Operation Paperclip: How the United States Recruited Over 1,600 Nazi Scientists After the War

In the final months of the Second World War, as Allied forces advanced into Germany, American intelligence agencies began a race against time — and against the Soviet Union. The target was not territory or weapons, but people: the scientists, engineers, and technical specialists who had built the Nazi war machine, and whose knowledge was considered too valuable to leave behind or allow to fall into Soviet hands. The operation that resulted was called Paperclip.

Operation Paperclip, run by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, ultimately recruited over 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians to work for the United States government. The recruits included specialists in rocketry, aviation, chemical weapons, medicine, and nuclear physics. Many had been members of the Nazi Party. Some had used slave labour from concentration camps in their wartime research. Several had been directly involved in the development of weapons used against civilian populations.

The most prominent recruit was Wernher von Braun, the lead engineer of the V-2 rocket programme. Von Braun had been an SS officer and had overseen the use of concentration camp prisoners — primarily from Dora-Mittelbau — as forced labour in the V-2 production facilities. Thousands of prisoners died in these facilities, more than were killed by the rockets themselves. Von Braun was brought to the United States, his Nazi Party membership and SS rank were classified, and he went on to lead the development of the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo 11 to the Moon.

The programme required the active falsification of official records. President Truman had issued a directive explicitly prohibiting the recruitment of anyone who had been 'an active supporter of National Socialism or militarism.' The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency circumvented this by altering the recruits' dossiers — removing or reclassifying evidence of Nazi Party membership, SS rank, and involvement in war crimes. The operation's name came from the paperclips used to attach the sanitised cover sheets to the original files.

The ethical dimensions of Paperclip were contested at the time and have been debated ever since. The State Department and the Justice Department both raised objections to specific recruits. The objections were overruled by military and intelligence agencies who argued that the strategic value of the scientists outweighed the moral costs. The argument was made explicitly: the Soviets were recruiting the same people, and the United States could not afford to lose the competition.

The legacy of Paperclip is embedded in the history of American science and technology. The Saturn V that put humans on the Moon was designed by a team led by a former SS officer who had used slave labour. The nerve agent research that informed American chemical weapons programmes was conducted by scientists who had tested their work on concentration camp prisoners. The space race was won, in part, by people whose wartime records had been deliberately buried. The documents describing what was buried are now, mostly, declassified.