SYMHC Classics: Operation Paperclip

and war crimes. Our episode on Operation paper Clip came out on May twenty fourth, twenty twenty one, and it is Today's Saturday Classic Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

United States after World War Two. And to be clear, the US was definitely not the only Allied nation doing this, as examples, the UK and France and the Soviet Union all had their own programs to try to exploit German scientific and engineering knowledge after the war, but in most cases those other programs involved specialists and researchers who were either working in occupied Germany or they were sent back to Germany after a few years of supervised work in

another country. But for the United States program, a lot of the people who were part of it ultimately became permanent residents or citizens of the US, and this included people who were ardent Nazis or who had committed war crimes. A lot of the time, the rocket scientists are the ones who get the most just discussion around this program today, so people like Werner von Brown, who developed ballistic missiles for the US Army before joining the space program at NASA.

But paper Clippers really came from a wide range of scientific and engineering specialties, including flight, medicine and chemical warfare and aeronautics. They worked in military and in civilian roles. It was like every layer of American industry and the

military industrial complex. When I started on this episode, my intent was that today we were going to talk about the context for this program and its precursor, which was called Operation Overcast, and then the program itself and some of the most prominent and notorious people who were part of it. That turned out to be too much for one episode, which people listening to me list all those

things off may not be that surprised by. So this episode is going to whack through the arc of this program's creation and its existence, and we'll have more about some of the specific scientists and engineers and other specialties in another episode sometime soon, possibly the next episode, but since it's not written yet, I don't want to promise anything. This is one of those things that became clear at like three o'clock yesterday afternoon that this could not all

be one episode. So that means that while there will be some references to some Nazi atrocities during World War Two and the general era of the nineteen thirties and forties, there's there's not as much detail about the specifics in this particular episode. It is something that will be discussed more in a future episode about the researchers themselves.

the goal to be aspired. It then went on to say, leading men of science above all are to make research fruitful for warfare by working together in their special fields. In nineteen forty four he issued another decree, and this one called for the development of weapons and equipment that had quote revolutionary new characteristics. These would put Germany ahead of its enemies. Nazi propaganda framed these new weapons and

equipment as Vunderwaffe or wonder weapons. Also in nineteen forty four, Germany introduced the rocket power measureschment Emmy one sixty three, which was the world's first rocket powered fighter, the two sixty two, which was the world's first operational jet fighter, the V one flying bomb, which was the world's first cruise missile, and the V two rocket, which was the

world's first ballistic missile. So a lot of wartime firsts there, and it has been widely repeated that if these technologies had been introduced just a few months earlier in the war, the access Powers might well have won, and there's some debate over whether that's really true, but Allied military officials definitely saw all of this and any other innovations that Germany might have had in the works is a huge threat.

There were concerns that Germany's ultimate goal for the V two rocket was for it to carry a nuclear payload, and concerns that it was sharing its secrets and technologies with Japan. So the Allied powers made it a priority to try to capture as much German research and technology as possible, both to replicate it for themselves and to try to develop countermeasures. Especially after the D Day invasion started on June six, nineteen forty four, teams really searched

for German research facilities and weapons factories. They copied blueprints and technical materials, They questioned scientists, and confiscated weapons and technology. This included disassembling and removing big pieces of equipment like V two rockets and wind tunnels and aircraft. This process really accelerated in the last months of the war. The UK and the US formed the Combined Intelligence Objective Subcommittee to coordinate a huge sweep for German military secrets and equipment.

