12]: 27 [19]}

In 1946, the United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists at a Fischer–Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri.^[28]

On June 1, 1949, the Chief of Ordnance of the United States Army designated Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, as the Ordnance Rocket Center, its facility for rocket research and development. On April 1, 1950, the Fort Bliss missile development operation—including von Braun and his team of over 130 Paperclip members—was transferred to Redstone Arsenal.

In early 1950, legal U.S. residency for some of the Project Paperclip specialists was effected through the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico; thus, German scientists legally entered the United States from Latin America.^{[12]: 226 [17]}

Between 1945 and 1952, the United States Air Force sponsored the largest number of Paperclip scientists, importing 260 men, of whom 36 returned to Germany and one (Walter Schreiber) reemigrated to Argentina.^[29]

Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field, Ohio, where the United States had Luftwaffe aircraft and equipment captured under Operation Lusty (Luftwaffe Secret Technology).^[30]

The United States Army Signal Corps employed 24 specialists—including the physicists Georg Goubau, Gunter Guttwein, Georg Hass, Horst Kedesdy, and Kurt Lehovec; the physical chemists Rudolf Brill, Ernst Baars, and Eberhard Both; the geophysicist Helmut Weickmann; the optician Gerhard Schwesinger; and the engineers Eduard Gerber, Richard Guenther, and Hans Ziegler.^[31]

In 1959, 94 Operation Paperclip men went to the United States, including Friedwardt Winterberg and Friedrich Wigand.^[27]

Overall, through its operations to 1990, Operation Paperclip imported 1,600 men as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the US and the UK, valued at $10 billion in patents and industrial processes.^[27][32]

Major awards (in the United States)[edit]

The NASA Distinguished Service Medal is the highest award which may be bestowed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). After more than two decades of service and leadership in NASA, four Operation Paperclip members were awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1969: Kurt Debus, Eberhard Rees, Arthur Rudolph, and Wernher von Braun. Ernst Geissler was awarded the medal in 1973.

The Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award is the highest civilian award given by the United States Department of Defense. After two decades of service, Operation Paperclip member Siegfried Knemeyer was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 1966.

The Goddard Astronautics Award is the highest honor bestowed for notable achievements in the field of astronautics by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).^[33] For their service, three Operation Paperclip members were awarded the Goddard Astronautics Award: Wernher von Braun (1961), Hans von Ohain (1967), and Krafft Arnold Ehricke (1984).

The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, owns and operates the U.S. Space Camp. Several Operation Paperclip members are members of the Space Camp Hall of Fame (which began in 2007): Wernher von Braun (2007), Georg von Tiesenhausen (2007), and Oscar Holderer (2008).

The New Mexico Museum of Space History includes the International Space Hall of Fame. Two Operation Paperclip members are members of the International Space Hall of Fame: Wernher von Braun (1976)^[34] and Ernst Steinhoff (1979).^[35] Hubertus Strughold was inducted in 1978 but removed as a member in 2006. Other closely related members include Willy Ley (1976),^[36] a German-American science writer, and Hermann Oberth (1976),^[37] a German scientist who advised von Braun’s rocket team in the U.S. from 1955 to 1958.

Two lunar craters are named after Paperclip scientists: Debus after Kurt Debus, the first director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and von Braun.

Scientific accomplishments[edit]

Wernher von Braun was chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which enabled human missions to the moon.^[38]

Adolf Busemann was responsible for the swept wing, which improved aircraft performance at high speeds.^[39][40]

Controversy and investigations[edit]

Before his official approval of the program, President Truman, for sixteen months, was indecisive on the program.^[11] Years later in 1963, Truman recalled that he was not in the least reluctant to approve Paperclip; that because of relations with the Soviet Union “this had to be done and was done”.^[41]

Several of the Paperclip scientists were later investigated because of their links with the Nazi Party during the war. Only one Paperclip scientist, Georg Rickhey, was formally tried for any crime, and no Paperclip scientist was found guilty of any crime, in America or Germany. Rickhey was returned to Germany in 1947 to stand at the Dora Trial, where he was acquitted.^[42]

