SYMHC Classics: Operation Paperclip

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Stuff You Missed in History Class – "Operation Paperclip"

Hosts: Tracy V. Wilson & Holly Fry
Date: June 20, 2026
Episode Theme:
The episode delves into Operation Paperclip, the covert U.S. program which brought German scientists, engineers, and specialists—including those with deep Nazi ties—to America after WWII. Holly and Tracy explore the origin, challenges, ethical debates, public controversies, and long-term consequences of America's quest to exploit German scientific knowledge, setting context for future episodes that will profile individual scientists in detail.

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Main Theme & Purpose

Operation Paperclip represents a critical, controversial episode in post-WWII history where Allied powers, particularly the U.S., sought to harness German technological and scientific expertise for military and industrial gain—often overlooking the Nazi backgrounds of many participants. The episode examines the moral and political calculations behind the operation, its execution, internal and external criticisms, and its enduring legacy on American science, military, and public memory.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Operation Paperclip: Context and Origins

• Competition Among Allies:

  • The U.S., U.K., France, and the Soviet Union all initiated programs to claim German expertise after WWII. The U.S. effort uniquely offered many participants a permanent home and even citizenship, unlike other Allies who mostly repatriated their experts after a few years.
  • [04:18] Tracy: "...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."

• German Scientific Prowess & Innovation:

  • Under Hitler, science was deliberately focused toward warfare, resulting in numerous firsts (V2 rockets, first jet fighters, cruise missiles).
  • [07:48] Tracy: "Germany introduced...the world's first rocket powered fighter...the world's first operational jet fighter...the world's first cruise missile...the world's first ballistic missile..."

• Race to Exploit and Deny the Soviets:

  • Both fear and admiration drove the U.S. to hunt for and secure as much technology and as many scientists as possible, especially to keep them from the U.S.S.R.
  • [08:39] Holly: "If these technologies had been introduced just a few months earlier in the war, the Axis powers might well have won...there were concerns that Germany's ultimate goal for the V2 rocket was for it to carry a nuclear payload..."

2. Seizing the Opportunity: Early Programs & Expanding Scope

• Military Efforts Intensify:

  • Teams swept Germany looking for research facilities, weapon blueprints, and scientific personnel, sometimes competing with the British or entering Soviet zones.
  • [09:11] Tracy: "Teams really searched for German research facilities...copied blueprints...questioned scientists and confiscated weapons and technology..."

• Internment & Selection:

  • Internment camps were set up to hold and question hundreds of engineers and scientists. The Allies viewed these individuals as resources for reparations.
  • [12:41] Holly: "Allied Expeditionary Force had established internment camps for scientists and engineers..."

• Selection Lists & Early Recruitment:

  • Lists compiled by Nazi officials (e.g., Osenberg List) and the Allies’ own "blacklists" and "gray lists" guided whom to target for "exploitation."
  • [11:31] Holly: "A document prepared by senior Gestapo officer Werner Ozenberg...a list of about 15,000 names, part of which was discovered in an unflushed toilet..."

3. Political & Ethical Dilemmas

• Controversy Over Bringing Nazis to America:

  • High-level officials expressed concern over public perception and the inherent risks of harboring potential enemies and war criminals, but military necessity overruled.
  • [16:05] Tracy quoting Robert Patterson: "...Bringing them to this country raises delicate questions, including the strong resentment of the American public who might misunderstand the purpose..."

• Project Overcast & Initial Safeguards:

  • Originally, Project Overcast sought only non-"ardent" Nazis. But the practical reality shifted lines—membership in Nazi organizations was almost ubiquitous for top scientists.
  • [22:58] Holly: "Officials recognized that under Adolf Hitler...at least some involvement with Nazism was essentially mandatory..."

• Flawed Vetting Processes:

  • The attempt to filter out "ardent" Nazis was complicated by spotty records, vague lists, and a desire for expedience.
  • [24:29] Holly: "The Crocus List...described as, quote, an unwieldy monster archive...vague, full of undocumented allegations..."

