Truman approves the expansion of Paperclip (August–September 1946)

Within weeks of Germany's surrender, Army and Navy technical teams were shipping German scientists to the United States to be questioned and put to work, at first for short periods and under military guard. By the summer of 1946 the services wanted something larger and more permanent. This two-part document is how that change reached the President: a one-page covering memorandum from Dean Acheson, then Acting Secretary of State, dated 30 August 1946, and an enclosed policy statement titled "Interim Exploitation of German and Austrian Specialists Under Project 'Paperclip'"¹.

What it says

Acheson's memorandum is short and practical. It describes Paperclip as an existing War Department project, reports General Joseph McNarney's warning that many specialists still in the American zones of Germany and Austria "may be lost to us" without quick action, and proposes expanding the project to between 800 and 1,000 people. Because the specialists' cooperation mattered, their families would be brought over and the strict custody rules relaxed. The War Department would keep people "with Nazi or militaristic records" out, and selected specialists would later be given regular immigration status. The statement, Acheson notes, came from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had been approved by the State, War and Navy Departments¹.

The enclosure turns this into rules. Names chosen by the War and Navy Departments, plus civilian nominations from the Commerce Department, were to be coordinated with the British and certified by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) as the official "U.S. Exploitation List." No more than 1,000 specialists, not counting families, were to be in the country at any time. Contracts were to provide for sending home anyone found unqualified or unacceptable for permanent residence. Everyone brought over would stay under "temporary, limited military custody" until given a visa or repatriated, with biographical files going to the FBI, JIOA and the sponsoring service¹.

The screening clause is the passage most often quoted. It bars anyone who had been more than a nominal member of the Nazi Party or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism, but adds that rank or honors awarded "solely on account of" scientific ability were not in themselves disqualifying, and that doubtful cases could be shipped to the United States and screened there¹.

Approval and what followed

The State Department copy bears a handwritten note: "Approved 9/3/46 Harry S Truman"¹. The approval went out as a secret directive that day, and the press began reporting on the program by December 1946³. The program grew well beyond the numbers in the memorandum: by the time JIOA was dissolved in 1962 it had compiled files on more than 1,500 German and other foreign specialists brought to the United States, according to the National Archives' description of its records².

The screening clause did not keep out everyone it was meant to. The National Archives' description of the JIOA case files names Georg Rickhey, a Nordhausen V-2 factory official who arrived in 1946 and was tried (and acquitted) by a US military tribunal in 1947; Walter Schreiber, who had taken part in medical experiments on concentration camp inmates and fled to Argentina in 1952 after a newspaper column exposed him; and Arthur Rudolph, who left the United States in 1984 after the Justice Department found he had taken part in the persecution of prisoners at Nordhausen².

Where it comes from

The document was printed in 1969 in the Foreign Relations volume covering Western and Central Europe for 1946, from the State Department's central files (file 862.542/9–346). The volume prints the memorandum and enclosure in full but not the related State–War–Navy Coordinating Committee papers it cites¹.