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American History Operation Paperclip

What was Operation Paperclip?

With rising technology being a problem as each country saw each other as enemies, the US sought to use the German science powerhouse to our own advantage, with the Soviets having the same idea. This resulted in Operations Paperclip and Osoaviakhim where 1,500 and 2,000 scientists, technicians, and engineers were taken back to either the US or the USSR in order to bolster the science workforce and to gain an advantage over the other. The US began the operation to curb the British and Soviet research, as well as keep German weapon research down after being defeated, while the Soviets gathered their own around a year later, mostly by gunpoint. Operation paperclip excluded anyone who had been apart of the Nazi party or supported it, as President Truman allowed, but was repealed as to get many lead scientists and others who were regarded as a must have when the lists on who to recruit were put out. Included on this list were some of the most important people to US research history like scientists Wernher von Braun, Kurt H. Debus, and Arthur Rudolph, as well as Physician Hubertus Strughold, each having been earlier classified as a “Menace to the security of the Allied Forces”.

Operation Paperclip started after the Allied victory over Germany and Europe on May 8th, 1945. But U.S. President Harry Truman did not formally order it to go ahead until August. The operation was conducted by the JIAO or Joint Intelligence Objective Agency, and went around many blocks and failsafes in order to recruit Nazi scientists and others than would never had been allowed in, going around the Yalta agreements, as well as the president's anti-Nazi orders. The Osenberg List was a list compiled by Nazi germany as far back as 1943, where German High Command instituted to find leading scientists and bring them back to further research more ways to defend against the Red Army counterattack. The US used the list in order to calculate which scientist would be a threat and what could be of use to them after the war.

Known to many Americans, it was deemed not right for these men to be allowed into the US for work, since their work was directly apart of the Nazi Regime and created terror around the world. But with the Cold War starting to reveal its true nature, the need for advancement outweighed the morals.

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This page references:

Operation Paperclip This Program discloses how the US sheltered Nazi war criminals just after World War 2 through a CIA project identified as Operation Paperclip. The CIA And the Nazis exposes how more than 4,000 Nazis joined to work in support of the American government, without disclosing it to the public, against the Soviet Union. German Reinhard Gehlen, one of Hitler’s General, was called to lead the US intelligence program inside of West Germany for the purpose of spying the Russians. Simultaneously, former Nazi scientists along with Nazi engineers were accepted within American land.
Operation Paperclip Casefile.pdf (PDFy mirror)