4. Operation Paperclip Proper: Expansion and Whitewashing

• From Temporary Contracts to Full Immigration

  • As the Cold War ramped up, the U.S. transitioned from temporary exploitation to offering German specialists long-term residency and citizenship—even as Germany was being denazified.
  • [27:06] Holly: "March of 1946, Project Overcast expanded...offered long term residency in the US and even citizenship."

• The “Paperclip” Name & File Manipulation:

  • The name comes from the literal paper clips used to flag concerning files—and the increasing tendency to "sanitize" backgrounds of valuable scientists.
  • [28:18] Holly: "...the name came from the paper clips...to discreetly flag the files of candidates whose backgrounds were potentially too damning..."

• Whitewashing Nazi Affiliations:

  • Documentation was sometimes dramatically revised to minimize Nazi activity—so that many “paperclippers” were high-ranking Nazis or implicated in crimes.
  • [30:29] Tracy: "...some of these revisions were really dramatic. That sort of went from... 'this person is a dangerous Nazi' to... 'no more than a nominal involvement'..."

5. Public Revelation & Backlash

• Media Exposés & Outcry:

  • News of Nazi scientists being brought to the U.S. gradually leaked through Russian and later American media, resulting in widespread outrage.
  • [31:25] Holly: "...the American public was becoming more aware of what was going on...Soon publications like the New York Times and Newsweek were reporting..."

• Internal & External Criticism:

  • State Department officials and civil rights leaders (including Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt) protested, decrying moral hypocrisy and the betrayal of WWII’s ideals.
  • [34:54] Holly: "...signed by about 40 people, including Albert Einstein, A. Philip Randolph and Rabbi B. Benedict Glaser. Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein worked together to vocally oppose the program..."

• Concerns About Hatred & Security:

  • Groups warned of the dangers of welcoming individuals “potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred” as citizens or key personnel.
  • [33:19] Tracy reading Council Against Intolerance telegram: "We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred..."

6. Operation Paperclip’s Legacy and Later Revelations

• Operation's Continuation After Official End:

  • Though Paperclip formally ended in 1947, German scientists continued to arrive, especially during the Cold War, the Berlin Blockade, and Korean War.
  • [41:12] Tracy: "...this same basic process continued under various different names and with various adjustments for much longer. The recruitment of German scientists actually accelerated during the Berlin Blockade..."

• Shifting from Anti-Nazi to Anti-Communist:

  • Later criteria for recruitment focused more on anti-Communist credentials than on Nazi pasts.
  • [42:01] Holly: "...the focus shifted...from establishing that they were not Nazis to establishing that they were not Communists."

• Espionage & Secrets Destroyed:

  • A JOA deputy director, Henry Whelan, spied for the USSR and destroyed or leaked many Paperclip records, making the full scope permanently unclear.
  • [45:02] Holly: "He was also spying for Russia...handed over or destroyed a lot of files related to Project Paperclip."

• Declassification, Books, and Ongoing Debate:

  • Mass declassification (esp. the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act) and journalists like Linda Hunt and Tom Bauer brought to light the scope of government coverups, with some framing it as a conspiracy.
  • [49:00] Tracy: "...mandated the declassification of roughly 8.5 million pages of records..."

• Continuing Institutional Reckoning:

  • Institutions continue to grapple with their connection to Paperclip scientists, especially as more details have become public thanks to persistent investigation and leaked documents.
  • [50:27] Tracy: "In part because of all the information that has been declassified and released in the last few decades, there are...institutions...still wrestling with how to reconcile their histories..."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“It was like every layer of American industry and the military industrial complex.”
— Tracy V. Wilson [04:18]

"He had compiled a list of about 15,000 names, part of which was discovered in an unflushed toilet in March of 1945."
— Holly Fry [11:31]

"This person is a dangerous Nazi" (original file). [dramatic revisions] "This person had no more than a nominal involvement in the Nazi party."
— Tracy V. Wilson [30:29], on background whitewashing

“Bob Hope joked that it meant that, quote, their Germans were better than our Germans.”
— Tracy V. Wilson [45:00]

“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.”
— Quoted from "US Intelligence and the Nazis" [49:00]

"We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred."
— Council Against Intolerance in America telegram, read by Tracy V. Wilson [33:19]

