Operation Paperclip was the United States government’s secret program to recruit German scientists, engineers, and technicians after World War II, including, in many cases, individuals with documented Nazi Party membership, SS affiliation, or involvement in war crimes. Running from roughly 1945 to 1959, Operation Paperclip brought approximately 1,600 Germans to work for the US military, NASA, and affiliated research programs. The most famous of them, Wernher von Braun, built the Saturn V rocket that carried Americans to the moon. Others designed the US ballistic missileA projectile weapon that follows a ballistic trajectory, typically used for air defense or offensive strikes against ground targets. program. Several had used concentration camp prisoners as slave labor. The American government knew this and recruited them anyway.
Operation Paperclip is not classified history. The documents are available. The story has been told by multiple credible historians. What makes it persistently uncomfortable is the clarity of the trade-off it represents: the United States decided, explicitly and with bureaucratic deliberation, that certain kinds of expertise were worth certain kinds of moral compromise. Whether that was the right calculation is a genuine question. Understanding the actual history is a prerequisite for thinking about it clearly.
How Operation Paperclip Began
In the final months of World War II, Allied forces raced to capture German scientific and military assets before the Soviet Union could reach them. The operation began under the name OVERCAST in mid-1945, targeting specialists in rocketry, aviation, chemistry, and nuclear physics. It was renamed Operation Paperclip in 1946, the name derived from the practice of attaching paperclips to the files of scientists selected for recruitment.
The program operated under a formal directive that should have screened out candidates with “ardent” Nazi affiliations. In practice, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), which ran the program, routinely altered or sanitized security dossiers to make scientists eligible under this criterion. The State Department and the Justice Department raised objections; the Army and the military establishment overrode them. As historian Annie Jacobsen documents in her 2014 account of the program, dossiers were altered to conceal SS membership, Party rank, and in several cases, specific documented involvement in criminal enterprises.
The Soviet Union ran its own parallel operation. In October 1946, Soviet forces conducted Operation Osoaviakhim, forcibly relocating approximately 2,000 German scientists and their families to the USSR in a single night. The Cold War competition for German expertise was explicit on both sides.
Wernher von Braun and the V-2 Rocket
Wernher von Braun is the central case study in Operation Paperclip’s moral complexity. Born in 1912 into Prussian aristocracy, he was a brilliant engineer who had dreamed of spaceflight since adolescence. He was also an SS major, a member of the Nazi Party since 1937, and the technical director of the V-2 rocket program at Peenemünde.
The V-2 was the first long-range ballistic missile used in combat. Between 1944 and 1945, Germany launched over 3,000 V-2s at London, Antwerp, and other cities, killing an estimated 9,000 people. The rockets were built at an underground facility called Mittelwerk, using forced labor from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. More people died building the V-2 than were killed by it, historians estimate roughly 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died constructing the weapon. Von Braun visited Mittelwerk and was aware of the conditions. Whether he bears direct moral responsibility for what happened there remains genuinely contested among historians.
After capture by US forces in 1945, von Braun’s dossier was altered to minimize his SS and Party affiliations. He was transferred to the United States, worked for the US Army at Fort Bliss and then Redstone Arsenal, and eventually became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He led the development of the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the moon in 1969. He died in 1977, celebrated as a father of the American space program. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975.
The British satirist Tom Lehrer captured the cognitive dissonance in a 1965 song: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.” The joke landed because the contradiction was obvious and largely unaddressed.
The Scope of Operation Paperclip
Von Braun was not an outlier. Operation Paperclip scientists contributed to US aerospace, chemical weapons research, aviation medicine, and ballistic missile development across multiple decades. Walter Dornberger, the military commander of the V-2 program at Peenemünde, was detained by the British War Crimes Investigation Unit for two years over slave labor in V-2 production; he was released under Operation Paperclip and went on to work for Bell Aircraft. Hubertus Strughold, recruited to work on aviation medicine and later called “the father of space medicine” by NASA, attended a 1942 conference where the results of hypothermia experiments on concentration camp prisoners at Dachau were presented, and his degree of involvement in those experiments remains disputed.
The program was secret for good reason. American public opinion, having just fought a war against Nazi Germany, would not have easily accepted the recruitment of SS officers as government employees. The secrecy held for decades. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, through investigative journalism and Freedom of Information Act requests, that the full scope of Operation Paperclip and the deliberate alteration of dossiers became publicly known. The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, established in 1979 to prosecute Nazi war criminals, investigated several Paperclip recruits, but the statute of limitations and the political complications of targeting people who had spent decades as respected US researchers limited what could be done.
Operation Paperclip: What the Trade-Off Actually Was
The argument in favor of Operation Paperclip, made at the time and still made by some historians, rests on Cold War logic: the Soviet Union was recruiting the same people; allowing German scientific expertise to flow entirely to the USSR would have represented an unacceptable strategic disadvantage; the knowledge these scientists carried could not be uninvented. By this account, Operation Paperclip was a hard necessity in a world that had already produced the Holocaust and was heading toward nuclear confrontation. The same logic would be invoked repeatedly in the early Cold War, including to justify the 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran, where a democratically elected government was removed to protect Western oil interests and prevent Soviet influence.
The argument against rests on a different premise: that accountability for war crimes is not a luxury that can be discarded when convenient; that recruiting individuals whose expertise was built on slave labor and atrocity rewarded and laundered that expertise; and that the secrecy required to make Operation Paperclip work corroded American legal and institutional norms in ways that extended well beyond the program itself. Eli Rosenbaum, who served in and later directed the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting office, was unequivocal: the program was a betrayal of the principles the United States had fought to uphold at Nuremberg.
Both arguments are coherent. They rest on different premises about what states owe to principles versus what they owe to strategic survival. What Operation Paperclip demonstrates is that the United States government, bureaucratically, deliberately, with internal dissent that was overridden, chose the strategic calculation and then worked to conceal it. The choice was made. Whether it was defensible is a different question from whether it was acknowledged. For the first three decades after the war, it largely was not.
Why Operation Paperclip Matters Now
The program offers a case study in what governments do when they believe the stakes are high enough. The specific mechanics, falsified dossiers, overridden objections, classification of recruitment files, are instances of a more general pattern: institutional decisions that cannot survive public scrutiny get made in the dark, and the declassification that eventually happens is presented as history rather than accountability.
Operation Paperclip also sits awkwardly in the American self-narrative about World War II. The war is remembered as a moral conflict, fought against genuine evil, won by genuine sacrifice. The recruitment of SS officers and concentration camp experimenters into the postwar US government does not fit that narrative cleanly. The discomfort is productive. History that makes itself comfortable by leaving out the inconvenient parts is not history, it is mythology. Operation Paperclip is one of the inconvenient parts. The Dreyfus Affair is another, an institution doubling down on a known wrong rather than accepting the cost of admitting it. The mechanisms differ; the logic is the same.
Sources
- Jacobsen, Annie. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America. Little, Brown, 2014. (The definitive modern account, based on declassified documents.)
- Hunt, Linda. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945–1990. St. Martin’s Press, 1991. (The first major investigative account, based on FOIA requests.)
- Operation Paperclip, Wikipedia (overview with primary source citations)
- NASA History Office, “Wernher von Braun.” (Official NASA biographical record.)
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Dora-Mittelbau: Overview.” (Documentation of Mittelwerk forced labor and prisoner deaths.)
- Rosenbaum, Eli. Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up. St. Martin’s Press, 1993. (Context on postwar accountability failures.)
