Operation Paperclip: German Scientists Brought to the US

Operation Paperclip was the secret programme through which the United States brought German and Austrian scientists, engineers and technicians to America after the Second World War. Beginning in 1945 and lasting into the late 1950s, it recruited more than 1,600 specialists, most famously the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, whose work later helped put Americans on the Moon.

The programme gave the United States a lead in rocketry and aerospace medicine at the start of the Cold War. It also remains controversial, because several recruits had been Nazi Party or SS members and some were linked to the use of forced labour.

Background

By 1945 Germany led the world in several military technologies. Its V-2 ballistic missile, first fired in combat in September 1944, was far ahead of anything the Allies possessed, and German engineers had also built jet aircraft and advanced aerodynamic test facilities. As Allied armies crossed Germany, special intelligence teams hunted for documents, equipment and the people who knew how to use them.

The Americans were not alone. Britain, France and the Soviet Union also wanted German expertise, and all four powers saw it as a prize in the emerging rivalry that followed the Potsdam Conference. For US planners, denying these specialists to the Soviet Union was as important as using them.

From Overcast to Paperclip

In July 1945 the US military approved Operation Overcast, a plan to bring a limited number of German specialists to the United States temporarily to help with the war against Japan. After Japan surrendered, the aim shifted to long-term use of their knowledge. In August 1945 the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was set up to run the programme, and in March 1946 it was renamed Operation Paperclip, reportedly after the paperclips attached to the files of chosen candidates.

President Harry Truman formally approved the programme in September 1946. His directive barred anyone who had been more than a nominal member of the Nazi Party or an active supporter of Nazism. In practice, JIOA officials sometimes rewrote or diluted security reports so that valuable recruits could stay and later receive US citizenship.

Von Braun and the rocket team

Wernher von Braun, technical director of the V-2 programme at Peenemünde, surrendered to American troops on 2 May 1945 with his brother Magnus and other colleagues. Over the following months more than 100 members of his team were shipped to Fort Bliss, Texas. From there they helped the US Army reassemble and launch captured V-2 rockets at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, starting in 1946.

In 1950 the group moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where it developed the Redstone and Jupiter missiles. After the shock of Sputnik 1, a Jupiter-C rocket built by the team launched Explorer 1, the first American satellite, on 31 January 1958. Von Braun became the first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960 and oversaw the Saturn V, the giant rocket that first carried a crew around the Moon on Apollo 8 in 1968.

Other fields

Rocketry was only part of the story. Paperclip recruits worked on jet engines and aircraft design at Wright Field in Ohio, on guided missiles for the Navy, on chemical weapons and on aviation medicine. Hubertus Strughold, often called a pioneer of space medicine, worked for the US Air Force on the effects of high altitude and spaceflight on the human body. Kurt Debus, another Peenemünde veteran, became the first director of what is now the Kennedy Space Center.

Many recruits brought families with them, and the programme continued in various forms, with new arrivals, through the 1950s. Most became American citizens.

Controversy

The darkest side of Paperclip concerned the V-2’s production. From 1943 the rockets were built in the underground Mittelwerk factory near Nordhausen by prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Historians estimate that some 20,000 prisoners died there from starvation, disease, exhaustion and executions. Von Braun had been an SS officer and visited the factory; how much he knew and could influence remains debated, though historians such as Michael Neufeld conclude he was aware of the conditions.

Arthur Rudolph, operations director at the Mittelwerk, later became project director for the Saturn V. In 1984, after an investigation by the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, he agreed to leave the United States and give up his citizenship rather than face proceedings. Strughold’s reputation suffered after evidence emerged linking his institute to human experiments at Dachau, and some honours named after him were withdrawn.

Rival programmes

The Soviet Union carried out a much larger and more coercive operation. On the night of 22 October 1946, in Operation Osoaviakhim, Soviet forces moved more than 2,000 German specialists and their families from the Soviet zone to the Soviet Union, where many worked on rockets and aircraft until the early 1950s. Britain and France also recruited German experts, though on a smaller scale than the two superpowers.

Timeline

• 1944, 8 September: The first V-2 rockets are fired in combat, at Paris and London.
• 1945, 2 May: Wernher von Braun and members of his team surrender to US forces.
• 1945, July: The US military approves Operation Overcast.
• 1946, March: The programme is renamed Operation Paperclip.
• 1946, 16 April: The first captured V-2 is launched at White Sands, New Mexico.
• 1946, September: President Truman formally approves the programme.
• 1958, 31 January: Explorer 1, launched by the von Braun team’s Jupiter-C, becomes the first US satellite.
• 1984: Arthur Rudolph leaves the United States after a Justice Department investigation.

Why it matters

Operation Paperclip shaped the American space programme and much of US military technology in the early Cold War, building on earlier pioneers such as Robert Goddard. It also poses a lasting moral question: how far a government should go in overlooking a person’s past in exchange for their skills.