This really escalated after Hitler issued the Destructive Measures on Reich Territory Decree, also known as the Nero decree that happened on March nineteenth, nineteen forty five, and this decree called for the destruction of anything that could be used by enemies of Germany. British and American units became increasingly competitive as they tried to capture resources before Germany could destroy them and before Soviet forces who had similar objectives

could move into an area. Yeah, in some cases it was literally an area that the Soviets were supposed to be occupying, but British or American forces or both together would be like, we got to get as much of this stuff ourselves as possible before they get here. As all of this.

target and bring in for more long term work. Initially, there was a blacklist of targets of military value and a gray list of targets of quote vital post war interest, but those people were not of immediate military value. Often, though, these lists are kind of lumped together as just the Blacklist. One source for the names on these lists was a document prepared by senior Gestapo officer Werner Osenberg, who supervised

the planning office of the Reich Research Council. He had compiled a list of about fifteen thousand names, part of which was discovered in an unflushed toilet in March of nineteen forty five. When Ousenberg himself was captured, he surrendered the entire list, along with documents that detailed the qualifications of the people on that list and other documents related

to the German war effort. The US Army established the Field Information Agency Technical or FIAT to help it exploit German knowledge and resources, including finding and capturing people from this list, and the term exploit comes up over and over in descriptions of this whole phase of the projected Militaries and governments were increasingly interpreting all of this as a form of German reparations for the war, and German scientists, engineers, technicians,

and researchers were all resources to exploit As part of those reparations.

could be used for military production. And that meant that for a lot of these specialists, the industries that they had been working in, as well as other related industries where they might have been able to find jobs, those just would not exist anymore. So it wasn't like they

could interrogate someone, release them, keep tabs on them. To make sure they were not doing anything dangerous while they went to some job they had gotten, because those industries they would have worked in no longer were to exist.

at Vulcan Rode, which had been camouflaged under trees. This secret facility was in an area that was supposed to be under British control, so American forces worked as quickly as possible to secure as much as they could before the British arrived.

was still ongoing. On April twenty second, nineteen forty five, the US Army Air Forces Intelligence Service launched Operation Lusty, which stood for Luftwaffa Secret Technology and that was to secure technical and scientific intelligence that could be used in the war against Japan. The US started cost being German munitions that had been used against Britain during the Blitz. By the time Germany surrendered on May eighth of nineteen forty five, the US had captured most of Germany's most

respected aircraft engineers. Two days later, Allied forces intercepted the German submarine U eight five eight, which surrendered in Delaware on May fourteenth. It was carrying civilian engineers to Japan, along with advanced weaponry and supplies, including an entire disassembled aircraft. Among its cargo were twelve hundred pounds of uranium oxide. This was most likely meant to be used for aircraft fuel, but it raised fears of the possibility of nuclear weapons development.

So this made the ongoing exploitation of German researchers more urgent, and officials started to question whether some of this work might be done more effectively in the United States. Although it was generally agreed that exploiting German researchers in Germany was vital and was generally ethical, the idea of bringing

people into the US was a lot more controversial. On May twenty eighth, Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson wrote a letter to Admiral William D. Lahy which read, in part quote, I strongly favored doing everything possible to utilize fully in the prosecution of the war against Japan all information that can be obtained from Germany or any other source. These men are enemies, and it must be assumed they

are capable of sabotaging our war effort. Bringing them to this country raises delicate questions, including the strong resentment of the American public, who might misunderstand the purpose of bringing them here and the treatment accorded them, But the idea of military necessity ultimately won out over these and other concerns.

After this letter, the War Department General Staff held a meeting at the Pentagon to develop a plan to give some German researchers, specifically ones who were not Nazis or war criminals, temporary contracts to work in the United States under protective military custody.

to Germany. Each person assigned a contract was supposed to undergo a background check to confirm that they were not an ardent Nazi. Like the word exploit, That phrase Nazi is a term that comes up a lot in documents about Operation Paperclip and its related programs. Officials recognized that under Adolph Hitler, Germany had been a single party dictatorship, and that at least some involvement with Nazism was essentially

mandatory for non Jewish Germans. The researchers, who the US saw as the most skilled and important, were of course seen the same way by the Nazis, so in many cases they had been targeted for leadership roles and rewarded with honors and awards that were bestowed by the party. Some people who joined the party also did so out

of a sense of self preservation or even opportunism. So with all this in mind, the general conclusion among American military authorities was that it was just not feasible to restrict anyone who had any connection at all to the

