Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip was the code name for the 1945 Office of Strategic Services, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency recruitment of German scientists from Nazi Germany to the U.S. after VE Day.

President Truman authorized Operation Paperclip in August 1945; however he had expressly ordered that anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism militarism" would be excluded.

Under this criterion many of the scientists recruited, such as Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph and Hubertus Strughold, who were all officially on record as Nazis and listed as a "menace to the security of the Allied Forces," were ineligible. All were cleared to work in the U.S. after having their backgrounds "bleached" by the military. The paperclips that secured newly-minted background details to their personnel files gave the operation its name.

Group of 104 Operation Paperclip rocket scientists in 1946 at Fort Bliss (35 were at White Sands Proving Grounds).
(An imagemap with the name of the subjects is available here.)

Osenberg List

Following the failure of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany was at a disadvantage since its military industries were unprepared for a long war. As a result, Germany began efforts in Spring 1943 to recall scientists and technical personnel from combat units for use in research and development, including 4000 to rocket work:

Overnight, Ph.D.s were liberated from KP duty, masters of science were recalled from orderly service, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics ceased to be truck drivers.

— Dieter K. Huzel

The recall first required identifying the men, then finding them and ascertaining their political correctness and reliability, before their names were recorded on the Osenberg List, kept by Werner Osenberg, a University of Hannover engineer–scientist, head of the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (English: Military Research Association). In March 1945, a Polish laboratory technician found the pieces of the Osenberg List in an improperly flushed toilet. Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance, London, used the Osenberg List to compile his blacklist of scientists to be interrogated, headed by rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.

Operation Overcast

The original, unnamed plan to only interview the rocket scientists changed after Major Staver sent Col. Joel Holmes's cable to the Pentagon, on 22 May 1945, about the urgency of evacuating the German technicians and their families as "important for [the] Pacific war." Most of the scientists were at Army Research Center Peenemünde which developed the V-2 rocket and were initially housed with their families in Landshut, Bavaria.

On 19 July 1945, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff designated the handling of the Nazi scientists and their families as Operation Overcast, but when their housing's nickname, "Camp Overcast," became common usage, Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip in March 1946.

An equally strong reason for these scientific rescues was to deny German expertise to the Soviets. For example, in Operation Alsos, nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg—principal scientist in the German nuclear energy project—was said by Allied intelligence to be "...worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans." Besides rocketeers and nuclear physicists, Allied teams also searched for chemists, medical doctors, and naval weaponeers.

Groups of scientists

In May 1945, the U.S. Navy acquired Dr. Herbert A. Wagner, a highly regarded expert in aerodynamics, controls and guidance. The inventor of the Hs 293 missile, Wagner worked for the first two years at the Special Devices Center located at the Castle Gould and Hempstead House in Long Island. In 1947, Wagner moved his operation to the Naval Air Station Point Mugu.

In early August 1945, Colonel Holger Toftoy, chief of the Rocket Branch in the Research and Development Division of Army Ordnance, offered initial one-year contracts to the rocket scientists. After Toftoy agreed to take care of their families, 127 scientists accepted the offer. In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived from Germany at Fort Strong in the US: Wernher von Braun, Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard Rees, Wilhelm Jungert and Walter Schwidetzky. In November, December, and February, three subsequent groups of rocket scientists arrived in the US for duty at Fort Bliss and White Sands Proving Grounds as "War Department Special Employees."

In early 1950, U.S. legal residence for some "Paperclip Specialists" was effected through the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juárez; from which the scientists legally entered the U.S. In later decades, the World War II activities of some scientists were investigated—Arthur Rudolph was exiled in 1984 and then exonerated by Germany, Georg Rickhey was acquitted of war crimes, and Hubertus Strughold was implicated in Nazi human experimentation.

Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field, which had acquired Luftwaffe aircraft and equipment under Operation Lusty (Luftwaffe Secret Technology).

The 'United States Army Signal Corps' employed 24 specialists—including physicists Drs. Georg Goubau, Gunter Guttwein, Georg Hass, Horst Kedesdy, and Kurt Levovec; physical chemists Professor Rudolf Brill and Drs. Ernst Baars and Eberhard Both; geophysicist Dr. Helmut Weickmann; technical optician Dr. Gerhard Schwesinger; and electronics engineers Drs. Eduard Gerber, Richard Guenther and Hans Ziegler

The 'United States Bureau of Mines' employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946.

In 1959, ninety-four Operation Paperclip men went to the U.S., including Friedwardt Winterberg, Hans Dolezalek, and Friedrich Wigand. Through 1990, the operation immigrated 1,600 personnel, with the "intellectual reparations" taken by the U.S. and the U.K. (patents and industrial processes) valued at some $10 billion.

Related operations

• APPLEPIE: Project to locate and interrogate key German personnel of RSHA AMT VI and members of the German Army Staff who were knowledgeable about Soviet industrial and economic matters.

• DUSTBIN (counterpart of ASHCAN): British-American operation established first in Paris and later in Kransberg Castle outside Frankfurt.

• ECLIPSE: unimplemented 1944 plan for post-war operations in Europe that would destroy V-1 and V-2 missiles found by the Air Disarmament Wing.
  • Safehaven: US project under ECLIPSE to prevent German researchers from escaping to other countries (e.g., Latin America).