In 1951, weeks after his U.S. arrival, Walter Schreiber was linked by the Boston Globe to human experiments conducted by Kurt Blome at Ravensbrück, and he emigrated to Argentina with the aid of the U.S. military.^[43]

In 1984, Arthur Rudolph, under perceived threat of prosecution relating to his connection—as operations director for V-2 missile production—to the use of forced labor from Mittelbau-Dora at the Mittelwerk, renounced his U.S. citizenship and moved to West Germany, which granted him citizenship.^[44]

For 50 years, from 1963 to 2013, the Strughold Award—named after Hubertus Strughold, The Father of Space Medicine, for his central role in developing innovations like the space suit and space life support systems—was the most prestigious award from the Space Medicine Association, a member organization of the Aerospace Medical Association.^[45] On October 1, 2013, in the aftermath of a Wall Street Journal article published on December 1, 2012, which highlighted his connection to human experiments during WW2, the Space Medicine Association’s Executive Committee announced that the Space Medicine Association Strughold Award had been retired.^[45][46]

Key recruits[edit]

Advisors brought into the United StatesHermann Oberth^{[citation needed]}Aeronautics and rocketryHans Amtmann^[47]Herbert AxsterErich Ball^[48]Oscar Bauschinger^[49]Hermann Beduerftig^[50]Rudi Beichel^[51]Anton Beier^[52]Herbert Bergeler^[53]Magnus von BraunWernher von BraunErnst CzerlinskyTheodor Buchhold [de]Walter Burose^[54]Adolf BusemannGN Constan^[55]Werner DahmKonrad DannenbergKurt H. DebusGerd De Beek^[56]Walter Dornberger – head of rocket programmeGerhard Drawe^[57]Friedrich Duerr^[58]Ernst R. G. EckertOtto Eisenhardt^[59]Krafft Arnold EhrickeAlfred Finzel^[60]Edward Fischel^[61]Karl Fleischer^[62]Anton FlettnerAnselm FranzHerbert Fuhrmann^[63]Ernst GeisslerWerner Gengelbach^[64]Dieter GrauHans Gruene^[65]Herbert Guendel^[66]Fritz Haber^[67]Heinz HaberKarl Hager^[68]Guenther Haukohl^[69]Karl Heimburg^[70]Emil Hellebrand^[71]Gerhard B. Heller^[72]Bruno Helm^[73]Rudolf Hermann^[74]Bruno Heusinger^[75][76]Hans Heuter^[77]Guenther Hintze^[78]Sighard F. HoernerKurt HohenemserOscar HoldererHelmut Horn^[79]Hans Henning Hosenthien [de]Dieter Huzel^[80]Walter JacobiErich Kaschig^[81]Ernst Klauss^[82]Theodore Knacke^[83]Siegfried KnemeyerHeinz-Hermann KoelleGustav Kroll^[84]Willi Kuberg^[85]Werner Kuers^[86]Hermann Kurzweg^[87]Hermann Lange^[88]Hans Lindenberg^[89]Hans Lindenmayer^[90]Alexander Martin Lippisch – aeronautical engineerRobert LusserHans Maus^[91]Helmut Merk^[92]Joseph Michel^[93]Hans Milde^[94]Heinz Millinger^[95]Rudolf Minning^[96]William Mrazek^[97]Hans Multhopp^{[citation needed]}Erich Neubert^[98]Hans von Ohain (designer of German jet engines)Robert Paetz^[99]Hans Palaoro^[100]Kurt Patt^[101]Hans Paul^[102]Fritz Pauli^[103]Arnold Peter^[104]Helmuth Pfaff^[105]Theodor Poppel^[106]Werner Rosinski^[107]Heinrich Rothe^[108]Ludwig RothArthur RudolphFriedrich von Saurma [de]Edgar SchaefferMartin Schilling^[109]Helmut Schlitt^[110]Albert Schuler^[111]August Schulze^[112]Walter Schwidetzky^[113]Ernst SteinhoffWolfgang Steurer^[114]Heinrich StruckErnst StuhlingerBernhard TessmannAdolf ThielGeorg von TiesenhausenWerner Tiller^[115]JG Tschinkel^[116]Arthur Urbanski^[117]Fritz Vandersee^[118]Richard VogtWoldemar Voigt (designer of Messerschmitt P.1101)Werner Voss^[119]Theodor Vowe^[120]Herbert A. WagnerHermann Rudolf Wagner^[121]Hermann Weidner^[122]Georg Rickhey – director of the slave labour Mittelwerk factoryWalter Fritz Wiesemann^[123]Philipp Wolfgang Zettler-Seidel.^[124]

