Operation Paperclip

As Allied armies crossed Germany in spring 1945, specialist teams followed close behind with lists of laboratories, factories and people. The Supreme Headquarters' "T Force" examined some 3,000 planned targets and found 2,000 more, looking for jet and rocket aircraft, synthetic rubber and fuel, naval equipment, secret-writing chemicals, aviation medicine and what its lists called "scientific and industrial personalities"². The grand prize was the Mittelwerk, the underground V-2 factory near Nordhausen². Scientists picked up in the sweep were interrogated at a detention center codenamed DUSTBIN, first near Paris and later at Kransberg Castle outside Frankfurt².

Overcast

The German rocket engineers formed a group of their own. Many had moved south to Bavaria late in the war and surrendered to American troops; Wernher von Braun, the technical director at Peenemünde, gave himself up in the Austrian Alps with other team leaders^2,3. In July 1945 the Secretary of War approved Project OVERCAST, the shipment of up to 350 German specialists, mostly in rocketry, to the United States².

The Army's own history is frank about the motives. Beyond any help the Germans might give in the war against Japan, "one of the most compelling arguments for bringing them to the United States seemed at the time to be simply to put them beyond the reach of Soviet recruiters"². The Soviets had taken Peenemünde and the Mittelwerk but had missed most of the research staff². Early recruiting went badly: the War Department insisted on volunteers, one-year contracts and families left behind, and few signed until the occupation authorities agreed in late 1945 to house and feed dependents in Germany².

Paperclip and the JIOA

In 1945 the Joint Chiefs of Staff set up the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), a subcommittee of their Joint Intelligence Committee, and gave it direct responsibility for the foreign scientist program, "initially code-named Overcast and subsequently code-named Paperclip"¹. The JIOA administered the program's rules, compiled a dossier on each recruit and worked with British officers running a parallel scheme¹. President Truman formally approved the program in a secret directive of 3 September 1946, expanding it to as many as 1,000 specialists held under "temporary, limited military custody"⁴.

The first rocket specialists, von Braun among them, reached the United States in September 1945⁴. They worked for the Army at Fort Bliss, Texas, and fired captured V-2s at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico^3,4. In 1950 the team moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where it built the Redstone and Jupiter missiles and the Jupiter C that launched Explorer I, the first American satellite, in 1958³. In 1960 the group was transferred to NASA; von Braun became director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and chief architect of the Saturn V³.

Paperclip was not only about rockets. Recruits worked for the Air Force, Navy, Army Signal Corps and Bureau of Mines, on aerodynamics, jet engines, fuels, electronics and aviation medicine⁴. NARA's dossier series covers "over 1,500 German and other foreign scientists, technicians, and engineers" brought in under Paperclip and similar programs¹. The Soviet Union ran its own version: on the night of 22 October 1946, in Operation Osoaviakhim, it deported more than 2,200 German specialists and their families to the USSR⁴.

The past that came with them

The program's central problem was that the expertise it wanted had been built in the service of the Nazi state. The V-2 was assembled at the Mittelwerk by prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, as NASA's own biography of von Braun records³. Von Braun had joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and been made an SS officer in 1940⁴.

The NARA dossiers include several men whose pasts caught up with them¹:

• Georg Rickhey, an official at the Nordhausen factory, arrived in 1946 and was sent back in 1947 to be tried for war crimes by a US military tribunal; he was acquitted.
• Walter Schreiber, implicated in medical experiments on concentration-camp inmates, left for Argentina in 1952 after a newspaper column exposed him.
• Arthur Rudolph, a V-2 project engineer who in 1969 received NASA's Distinguished Service Medal, left the United States in 1984 after the Justice Department discovered his role in the persecution of prisoners at Nordhausen^1,4.

Legacy

The JIOA was disbanded in 1962¹. Its files, opened under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, let historians weigh both sides of the ledger: Paperclip recruits helped build the missiles that carried American warheads and the rockets that took astronauts to the Moon, and the government that recruited them chose not to look closely at what some had done before 1945.

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