• Field Information Agency; Technical (FIAT): US Army agency for securing the "major, and perhaps only, material reward of victory, namely, the advancement of science and the improvement of production and standards of living in the United Nations by proper exploitation of German methods in these fields." FIAT was dissolved in 1947 when operation PAPERCLIP began large scale operations.

• JCS Directive 1067/14: On April 26, 1946, Joint Chiefs of Staff Order 1067 had been issued to General Eisenhower to "preserve from destruction and take under your control records, plans, books, documents, papers, files and scientific, industrial and other information and data belonging to … German organizations engaged in military research." The U.S. occupation directive stated that German scientists should be detained as needed for intelligence purposes, except for war-criminals.

• National Interest/Project 63: "Project to help former Nazis obtain jobs with Lockheed, Martin Marietta, North American Aviation or other defense contractors during a time when many American engineers in the aircraft industry were being laid off."

• Operation Alsos, Operation Big, Russian Alsos: US and USSR efforts to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel

• Operation Backfire (WWII): Rocket experiments in the area of Cuxhaven

• Operation Lusty: US efforts to capture German aeronautical secrets, equipment and personnel

• Operation Surgeon: British operation to deny German aeronautical expertise to the USSR and instead exploit the scientists in order to further British research.

• Special Mission V-2: US operation commanded by Major William Bromley to recover V-2 rocket parts and equipment. Major James P. Hamill, with the aid of the 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly Company, coordinated the shipment of the first trainload of V-2 equipment from Nordhausen to Erfurt.[1] (see also Operation Blossom, Broomstick Scientists, Hermes project, Operations Sandy and Pushover)

• Target Intelligence Committee: US project to gather German experts in cryptography.

In popular culture

• Former Nazi Germany scientists working for the US are featured in the films Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and The Right Stuff; in an X-Files TV episode; in the Astro City and Ministry of Space comic books; and in the Area 51 novels.
• An episode of The X-Files, entitled Paper Clip, which first aired on Friday September 29, 1995, references Operation Paperclip.
• The 2006 film The Good Shepherd depicts the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for German scientists.
• The novel Space contains a fictionalized account of Operation Paperclip.
• In the film The Good German, an American war correspondent discovers aspects of Operation Overcast.
• Operation Paperclip is mentioned in the Chuck Palahniuk novel Rant.
• The second season of Twin Peaks reveals character Garland Briggs worked on Operation Paperclip.
• Operation Paperclip is explained in the Discovery Channel's special entitled "Nazi/UFO Conspiracy".

Key figures

• Rocketry: (see also List of German rocket scientists in the US): Rudi Beichel, Magnus von Braun, Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, Werner Dahm, Konrad Dannenberg, Kurt H. Debus, Ernst R. G. Eckert, Krafft Arnold Ehricke, Otto Hirschler, Hermann H. Kurzweg, Fritz Mueller, Gerhard Reisig, Georg Rickhey, Arthur Rudolph, Ernst Stuhlinger, Werner Rosinski, Eberhard Rees, Ludwig Roth, Bernhard Tessmann
• Aeronautics: Alexander Martin Lippisch, Hans von Ohain, Hans Multhopp, Kurt Tank
• Medicine: Walter Schreiber, Kurt Blome, Hubertus Strughold, Hans Antmann (Human factors)
• Electronics: Hans Ziegler, Kurt Lehovec, Hans Hollmann, Johannes Plendl
• Intelligence: Reinhard Gehlen

See also

• Ex-Nazis, ODESSA, Nazi human experimentation, Gernot Zippe
• Locations in Germany: Peenemünde, Mittelwerk, Mittelbau-Dora, Landshut
• Locations in the US: Fort Bliss, White Sands Missile Range, Fort Monmouth, Camp Evans, Fort Strong
• Allen Welsh Dulles

References

Bibliography

• Yves Beon.Planet Dora. Westview Press, 1997. ISBN 0813332729
• Giuseppe Ciampaglia: "Come ebbe effettivo inizio a Roma l'Operazione Paperclip." Roma 2005. In: Strenna dei Romanisti 2005. Edit. Roma Amor
• John Gimbel, "Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany" Stanford University Press, 1990 ISBN 0804717613
• Linda Hunt, U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. April, 1985.
• Linda Hunt, Arthur Rudolph of Dora and NASA, Moment 4, 1987 (Yorkshire Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
• Matthias Judt; Burghard Ciesla, "Technology Transfer Out of Germany After 1945" Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. ISBN 3718658224
• John Gimbel "U.S. Policy and German Scientists: The Early Cold War", Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 3 (1986), pp. 433–51
• Clarence G., Lasby "Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War" Scribner (February 1975) ISBN 0689705247
• Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988)
• Wolfgang W. E. Samuel American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe’s Secrets (University Press of Mississippi, 2004)
• Koerner, Steven T. "Technology Transfer from Germany to Canada after 1945: A Study in Failure?". Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Volume 2, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 99–124
• C. Lester Walker "Secrets By The Thousands", Harper's Magazine. October 1946
• John Farquharson "Governed or Exploited? The British Acquisition of German Technology, 1945–48" Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 23–42
• 1995 Human Radiation Experiments Memorandum: Post-World War II Reccruitment of German Scientists—Project Paperclip
• Operation Paperclip Casefile
• Employment of German scientists and technicians: denial policy UK National archives releases March 2006.
• "Objective List of German and Austrian Scientists" (Microsoft Word). Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. Retrieved 2007-04-10.