(see List of German rocket scientists in the US).ArchitectureHeinz Hilten^[125] and Hannes Luehrsen.^[126]Electronics – including guidance systems, radar and satellitesWilhelm Angele [de]^[127]Ernst Baars [de]Josef Boehm^[128]Hans FichtnerHans Friedrich^[129]Eduard Gerber^[130]Georg GoubauWalter HaeussermannOtto Heinrich Hirschler^[131]Otto Hoberg^[132]Rudolf Hoelker^[133]Hans HollmannHelmut HölzerHorst Kedesdy^[134]Kurt LehovecKurt Lindner^[135]JW Muehlner^[136]Fritz MuellerJohannes PlendlFritz Karl PreikschatEberhard ReesGerhard Reisig^[137]Harry Ruppe^[138]Heinz SchlickeWerner Sieber^[139]Othmar Stuetzer^[140]Albin Wittmann^[141]Hugo Woerdemann^[142]Albert Zeiler^[143]Hans K. ZieglerMaterial Science (high temperature)Klaus Scheufelen ^[144] and Rudolf Schlidt.^[145]Medicine – including biological weapons, chemical weapons, and space medicineTheodor Benzinger [de], Rudolf Brill [de], Konrad Johannes Karl Büttner, Richard Lindenberg, Ulrich Cameron Luft [de], Walter Schreiber, Hubertus Strughold, Hans Georg Clamann, and Erich Traub.PhysicsGunter Guttein, Gerhard Schwesinger,^[146] Gottfried Wehner, Helmut Weickmann,^[147] and Friedwardt Winterberg.Chemistry and Chemical engineeringHelmut Pichler, Leonard Alberts, Ernst Donath, Josef Guymer,^[148] Hans Schappert, Max Josenhaus, Kurt Bretschneider,^[149] Erich Frese

Similar operations[edit]

• APPLEPIE: Project to capture and interrogate key Wehrmacht, RSHA AMT VI, and General Staff officers knowledgeable of the industry and economy of the USSR.^[150]
• DUSTBIN (counterpart of ASHCAN): An Anglo-American military intelligence operation established first in Paris, then in Kransberg Castle, at Frankfurt.^{[151][152]: 314}
• ECLIPSE (1944): An unimplemented Air Disarmament Wing plan for post-war operations in Europe for destroying V-1 and V-2 missiles.^{[152][153]: 44}
  • Safehaven: US project within ECLIPSE meant to prevent the escape of Nazi scientists from Allied-occupied Germany.^[17]
• Field Information Agency; Technical (FIAT): US Army agency for securing the “major, and perhaps only, material reward of victory, namely, the advancement of science and the improvement of production and standards of living in the United Nations, by proper exploitation of German methods in these fields”; FIAT ended in 1947, when Operation Paperclip began functioning.^[152]: [1]
• On April 26, 1946, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued JCS Directive 1067/14 to General Eisenhower instructing that he “preserve from destruction and take under your control records, plans, books, documents, papers, files and scientific, industrial and other information and data belonging to … German organizations engaged in military research”;^[16]: 185 and that, excepting war-criminals, German scientists be detained for intelligence purposes as required.^[154]
• National Interest/Project 63: Job placement assistance for Nazi engineers at Lockheed, Martin Marietta, North American Aviation, and other aeroplane companies, whilst American aerospace engineers were being laid off work.^[27]
• Operation Alsos, Operation Big, Operation Epsilon, Russian Alsos: Soviet, American and British efforts to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment, and personnel.
• Operation Backfire: A British effort at recovering rocket and aerospace technology, followed by assembling and testing rockets at Cuxhaven.
• Fedden Mission: British mission to gain technical intelligence concerning advanced German aircraft and their propulsion systems.
• Operation Lusty: US efforts to capture German aeronautical equipment, technology, and personnel.
• Operation Osoaviakhim (sometimes transliterated as “Operation Ossavakim”), a Soviet counterpart of Operation Paperclip, involving German technicians, managers, skilled workers and their respective families who were relocated to the USSR in October 1946.^[155]
• Operation Surgeon: British operation for denying German aeronautical expertise to the USSR, and for exploiting German scientists in furthering British research.^[156]
• Special Mission V-2: April–May 1945 US operation, by Maj. William Bromley, that recovered parts and equipment for 100 V-2 missiles from a Mittelwerk underground factory in Kohnstein within the Soviet zone. Major James P. Hamill co-ordinated the transport of the equipment on 341 railroad cars with the 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly Company, from Nordhausen to Erfurt, just before the Soviets arrived.^[157] (See also Operation Blossom, Broomstick Scientists, Hermes project, Operations Sandy and Pushover)
• Target Intelligence Committee: US project to exploit German cryptographers.