"The cover-up seems to have stemmed from a belief that U.S. national security would be best served by keeping these Nazi specialists away from the Soviet Union."
— Tracy reading from Linda Hunt’s exposé [47:45]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Operation Paperclip Intro and Context: [04:18 – 07:12]
• Nazi Scientific Innovations & Allied Race: [07:12 – 10:28]
• Allied Competition and Early Recruitment: [10:28 – 13:58]
• Project Overcast and Vetting Dilemmas: [22:34 – 25:48]
• Transition to Operation Paperclip: [27:06 – 28:45]
• Public Awareness & Moral Controversy: [31:25 – 35:36]
• Scandal, Cover-ups, and Media Exposés: [35:36 – 38:46]
• Paperclip's Post-1947 Continuation: [41:12 – 46:26]
• Declassification, Institutional Reckoning: [47:45 – 51:43]

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Flow & Tone

The hosts maintain their signature insightful-yet-accessible tone, blending dry humor, moral clarity, and clear-eyed historical skepticism. They openly acknowledge the limits of the episode’s scope (postponing deep-dives into individual scientists and atrocities for future shows) while transparently navigating the program’s profound ethical ambiguities.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a comprehensive, nuanced exploration of Operation Paperclip, revealing how American expediency—driven by national security and technological competition—compromised stated ethical principles in the postwar era. The episode’s careful attention to primary source quotes, evolving historical perspectives, and institutional memory underscores how the legacy of Operation Paperclip remains contested and relevant. The hosts set the stage for future episodes to dig deeper into the personal stories of Nazi-linked scientists whose work reshaped America—and whose pasts remain inextricable from the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.

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Transcript

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

Happy Saturday. 81 years ago today, on June 20, 1945, the US Secretary of State approved Wernher von Braun and other German rocket scientists to enter the United States under a program called Operation Paperclip. This was a secret program to bring German scientists, engineers, and other specialists to the United States to live and work, including ones who had deep ties to the Nazi party and war crimes.

[Holly Fry]

Our episode on Operation Paperclip came out on May 24, 2021, and it is today's Saturday classic. Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Today we are going to talk about Operation Paperclip, which is also known as Project Paperclip. And this was the US Effort to bring German scientists to to the United States after World War II. 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 discussion around this program today. So people like Werner von Braun, 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 3 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 II and the general era of the 1930s and 40s, there's just not. 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.

[Holly Fry]

So to establish a bit of background on this subject, In June of 1942, Adolf Hitler issued the Decree of the Fuhrer on the Reich Research Council. It read in part, the necessity to expand all available forces to highest efficiency in the interest of the state requires not only in peacetime, but also, and especially in wartime, the concentrated effort of scientific research and its channelization toward 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1944, 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 Wunderwaffe, or wonder weapons. Also in 1944, Germany introduced the rocket power Messerschmitt ME 163, which was the world's first rocket powered fighter, the Messerschmitt Me262, which was the world's first operational jet fighter, the V1 flying bomb, which was the world's first cruise missile, and the V2 rocket, which was the world's first ballistic missile. So a lot of wartime firsts there.

[Holly Fry]

And it has been widely repeated that if these technologies had been introduced just a few months earlier in the war, the Axis 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 V2 rocket was for it to carry a nuclear payload, and concerns that it was sharing its secrets and technologies with Japan.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 6, 1944, teams really searched for German research facilities, 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 V2 rockets and wind tunnels and aircraft.

[Holly Fry]

This process really accelerated in the last months of the war. The UK and the US formed the Combined Intelligence Objectives 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 19, 1945. 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 was happening, military officials also started to shift their focus a little bit, because no matter how many blueprints or technical manuals or formulas or actual pieces of technology they managed to secure, and no matter how many specialists they interviewed, that still wouldn't be the same as having ongoing access to the minds behind all of this stuff. So the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee started developing lists of people to 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 unquote, 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.

