Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

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History & Foreign Affairs

Which Germans do you hire after World War II, and which do you try and hang? Jacobsen documents a government weighing that against keeping specialists from the Soviets, and more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians came to America, some tied to Nazi war crimes.

Core ideas
  • Records of atrocity: Recruits included Luftwaffe doctors, some of whom had run lethal experiments on camp prisoners, and developers of the nerve agents sarin and tabun.
  • Hired or tried: Wernher von Braun came over, as did men linked to slave labor at Mittelbau-Dora and IG Farben, while others were prosecuted at Nuremberg.
  • The paper trail: The visa and citizenship paperwork shows where officials lied to get recruits in, until exposure brought a backlash in the 1970s and 1980s.
Published2014
Pages575
ISBN9780316221047
ReadMay 2024

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