Operation Paperclip: The Truth about Bringing Nazi Scientists to America

.March 15, 2020 | by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller From https://aish.com/operation-paperclip-the-truth-about-bringing-nazi-scientists-to-america/

The top-secret program brought 1,600 Nazis to America and whitewashed their past.

A major plotline of the TV show Hunters involves the uncovering of Operation Paperclip, a top-secret program that brought thousands of Nazi officials into the United States and helped them cover up their brutal pasts. The controversial series is fictional, but Operation Paperclip is based on a real program involving United States and other countries actively recruiting Nazi scientists to work on domestic weapons programs.

Origins in World War II

“Operation Paperclip” had its origins while World War II still raged. Starting in 1943, a top secret American military program called the Alsos Mission sent American scientists into Nazi Europe along with Allied troops: their mission was to search for information about the Nazis’ biological, chemical and nuclear programs and to transport that information back to the US.

At first, Alsos officials were able to make contact with Italian and later French scientists who’d worked for the Nazis, who assured the Americans that the Nazis were far from creating advanced non-conventional weapons. Alsos operatives made little progress in uncovering Nazi scientists’ weapons-making secrets.

Their luck changed in late 1944, during protracted fighting in the French town of Strasbourg. While fighting still raged outside, Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch-born scientist working for the Americans under Alsos, made his way to the home of Dr. Eugen Haagen, a senior Nazi scientist who helped plan Nazi Germany’s feared biological weapons program. Haagen had fled just hours earlier, leaving his papers inside his luxurious apartment. With American soldiers guarding them, Dr. Goudsmit and his Alsos team stayed up all night reading through Haagen’s papers by candlelight.

They made for grim reading. “Of the 100 prisoners you sent me,” Dr. Haagen had written to a colleague, “18 died in transport. Only 12 are in a condition suitable for my experiments. I therefore request that you send me another 100 prisoners, between 20 and 40 years of age, who are healthy and in a physical condition comparable to soldiers. Heil Hitler…” This and other papers showed that the Nazis were indeed moving full speed ahead to build potent biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

A group of 104 rocket scientists at Fort Bliss, Texas

The Alsos officials made copious notes, writing down the names of scientists involved in these projects. Their goal wasn’t to bring these scientists to justice for their evil experiments. They were creating a list of scientists to track down, capture and interrogate. The United States was determined to learn what it could do about the diabolical weapons they were inventing.