[Holly Fry]

One source for the names on these lists was a document prepared by senior Gestapo officer Werner Ozenberg, who supervised the planning office of the Reich Research Council. He had compiled a list of about 15,000 names, part of which was discovered in an unflushed toilet in March of 1945. When Osenberg 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The U.S. 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 project. Allied 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, Supreme Headquarters,

[Holly Fry]

Allied Expeditionary Force had established internment camps for scientists and engineers in Germany and in formerly German occupied territory. Some of these camps housed hundreds of people. And beyond interrogating them about their work and getting to interpret and explain technical documents, at first, officials weren't quite sure what to do with them.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Simply letting people go after they'd been interrogated wasn't really an option. The people who had developed the aircraft, bombs and chemical and biological weapons for the Third Reich still presented a threat. And then on top of that, the Potsdam Agreement, which was signed in August of 1945, called for the, quote, complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany and the elimination or control of all German industry that 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, you know, 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.

[Holly Fry]

Although the US and the UK Were allies and the Combined Intelligence Objective Subcommittee had been established as a joint effort between the two nations, over time, they became increasingly competitive. For example, on April 13, 1945, Colonel Donald L. Putt was led to the Hermann Goering Aeronautical Research center at Vulcan Road, 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, this kind of stuff led to various toe stepping, basically from a military perspective, and then the United States having to, like, work with Britain to say, okay, we took all these V2 rockets that you were supposed to get access to, so we will work with you to figure out how they work and to launch some so you can see how they work. Some of this was specifically focused on trying to secure information and weapons that could be useful in the war in the Pacific, which was still ongoing. On April 22, 1945, the US Army Air Forces Intelligence service launched Operation Lusty, which stood for Luftwaffe Secret technology, and that was to secure technical and scientific intelligence that could be used in the war against Japan. The US Started copying German munitions that had been used against Britain during the blitz. By the time Germany surrendered on May 8th of 1945, the US had captured most of Germany's most respected aircraft engineers.

[Holly Fry]

Two days later, Allied forces intercepted the German submarine U858, which surrendered in Delaware on May 14th. It was carrying civilian engineers to Japan, along with advanced weaponry and supplies, including an entire disassembled aircraft. Among its cargo were 1200 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 28, Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson wrote a letter to Admiral William D. Leahy which read in part, quote, I strongly favor 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. Of bringing them here and the treatment accorded them.

[Holly Fry]

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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

The first project to bring German scientists to the US to work under a temporary contract was called Project Overcast, and it was launched on July 20, 1945. Under this program, German specialists and researchers would be brought to the US where they would temporarily work under military supervision before eventually returning to Germany.

[Holly Fry]

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 ardent Nazi is a term that comes up a lot in documents about Operation Paperclip and its related programs. Officials recognized that under Adolf 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 Fuhrer. People who were leaders in the party or in one of its affiliated organizations like the SS or the sa, people who had been convicted in a post war denazification court, or people who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.

[Holly Fry]

This process involved interviews, examining people's records and confirming that they were not on the central registry of war criminals and security suspects. That's also known as the Crocus List. This list was described as, quote, an unwieldy monster archive. It was often vague, it was full of undocumented allegations. There was a lot of hearsay. But in terms of the people conducting these background checks, it became a useful checkoff to say this person was not a suspected war criminal.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This program, Operation Overcast, grew really quickly. It expanded to include a huge assortment of government and military programs and their associated acronyms. There were a lot of. Every book that I read on this had just a list of acronyms at the beginning and what they all stood for. The Joint Intelligence Objective Agency, that is abbreviated J I O A 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 the 1600 German and Austrian scientists, engineers and researchers to the US between 1945 and 1970. The Office of Strategic Services and the Joint Intelligence Committee were involved in this as well.

[Holly Fry]

Japan formally surrendered on September 2, 1945. But even though that ended the war, the effort to bring German scientists to the US continued. By January of 1946, 160 German specialists had been brought to the United States. 115 of them were rocket specialists, including Wernher von Braun.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 3rd of 1946, the Merck 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.

[Holly Fry]

In March of 1946, Project Overcast expanded. It shifted from a limited number of people with temporary contracts working under military supervision to between 800 and 1000 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 researchers families would be permitted to enter the US Permanently as well.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This was the whole process where Germany was being denazified. Like people with Nazi ties were being pulled out of leadership positions in all of these different industries and all of these different contexts. But some of the same people were being brought to the United states and offered U.S. 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 change to Operation Paperclip or Project Paperclip, 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.

