Operation Paperclip: Recruiting Nazi Scientists
How the U.S. government recruited over 1,600 Nazi scientists and whitewashed their records
The Program
Operation Paperclip was a secret U.S. government program that recruited more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians from Nazi Germany and brought them to the United States following World War II. The program, which began in 1945 and continued into the late 1950s, was administered by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The recruits included specialists in rocketry, aerodynamics, chemical weapons, aviation medicine, and other fields considered strategically valuable in the emerging Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The program’s name derived from the paperclips attached to the files of scientists selected for recruitment.
Circumventing Presidential Orders
President Truman authorized the program in September 1946, with an explicit condition: no one who had been “a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism” would be eligible. The JIOA systematically circumvented this restriction. When scientists’ dossiers contained evidence of Nazi Party membership, SS affiliation, or involvement in war crimes, JIOA officers created new, sanitized files. The original records were classified or destroyed.
Key Figures
Wernher von Braun was the most prominent Paperclip recruit. He had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1937 and held the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (major). During the war, he directed the development of the V-2 rocket at the Peenemünde Army Research Center. V-2 production relied on slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where an estimated 20,000 prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and execution. Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and a central figure in the Apollo program.
Hubertus Strughold, recruited as a specialist in aviation medicine, was later named “the Father of Space Medicine” by the U.S. Air Force. Strughold had been director of the Luftwaffe’s Institute for Aviation Medicine in Berlin. Post-war investigations linked his institute to experiments on concentration camp prisoners at Dachau, including high-altitude pressure experiments that killed subjects. Strughold denied knowledge of the experiments. In 2006, his name was removed from the Space Medicine Association’s award after further documentation of his institute’s activities surfaced.
Scale and Scope
Beyond the headline names, Paperclip brought chemists who had developed nerve agents, physicists who had worked on uranium enrichment, and biologists who had conducted weapons research. Many were placed at U.S. military installations, defense contractors, and universities. Their contributions to American missile development, space exploration, and weapons programs were substantial. So were their pasts.
The program’s records were declassified in stages beginning in the 1980s, with major releases in 2006 and 2010 through the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. These records confirmed the systematic nature of the record-whitewashing operation.
Research Verdict
| Assessment | CONFIRMED |
| Confidence | High |
| Summary | The U.S. government recruited over 1,600 Nazi scientists, deliberately falsifying their records to circumvent a presidential order barring Nazi Party members |