“One by one, across the Reich,” explains journalist Annie Jacobsen in her book Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Back Bay Books: 2014), “Hitler’s scientists were taken into custody and interrogated.” Two core goals emerged among Allied officers uncovering the extent of the carnage and horrors in Europe created by the Nazi regime. Many sought Nazis to arrest and bring to justice. At the same time, a key US and Allied goal was also to harness Nazi scientists’ technical know-how. “The scale on which science and engineering have been harnessed to the chariot of destruction in Germany is indeed amazing,” noted W.S. Farren, a British aviation expert with the Royal Aircraft Establishment. “There is a tremendous amount to be learnt in Germany at the present time.”

Operation Paperclip

On July 6, 1945, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a top-secret memorandum that was so explosive it was never even shown to President Truman. Titled “Exploitation of German Specialists in Science and Technology in the United States”, it outlined a program for “procurement, utilization and control of specialists” – in other words, a plan to recruit Nazi weapons scientists and bring them to the United States. The Military Intelligence of the War Department, a unit known as G-2, was given control of the program.

The US, as well as Britain, was engaged in an arms race with the Soviet Union. The Cold War was a terrifying time of escalating arms races, and recruiting Nazi weapons experts instead of bringing them to justice was seen as a key way to gain an edge. Still, the program was seen as morally problematic, and officials were keen to shroud it in secrecy.

The program was originally called Operation Overcast. A list called “List 1” included over a hundred German rocket scientists to recruit. Before the Nazi rocket scientists were given permission to move to America, Britain requested access to the scientists to do some rockets experiments of their own with the Nazi experts. One Nazi weapons expert, Arthur Rudolph, later recalled how the Nazis and British weapons experts immeidately formed a friendly bond. One night, a group of British and Nazi rockets experts even got drunk together; Rudolph recalled them standing arm in arm, “apparently comrades now, and lustily singing Wir Fahren gegen England, or ‘We Will March Against England’” (quoted in Operation Paperclip). Far from condemning these Nazis for their actions, it seems that at an early stage, Allied scientists were willing to overlook their crimes and embrace them as colleagues and even friends.

Several of these Nazi rocket scientists who’d worked on that first British experiment were later brought to America. In time, they were joined by hundreds of other weapons experts. Their cases were marked for special consideration by a paperclip in their file. This meant that no matter what crimes they’d committed as Nazis, their cases would be expedited as they were approved for admission to America. Within months, Operation Overcast changed its name to reflect this, becoming Operation Paperclip, that allowed hundreds of ardent Nazis to escape justice and build new lives in the United States.

Arthur Rudolph

Arthur Rudolph, the operations director of the Mittlewerk labor camp and expert in Germany’s powerful V2 rocket systems, was flagged by American officials as a desirable asset to bring to America. (In photo at top of the article, Dr. Wernher von Braun, center, explains the Saturn Launch System to President John F. Kennedy in 1963 as NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans looks on. [NASA])

Mittelwerk was started in 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald. When it was liberated in March 1944, 40,000 prisoners were in the camp. “The noise, dust, and noxious gasses…exacerbated an already catastrophic health situation for the prisoners,” notes the United States Holocaust Museum, of the conditions during the camp’s construction and expansion. “Water was in short supply. The only toilets were oil barrels cut in half with boards over them, but they were too few in number; many relieved themselves in the (underground production) tunnels. The stench became intolerable, and disease and vermin proliferated. Soon, cases of pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid, and dysentery took a dreadful toll, combined with total exhaustion inflicted by 12-hour days of backbreaking labor with poor sleep and minimal equipment…”

Arthur Rudolph – a prime force in the development of the V2 rocket for Nazi Germany.
Photograph: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Approximately 20,000 workers died at the camp. Yet despite the horrendous conditions for the Mittlewerk slave laborers, the factory produced high level technology and weapons. It was this expertise that the United States was willing to do anything to obtain, even ignoring the crimes of a Nazi scientist such as Rudolph.

When he was granted entry to the US under Operation Paperclip, Rudolph was described by American officials in Germany as an “ardent Nazi”. He’d personally overseen slave labor and been present when prisoners were executed. West German and American officials classified him as a war criminal. Yet these accusations were quietly erased from his official file, and Rudolph worked for NASA.