[Holly Fry]

In August, Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent a top secret memo to President Harry Truman requesting his approval of the interim exploitation of German and Austrian specialists under Project Paperclip. The document Truman approved included the text of State War Navy coordinating committee document 257 22, which outlined a revised version for the expanded Paperclip program that had been launched in March.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This read in part, quote, Persons proposed to be brought to the US Hereunder shall be screened by the Commanding General US FET on the basis of available records. No person found by the Commanding General USFT to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism shall be brought to the US Hereunder. However, neither position nor 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 Hereunder, 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.

[Holly Fry]

Before October of 1946, the State Department had been pre approving Project Paperclip candidates before they left Europe. But after that point the process shifted so that the Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner handled them in the US. This dropped the State Department preclearance requirement which was required 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 1970s and afterward revealed that reports on individual candidates were revised to basically whitewash their backgrounds.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yes, some of these revisions were really dramatic. That sort of went from, you know, draft one, the first thing in somebody's file being like, this person is a dangerous Nazi. And then later on being like, ah, this person had no more than a nominal involvement in the Nazi party. So even though this whole project had started with a lot of assurances that it absolutely would not involve ardent Nazis, in the end, paper clippers included people who had worked directly with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Guring. Some had been officers in the Nazi party or in the SS or the sa. Some stood trial at Nuremberg or faced other war crimes trials. In some cases, people's backgrounds were so egregious that they were given 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

[Holly Fry]

the U.S. of course this whole program was classified. But just as this shift was happening from temporary contracts to American citizenship, the American public was becoming more aware of what was going on. This started thanks to news reports that originated from Russian language newspapers being printed in Germany. Soon publications like the New York Times and Newsweek were reporting on German researchers, some of them Nazis, being brought to the US and offered citizenship.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The War Department tried to respond to all this with its own favorable propaganda about the program. So the whole idea of like, no, we're only bringing the good Germans here, Like interviews with hand picked scientists who were doing relatively neutral and wholesome seeming work. Of course, this all had to totally sidestep the fact that many paper clippers had been Nazis. And even if they had not been 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.

[Holly Fry]

There had been critics of this program within the government and the military from the beginning. For example, Samuel Clowes was an attorney with the State Department and had been chosen to represent the State Department with joa. 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 Clause'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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, he. 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 this, 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 30, 1946, 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 residence or citizenship in the United States States with the opportunity which that would afford of inculcating these anti democratic doctrines which seek to undermine and destroy our national unity.

[Holly Fry]

That telegram was signed by about 40 people, including Albert Einstein, A. Philip Randolph and Rabbi B. Benedict Glaser. 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 3 and the Federation 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

From there, Operation Paperclip continued to make some pretty astounding headlines that were 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 9th of 1947, Drew Pearson wrote an article for the New York Times that alleged that Carl Crouch had been offered a Paperclip contract while incarcerated at Nuremberg, where he was awaiting a trial for war crimes. Crouch was ultimately convicted of enslavement and crimes against humanity.

[Holly Fry]

Project Paperclip wrapped up in September of 1947, but German scientists were still brought into the US after that point. We're going to talk more about that after a sponsor break.

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[Cal Penn]

Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Irsay The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary, Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.

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I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no. At this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. There's places in this book that that deeply, emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great cuz it served the story. People will say like oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah dude, me too.

[Cal Penn]

Listen to Irsay the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

Project Paperclip, also known as Operation Paperclip, formally ran from March of 1946 to September of 1947, building on its precursor, Operation Overcast, as we talked about earlier, but this same basic process continued under various different names and with various adjustments for much longer. The recruitment of German scientists actually accelerated during the Berlin Blockade, which is when the Soviet Union blocked access to parts of Berlin in 1948 and 1949. The idea was once again to keep the Soviets from getting access to more German knowledge and technology, with the CIA and JOA basically competing with each other in their efforts to find and recruit more German specialists.