Nazi Party. That would leave them with no researchers to exploit. Instead, the focus was on banning ardent Nazis, and ardent Nazis were described as people who had joined the Nazi Party before Hitler declared himself, Burier, people who were leaders in the party or in one of its affiliated organizations like the SS or the Essay, people who had been convicted in a post war de notification court, or people who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.

their associated acronyms. There were a lot of Every book that I read on this had just a of acronyms at the beginning and what they all did for The Joint Intelligence Objective Agency that has abbreviated JIOA and usually said JOA was created as part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during this expansion, and this agency directed this whole operation and brought about sixteen hundred German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and researchers to the US between nineteen forty five and

nineteen seventy. The Office of Strategic Services and the Joint Intelligence Committee were involved in this as well. Japan formally surrendered on September second, nineteen forty five, but even though that ended the war, the effort to bring German scientists to the US continued. By January of nineteen forty six, one hundred sixty German specialists had been brought to the

United States. One hundred and fifteen of them were rocket specialists, including Werner von Braun, and the program got bigger and broader from there. As relations between the US and the USSR devolved into the Cold War, the idea of keeping the other side from getting access to German researchers and

technology became more and more important to both nations. The United States started to see an eventual armed conflict with the Soviet Union as inevitable advances in Soviet nuclear research led to fears that the Soviets had been getting aid from German scientists on this, although it later turned out

that they were really getting stolen American nuclear secrets. On January third of nineteen forty six, the Mirk Report detailing biological warfare research in Japan became public, and that led for calls for more research into biological agents and their countermeasures in the United States, and that was yet another specialty of these German researchers. In March of nineteen forty six,

Project Overcast expanded. It shifted from a limited number of people with temporary contracts working under military supervision to between eight hundred and one thousand specialists who would be offered long term residency in the US and even citizenship. Since this was no longer intended as a temporary assignment, the researcher's families would be permitted to enter the US permanently

as well. This was a whole process where Germany was being denocified, like people with Nazi ties were being pulled out of leadership positions in all of these different industries and all of these different contexts, some of the same people were being brought to the United States and offered

US citizenship. So by this point, some of the scientists' families who were being housed at a camp in Germany had started calling that camp Camp Overcast, and that prompted this project's name change to Operation paper Clip or Project paper Clip, depending on the source that you're looking at. That name came from the paper clips that were used to discreetly flag the files of candidates whose backgrounds were potentially too damning for them to be allowed into the

United States. In August, Secretary of State Dean Atchison sent a top secret memo to President Harry Truman requesting his approval of the interim exploitation of German and Austrian specialists under Project paper Clip. The document Truman approved included the text of State War Navy Coordinating Committee Document two five seven Slash twenty two, which outlined a revised version for the expanded paper clip program that had been launched in March.

or militarism, shall be brought to the US here under. However, neither possidition or honors awarded a specialist under the Nazi regime solely on account of his scientific or technical ability, will in themselves be considered sufficient to disqualify a specialist

for evacuation to the US here Under. Where there is doubt as to the qualification of a specialist under the preceding sentence, the Commanding General us FET may transport the specialist to the US, where further interrogation and screening shall be conducted immediately in order to determine such qualification.

by law in occupied Germany. The Office of Military Government US kept security dossiers on all of the candidates, but also withheld the most damaging information on many high profile candidates. Documents that were declassified in the nineteen seventies and afterward revealed that reports on individual candidates were revised to basically whitewash their backgrounds. Yes, some of these.

Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Gering. Some had been officers in the Nazi Party or in the SS or the Essay. Some stood trial at Nuremberg or faced other war crimes trials. In some cases, people's backgrounds were so egregious that they were giving contracts to work for the US military, but they did that work while still living in Germany. But in other cases, people with pretty similar backgrounds still made their way to the US.

neutral and wholesome seeming work. Of course, course this all had to totally sidestep the fact that many paper clippers had been Nazis, and even if they had not been ardent, their work during the war had still contributed to, or at the absolute very least, been complicit in the German war effort. This work had been involved in the deaths of Allied personnel and the widespread atrocities of the Holocaust. There had been critics of this program within the government

and the military from the beginning. For example, Samuel Klaus was an attorney with the State Department and had been chosen to represent the State Department with Joah. He had argued strongly against the program since he first became involved, pointing out that the United States was giving Nazis the chance for American citizenship while denying that chance to refugees and displaced persons who had been persecuted and harmed by

the Nazi regime. Thanks in part to Klaus's role, the relationship between the State Department and the military became incredibly adversarial during this program, and he wound up being targeted during the Red Scare. Yeah, he made a lot of incredibly strident criticisms of all of this. He was eventually

moved off the project. Aside from his well argued criticisms of all of us, he apparently was also kind of a tricky person to work with and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in this and many other contexts, so he seems like kind of a tangle. After these reports, though, there was a lot of vocal criticism of this program

from the public as well. On December thirtieth, nineteen forty six, the Council Against Intolerance in America sent a telegram to President Truman which read quote, as American citizens permit us to express our profound concern over reports that Nazi scientists have not only been brought to this country by the United States Army for research projects, but that their families are to follow them, and that they may be permitted to remain here permanently. We hold these individuals to be

potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred. Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens or hold key

positions in American industrial, scientific, and educational institutions. If it is deemed imperative to utilize these individuals in this country, we earnestly petition you to make sure they will not be granted permanent residents or citizenship in the United States, with the opportunity which that would afford of inculcating these anti democratic doctrines which seek to undermine and destroy our

national unity. That telegram was signed by about forty people, including Albert Einstein, A Philip Randolph, and Rabbi B. Benedict Glazier. Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein worked together to vocally oppose

the program. Other organizations that spoke out against it included the NAACP, the Society for the Prevention of World War III, and the Federia Show of American Scientists, whose statement described the program as quote an affront to the people of all countries who so recently fought beside us, to the refugees whose lives were shattered by Nazism, to our unfortunate scientific colleagues of former occupied lands, and to all of those others who suffered under the yoke these men helped

to forge. From there, Operation Paperclip continued to make some pretty astounding headlines that were honestly pretty embarrassing to the authorities who were behind it. We'll talk about some of these things more in this upcoming, not yet written episode of the show. On March ninth of nineteen forty seven, Drew Pearson wrote an article for The New York Times that alleged that Karl Krouch had been offered a Paperclip contract while incarcerated at Nuremberg, where he was awaiting a.

as we talked about earlier. But this same basic process continued under various different names and with various adjustments, for much longer.

as Accelerated Paperclip and Projects sixty three. This program involved quote evacuating high profile scientists from Germany, and the focus shifted away from establishing that they were not Nazis to establishing that they were not communists. Recruits during this particular period included Walter Schreiber, who had been the surgeon General under the Third Reich, and he was hired to work

at the US Air Force School of Aviation Medicine. His time in the US didn't last long, though, and it was part of more information about this program coming to public light. In nineteen fifty one, former war crimes investigator Leopold Alexander noticed a brief mention of his hiring in a medical journal. Alexander wrote to the Massachusetts Medical Society

and to the Boston globed announcing this hiring. When the Globe ran its story, it included a statement from Schreiber, who said that he had been the victim of Russian disinformation. In the face of increasing and increasingly public outrage against Schreiber's work in the US, plans started to form to return him to Europe, but intelligence experts were concerned that

he might be a security risk. He had previously been captured by Russia and had supposedly escaped, but a lot of this was mysterious, a little bit fishy, and there were concerns that he might very well start informing to the Russians. At the same time, American officials were concerned that he also presented a security risk if he remained in the United States, since he had extensive knowledge of all the other paper clippers who had been high ranking

and ardent Nazis. Basically, they were afraid he would blow their cover. Eventually, the US paid for his passage to Argentina, where he had family and which had already become a home to a community of high profile notzs the officials. He was also given an undisclosed allowance. In the nineteen fifties, other Allied nations that had been working with German researchers within their own borders generally started returning those researchers to Germany, but in the US most were on the path to

becoming citizens. In fact, ninety percent of the Germans who were brought to the US between nineteen forty five and nineteen fifty two ultimately became US citizens. And even though the details of the program were still classified, it had really become something of an open secret. I mean, the War Department had had this whole propaganda campaign about these

being the good Germans. Only when the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in nineteen fifty seven, Bob Hope joked that it meant that quote.