In the 1960s, Rudolph became a key engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, managing teams of scientists working on the Saturn 5 rocket that in 1969 launched the Apollo rocket in the first manned flight to the moon.

Rudolph never made any mention of his previous job as director of Mittelwerk, where his workers were emaciated slaves in Nazi Germany, of course. Thanks to Operation Paperclip, almost nothing was known of Rudolph’s Nazi past until 1979, when the State Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), charged with hunting Nazis who’d hid their past and were living in the United States, was formed.

OSI officials interviewed slave laborers from Mittelwerk and approached Rudolph with an offer: he wouldn’t be charged if he voluntarily left the United States and gave up his US citizenship. He and his wife moved back to Germany, but in 1987 a German court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to try him for war crimes. He tried for years to regain his US citizenship – helped by some former colleagues from NASA – but was unsuccessful. He died in 1996 at the age of 89.

Wernher von Braun

Arthur Rudolph worked at NASA under the leadership of another “Operation Paperclip” recruit, Warner von Braun. Identified as a key asset at the close of the war because of his work on the Nazis’ V2 rocket, Braun was transferred to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a luxurious ski town in Bavaria, for questioning by Allied forces.

Wernher von Braun (center) in 1961 with fellow Operation Paperclip
scientists working on a Saturn rocket.

At first he and his fellow rocket scientists refused to cooperate with their Allied captors, refusing to divulge any scientific information. He knew he held a foolproof bargaining chip: in the waning days of the war, Braun and his coworkers had hidden vital documents in an abandoned salt mine. Braun was determined to trade these papers for a new life in the United States.

After his capture, Braun “posed for endless pictures with individual GIs, in which he beamed, shook hands, pointed inquiringly at medals and otherwise conducted himself as a celebrity rather than a prisoner, treat(ing) our soldiers with the affable condescension of a visiting congressman,” remembered one disgusted American Counterintelligence Corps official (quoted in Operation Paperclip).

Braun was brought to the US in 1945 and for the next fifteen years he worked for the US Army, most notably as chief of the US Army ballistic weapon program. He oversaw teams that developed the Redstone, Jupiter-C, Juno and Pershing missile systems. Under his command, an incredible 120 former Nazi scientists worked on these and other jet systems.

In 1977 Braun even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor.

An affable and charismatic figure, Braun wrote popular books and articles on space flight, and became a well-known figure explaining the burgeoning space program to the American public. In the 1960s, he moved to Huntsville, Alabama, and became Director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where the Saturn space boosters that enabled manned space flight were produced. A beloved figure, in 1977 Braun even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor.

Wernher von Braun and his team in the fall of 1959 in Huntsville, Alabama. Those in the photograph have been identified as Ernst Stuhlinger, Frederick von Saurma, Fritz Mueller, Hermann Weidner, Erich W. Neubert (partially hidden), W.A. Mrazek, Karl Heimburg, Arthur Rudolph, Otto Hoberg, von Braun, Oswald Lange, General Bruce Medaris, Helmut Hoelzer, Hans Maus, E.D. Geissler, Hans Hueter, and George Constan.

Braun acknowledged he’d been a member of the Nazi party, but claimed he’d never been a true believer and had no choice. He insisted that research, not politics, was his passion.

However, there was much more to Braun than this whitewashed version of his history, and the US Army and Operation Paperclip enabled him to evade justice. Far from being an unwilling Nazi, Braun was a member of the feared SS. Instead of being unaware of the horrors of Hitler’s “Final Solution” of murder and destruction, Braun actually visited the Buchenwald concentration camp to personally select workers to become slave laborers in his V2 rocket program.

His SS officer rank and Nazi records were classified by the US Army. For years, until his death in 1977, Braun was able to evade justice. He died in Alexandria, Virginia, a beloved figure. President Carter even issued an official statement after his death: “To millions of Americans, Wernher von Braun’s name was inextricably linked to our exploration of space and to the creative application of technology. Not just the people of our nation, but all the people of the world have profited from his work….”

The many unnamed victims of his torture and forced labor remained forgotten, seemingly erased from history by Operation Paperclip.