[Holly Fry]

Things escalated once again during the Korean War under a project that was known alternately as Accelerated paperclip and Project 63. 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 U S Didn't last long though, and it was part of more information about this program coming to public light. In 1951, 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 Globe denouncing 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.

[Holly Fry]

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 paperclippers 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 home to a community of high profile Nazi officials. He was also given an undisclosed allowance.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In the 1950s, 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, 90% of the Germans who were brought to the US between 1945 and 1952 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, the War Department had had this whole propaganda campaign about these being the, the good Germans. Only when the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, Bob Hope joked that it meant that, quote, their Germans were better than our Germans. Bob Hope is just one of the people that this quote has been attributed to. Sometimes it's their German rocket scientists were better than our German rocket scientists. People knew. It was obvious.

[Cal Penn]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

In 1959, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Whelan became deputy director of JOA, which was still overseeing this work. He was also spying for Russia, something that went undetected until 1963. When the FBI investigated, it became clear that he had handed over or destroyed a lot of files related to Project Paperclip. So at least some of the details about all of this may never be known. Whelan pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring with Soviet agents, but the Justice Department dropped the charge of espionage.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

By the time Waylon's espionage was uncovered, JOA had actually been disbanded. That happened in 1962, and a few years after that, people started combing through the details of what had happened during and after the war. The first book on Operation Paperclip to come out of this work was Clarence Lasby's Project Paperclip, German Scientists in the Cold War, which was published in 1971. At that point, though, most of the documents related to the program were still classified, and Lasby's general conclusion was that authorities had screened everyone, but that a few ardent Nazis had unfortunately managed to evade detection. Criticism of the Paperclip program and its successors had been ongoing through all these years. But public interest reached another peak in 1978 after NBC aired a miniseries on the Holocaust.

[Holly Fry]

In 1980, 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 30,000 prisoners died by Jean Michel, who was imprisoned at the camp, and the Rocket Team, which traced the history of the V2 rocket. And in reading these books, he connected the V2's development with the use of slave labor from the concentration camp.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 1979 to investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals who were living in the U.S. rosenbaum convinced the head of the OSI to open an investigation into paperclipper Arthur Rudolph, who designed the Saturn V rocket and had been a big part of the V2 development team.

[Holly Fry]

In addition to coordinating the use of enslaved labor at the German development facility known as Mittlewerk, he had known about and been complicit in or possibly been actively involved in atrocities that were committed there. He maintained that he was innocent of these accusations. Rather than stand trial, he renounced his U. S. Citizenship in 1984 and returned to Europe after 38 years in the

[Tracy V. Wilson]

U. S. After this happened, investigative journalists started trying to get more and more information about Operation Paperclip, including through the Freedom of Information act, which had been signed into law in 1967. In 1985, 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. Formerly classified documents reveal details of the U. S. 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 status. The COVID up seems to have stemmed from a belief that U. S. 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 Paperclip.

[Holly Fry]

Hunt published a book based on this and other research in 1991. Journalist Tom Bauer had done the same. In 1987, both Hunt and Bauer framed Project Paperclip as a conspiracy.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1998, the US passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure act, which mandated the declassification of roughly 8.5 million pages of records related to all this. This mass declassification led to the publication of US intelligence and the Nazis in 2004. A key sentence from its introduction is quote granted, some intelligence activities involve a degree of secret and messiness which strain 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.

[Holly Fry]

Between its establishment in 1978 and its merge with the Human Rights and Special prosecution section in 2010, the Office of Special Investigations work led to at least 100 Nazi war criminals criminals being stripped of their US citizenship or removed from the United States. In 2006, OSI legal historian Judith Fagan wrote a 600 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 response to a Freedom of Information act request, former officials leaked the entire unredacted thing to the New York Times.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 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, 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 address is historypodcastheartradio.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.

[Holly Fry]

Living with a rare autoimmune condition brings uncertainty, but it can also create community. In season six of Untold Life with a severe autoimmune condition, they go beyond MG and cidp as host Martine Hackett welcomes stories from other conditions like myositis and IgAN into the conversation. Untold Stories is produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenics. Listen to Untold Life with a Severe Autoimmune condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

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