this may never be known. Waylan pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring with Soviet agents, but the Justice Department dropped the charge of espionage.

At that point, though, most of the documents related to the program were still classified, and Lasbie's general conclusion was that authorities had screened everyone, but that a few ardent Nazis had unfortunately managed to evade detection. Criticism of the paper Clip program and its successors had been ongoing through all these years, but public interest reached another peak in nineteen seventy eight after NBC aired a mini series on the Holocaust. In nineteen eighty, Eli Rosenbaum, who was a

student at Harvard Law was browsing through a bookstore. He picked up both Dora, the Nazi concentration camp where modern space technology was born and thirty thousand Prisoners Died by Jean Michel, who was imprisoned at the camp, and the Rocket Team, which traced the history of the V two rocket, and in reading these books he connected the V two's development with the use of slave labor from the concentration camp.

So when Rosenbaum finished his law degree, he got a job at the Department of Justice in the Office of Special Investigations. The OSI had been established in nineteen seventy nine to investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals who were living in the US. Rosenbaum convinced the head of the OSI to open an investigation into paper Clipper Arthur Rudolph, who designed the Saturn five rocket and had been a big part of the V two development team.

to Europe after thirty eight years in the US. After this happened, investigative journalists started trying to get more and more information about Operation paper Clip, including through the Freedom of Information Act, which had been signed into law in nineteen sixty seven. In nineteen eighty five, journalist Linda Hunt broke a story by publishing an article titled US cover Up of Nazi Scientists in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

This article, read in part quote formerly classified documents, revealed details of the US military's employment of alleged Nazi war criminals in highly sensitive defense projects. They show that government officials concealed information about many specialists in order to secure

their legal US immigration status. The cover up seems to have stemmed from a belief that US national security would be best served by keeping these Nazi specialists away from the Soviet Union, but it was a direct contravention of the presidential directive which formally set up Project paper Clip. Hunt published a book based on this and other research

in nineteen ninety one. Journalist Tom Bauer had done the same in nineteen eighty seven, both Hunt and Bauer framed Project paper Clip as a conspiracy.

and the Nazis in two thousand and four. A key sentence from its introduction is quote, Granted, some intelligence activities involve a degree of secret and messiness which strained conventional moral standards, but there was no compelling reason to begin the post war era with the assistance of some of

those associated with the worst crimes of the war. Between its establishment in nineteen seventy eight and its merge with the Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section in twenty ten, the Office of Special Investigations work led to at least one hundred Nazi war criminals being stripped of their US

citizenship or moved from the United States. In two thousand and six, OSI legal historian Judith Fagan wrote a six hundred page report called Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, which detailed both the OSI's efforts to investigate Nazi war criminals and the US efforts to shelter them.

After the Department of Justice released an incredibly heavily redacted version in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, former officials leaked the entire, unredacted thing to The New York Times. Yeah, I read an article that described this as an incredible cell phone because they had they had released something that was so incredibly redacted to the point of uselessness that other people were like, well, We're just

going to leak the entire thing. In part because of all the information that has been declassified and released in the last few decades, there are various organizations and institutions that are really still wrestling with how to reconcile their own histories with paper clippers and their own connection to the Nazi Party and war crimes. We'll be talking about that, but since that will involve some of the discussion of more specific people who are part of the program in

a future episode. It might be the next episode, but since I haven't written it yet, as I said at the top of the show, I don't quite want to promise anything. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note. Our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.