Operation Paperclip: How the U.S. Smuggled 1,600 Nazi Scientists Into America
SS officers. Concentration-camp doctors. The architect of the V-2 rocket. We made them American citizens. We put them in charge of NASA.
President Truman's 1946 directive specifically excluded Nazi Party members from immigration. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) ignored it. Between 1945 and 1959, the U.S. brought 1,600 German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and technicians - many of them committed Nazis - to the United States. Their files were "bleached" of incriminating evidence and clipped with paperclips, hence the name.
Wernher von Braun designed the V-2 rocket. He used slave labor from Mittelbau-Dora, where 20,000 prisoners died. The U.S. made him director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He put a man on the moon.
Hubertus Strughold experimented on Dachau prisoners with low-pressure chambers. He became "the father of American space medicine."
Kurt Blome led the Nazi biological-warfare program. The U.S. Army Chemical Corps hired him.
The next time someone tells you our institutions are guided by morality - remember that we made the architects of the Holocaust into the architects of NASA.