Recruiting Agents of Torture

“It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true,” Dr. Leopold Alexander told his wife one day in 1945. Dr. Alexander was a Jewish doctor from Vienna. He’d escaped from Europe before the Holocaust, and made his way to America where worked in psychiatric hospitals in New England, specializing in shellshock and trauma. He volunteered for the US Army, and at the close of the war, he was sent to Europe to investigate allegations of gruesome medical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors.

One of the key doctors he interviewed was Dr. Hubertus Strughold, a senior Nazi official who oversaw a vast network of researchers who conducted experiments on hypothermia. Nazi scientists insisted to Dr. Alexander that they only conducted experiments on animals, but it soon became obvious that humans – particularly Jews – were the subjects of hundreds of sadistic medical experiments.

Wernher Von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, Hubertus Strughold

Unbeknownst to Dr. Alexander, Strughold was a long-time personal friend of a senior American military official, Lt. Col. Harry Armstrong, chief surgeon of the Eighth Air Force. While Dr. Alexander was stationed in Europe investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity, Lt. Col. Armstrong had a very different remit: to find Nazi medical researchers and bring them to the United States.

“During the war, physicians with the U.S. Army Air Forces heard rumors about cutting-edge research being developed by the (Third) Reich’s aviation doctors,” explains journalist Annie Jacobsen. These experiments were never published in mainstream medical journals, but were disseminated in Nazi magazines such as Luftfahrtmedizin (“Aviation Medicine”). Secretly, both British and US Air Forces would often translate the works and disseminate them to Allied doctors to study. With World War II coming to a close, Lt. Col. Armstrong and other US military officials wanted to get to Dr. Strughold and other Nazi scientists and bring them to America.

Lt. Col. Armstrong made Dr. Strughold a top-secret offer: no charges would be brought against him if he became co-chairman, along with Armstrong, of a new research center the American Air Force was setting up in Heidelberg called the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center. Dr. Strughold was allowed to select the physicians he wanted to work with, and he chose 58 Nazi physicians, including some who’d worked with him on gruesome and cruel human experiments. Within a few years, many of these physicians were brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip.

In the case of Dr. Strughold, there was some difficulty in smoothing his way. The FBI had investigated him in Germany and found that he seems to have been an ardent Nazi. He’d “expressed the opinion that the Nazi party had done a great deal for Germany” and claimed that “prior to Nazism, the Jews had crowded the medical schools and it had been nearly impossible for others to enroll.” Military officials asked another German doctor, who himself had been accused of war crimes, to vouch that Dr. Strughold had high “ethical principles”. With this bogus endorsement in hand, Strughold set sail for the United States.

Strughold became Professor of Space Medicine at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. In 1950, he co-founded the Space Medicine Branch of the Aerospace Medical Association. In 1963, it established the “Hubertus Strughold Award”, given each year to recognize excellence in space medicine. (In 2006 the Space Medicine Association Executive Committee debated removing Strughold’s name from the award. His Nazi past had been so thoroughly hidden, in part by the U.S. Army, that no evidence of crimes was found, and the award continued to bear Strughold’s name. After a 2012 article about Dr. Strughold’s Nazi atrocities, the award was finally suspended.)

In total, about 1,600 Nazi scientists were brought to the US under Operation Paperclip, as well as their families.

In total, about 1,600 Nazi scientists were brought to the US under Operation Paperclip, as well as their families. They evaded justice and in many cases were able to erase all mention of their Nazi pasts in their official biographies. For most of these scientists, justice never caught up and many died in America, seemingly innocent workers whose neighbors and friends and coworkers never knew the gruesome secrets in their pasts.

It was only in 2006 the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) finally succeeded in publishing an official record documenting Operation Paperclip, after objections from the Justice Department. The OSI was disbanded in 2010, but its research and the mirror it held up to America continues to shed light on Operation Paperclip and this shameful chapter in American history.

For years, Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States the OSI concluded. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became – in some small measure – a safe haven for persecutors as well.”