npr | In the fall of 1944, the United States and its allies launched a
secret mission code-named Operation Paperclip. The aim was to find and
preserve German weapons, including biological and chemical agents, but
American scientific intelligence officers quickly realized the weapons
themselves were not enough.
They decided the United States
needed to bring the Nazi scientists themselves to the U.S. Thus began a
mission to recruit top Nazi doctors, physicists and chemists — including
Wernher von Braun, who went on to design the rockets that took man to
the moon.
The U.S. government went to great lengths to hide the
pasts of scientists they brought to America. Based on newly discovered
documents, writer Annie Jacobsen tells the story of the mission and the
scientists in her book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America.
On the origins of Operation Paperclip
It's
just a few months after the landings at Normandy and you have Allied
forces making their way across the continent, headed toward Berlin and
Munich, and with them, sort of scattered among the soldiers, are these
small teams of scientific intelligence officers. And they are searching
for the Reich's weapons. And they don't know what they might find.
One example was they had no idea that Hitler had created this whole
arsenal of nerve agents. They had no idea that Hitler was working on a
bubonic plague weapon. That is really where Paperclip began, which was
suddenly the Pentagon realizing, "Wait a minute, we need these weapons
for ourselves." Full Text
