Operation Paperclip (1945-1959) brought over 1,600 German scientists to the US, including rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun (who used slave labor at Mittelbau-Dora) and chemical weapons experts. President Truman explicitly forbade recruiting active Nazis, but the JIOA systematically falsified biographies, destroyed incriminating records, and created clean files — hence 'Paperclip' (referring to paperclips on sanitized files). The program gave the US its space program and biological/chemical weapons capabilities. Roughly half of the recruited scientists had been Nazi Party members. The program remained classified for decades.
“The US government recruited Nazi war criminals and whitewashed their records to exploit their scientific expertise, violating the President's own orders.”
What they said vs. what the evidence shows
“These German specialists are being employed under strict military supervision for purposes critical to national security. No war criminals have been recruited.”
— US War Department · Mar 1946
SourceFrom “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
When President Harry Truman signed off on America's post-World War II strategy in 1945, he was explicit about one thing: Nazi Party members were off-limits. The United States would recruit German scientists for the Cold War effort, yes, but not the ideologues who had actively supported Hitler's regime. It was a clear line. It didn't hold.
Operation Paperclip, the classified program that ran from 1945 to 1959, brought over 1,600 German scientists to American soil. Among them was Wernher von Braun, the brilliant rocket scientist who would become the architect of the Apollo program. There was one problem with this recruitment drive: roughly half of the scientists brought to the US had been Nazi Party members. Worse, many had direct involvement in war crimes. Von Braun himself had overseen the use of slave labor at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp facility. Chemical weapons experts with documented histories joined biological warfare programs. The men Truman forbade were exactly the men who arrived.
How did this happen? The answer reveals a systematic campaign of document destruction and biographical whitewashing. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, or JIOA, the military outfit running Paperclip, faced a problem: they wanted these scientists, but couldn't justify it to the president or Congress. So they falsified records. They destroyed incriminating files. They created clean biographies that erased Nazi affiliations and war crimes. The paperclips that gave the program its name referred to the literal clips holding together these sanitized dossiers—files with the damning evidence removed.
For decades, this operation remained classified. The scientists themselves weren't the first to raise questions about what had happened. Journalists and historians eventually began investigating the gaps in official records and the suspicious cleanliness of these German scientists' backgrounds. The National Geographic investigation and subsequent historical analysis confirmed what had long been suspected: this wasn't an accident or isolated deviation. It was systematic deception executed at high levels of the military and intelligence apparatus.
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Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
What Paperclip gave the United States was undeniable. The space program that put Americans on the moon depended on von Braun's expertise. American biological and chemical weapons capabilities were enhanced by the knowledge these scientists brought. The Cold War competition with the Soviet Union was shaped by this technological advantage. But the cost was moral, and it was paid in a currency of compromised principles: Truman's direct orders were violated, Nazi war criminals were rehabilitated, and American institutions lied about it.
This matters because it established a pattern. When national security interests conflicted with stated values, the interests won—and the public was kept in the dark. It wasn't until decades later that documents were declassified and the full scope of Paperclip became clear. Citizens had supported a government they thought was following one set of rules while it quietly followed another. That's not a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true in the paranoid sense. It's something simpler and more troubling: documented proof that institutional secrecy, when married to strategic necessity, can systematically overturn explicit leadership decisions. It's why transparency matters, and why verified claims about what governments actually do—not what they say they do—deserve scrutiny.
Unlikely leak
Only 18.9% chance this would come out. It did.
Conspirators
~1,000Large op
Secret kept
52.3 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
