Operation Paperclip
Secret U.S. program recruiting Nazi scientists after World War II
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States government program that recruited more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians from Nazi Germany to work for the U.S. government after World War II. The program ran from 1945 to 1959 and was conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
The program's name derived from the paperclips used to attach new, sanitized biographical profiles to the scientists' files — profiles that omitted or minimized their Nazi Party membership and, in many cases, their involvement in war crimes. President Truman had explicitly 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 Nazi militarism" should be excluded. The JIOA systematically circumvented this directive.
Among the most prominent recruits was Wernher von Braun, who had been a member of the SS and whose V-2 rocket program used slave labor from concentration camps. Approximately 20,000 forced laborers died during the construction of V-2 rockets at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Von Braun later led NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and was the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the Moon.
Other recruits included Hubertus Strughold, the "father of space medicine," who was linked to human experiments at the Dachau concentration camp; Kurt Blome, who worked on Nazi biological weapons programs; and Walter Schreiber, a military doctor connected to human experimentation programs.
The program's existence was officially declassified in 1990, though investigative journalists and historians had documented it earlier. The full scope was confirmed through declassified records released by the National Archives in 2006 as part of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
Operation Paperclip raises fundamental questions about accountability and institutional memory. The U.S. government knowingly harbored individuals complicit in some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century because their technical expertise was deemed more valuable than justice for their victims.