Operation Paperclip

Background

In the closing months of the European war the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff established a coordinated effort to identify, locate, and exploit German scientific and technical personnel of military intelligence value. The initial vehicle was the Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, an Anglo-American body operating under the Combined Chiefs of Staff. By the spring of 1945 a parallel United States-only programme — initially designated "Operation Overcast" and authorised by the Joint Chiefs on 19 July 1945 — was screening German scientists in US custody for recruitment to United States employment, principally for continuation of work begun for the Wehrmacht and the German aerospace industry. The programme was renamed "Operation Paperclip" in March 1946; the name derived from the practice of attaching a paperclip to the personnel files of recruits whose records had been deemed too problematic for ordinary visa processing.¹

The single largest cohort of recruits comprised the rocket-engineering team of the Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde — the Wehrmacht ballistic-missile research and development centre on the Baltic island of Usedom — under Wernher von Braun. Approximately 120 of the Peenemünde team, with their families, surrendered to US Army units in Bavaria in May 1945; the team was exfiltrated to the United States and assigned initially to White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, and from 1950 to the US Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Von Braun's group formed the technical core of the post-war American ballistic-missile and space-launch programme, contributing to the Redstone, Jupiter, and ultimately Saturn V launch vehicles of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration.²

The Operation

Operation Paperclip was administered by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), a joint-service body under the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. JIOA was responsible for the screening, transport, employment, immigration, and post-arrival administration of recruited personnel. Recruits arrived in the United States across the period 1945–1959, with the bulk in the first six years; the programme placed recruits at US Army research installations (Redstone, Aberdeen, Edgewood, Fort Detrick), at US Air Force installations (Wright-Patterson, Holloman, the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field), at the US Navy (the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River), at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and its successor NASA, and across a range of other federal and federally-contracted facilities.³

The substantive scientific and technical fields covered by the recruitment were the fields in which the Third Reich had reached or led the world frontier in research and engineering: ballistic-missile and rocket propulsion, jet aerodynamics and propulsion, aviation medicine, ophthalmology and physiology of high-altitude and high-acceleration flight, chemical and biological warfare agents, electronics and radar, optical and precision-instrument engineering, and metallurgy. The aerospace-medicine cohort under Hubertus Strughold, including former personnel of the Luftwaffe Aviation Medicine Institute (whose wartime work had included experimentation on concentration-camp prisoners at Dachau, the subject of post-war US Government attribution that has remained substantially contested in the Strughold case specifically), was placed at the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, Texas.⁴

The political-affiliation problem was identified at the outset. President Harry S. Truman, in a directive dated 3 September 1946, formally authorised the Paperclip programme but specified that no individual 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 admitted to the United States. The directive was incompatible with the actual wartime record of a substantial fraction of the recruits. JIOA's institutional response was to sanitise the recruits' security dossiers — replacing or rewriting Office of Strategic Services and US Army Counter Intelligence Corps assessments that documented wartime party membership, SS rank, or knowledge of slave-labour conditions, with revised assessments that downplayed or omitted those facts. The practice has been documented in declassified JIOA, Army G-2, and Counter Intelligence Corps records.⁵

Disclosure

The wartime records of named Paperclip recruits became a recurring matter of US public attention from approximately 1980 onward. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) at the United States Department of Justice, established in 1979 and tasked with the identification, denaturalisation, and deportation of Nazi-era war criminals resident in the United States, opened investigations into a series of named individuals over the 1980s and 1990s. A small number of Paperclip recruits — most notably Arthur Rudolph, the former chief project engineer at the Mittelwerk underground V-2 production facility (where slave labour from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp was employed) — agreed to renounce US citizenship and depart the country rather than contest OSI proceedings. Rudolph departed for West Germany in 1984.⁶

The Linda Hunt 1985 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article and her 1991 monograph Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 were the first systematic public-record reconstructions, drawing on Freedom of Information Act-released JIOA, Army G-2, and CIC records. The 2007 Final Report of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act Interagency Working Group included substantial Paperclip-relevant material in its overall declassification of approximately 8.5 million pages, and Annie Jacobsen's 2014 Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America drew on those declassifications to extend the public-record account.⁷

The contrast between the policy formally articulated in Truman's 1946 directive and the operational practice subsequently documented in the JIOA records is the central evidentiary feature of the public-record account of Paperclip. Successive academic and journalistic treatments have characterised the JIOA file-sanitisation practice as the principal mechanism by which named recruits with disqualifying wartime records were nonetheless admitted to United States employment and, subsequently, to United States citizenship. The Strughold case in particular has remained the subject of contested historical assessment; the United States Air Force, which had named a research library at Brooks Air Force Base after Strughold, removed his name from the institution in 2012 following sustained academic critique.⁸

Legacy

Operation Paperclip's post-war scientific output is documented and operationally significant. The Saturn V launch vehicle that placed the Apollo missions on lunar trajectory was developed under Wernher von Braun's direction at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center; the contribution of the Peenemünde-derived team to the practical success of the United States ballistic-missile programme across the 1950s, and to the United States crewed space-flight programme across the 1960s, is uncontested. Parallel contributions are documented in jet propulsion, aviation medicine, and other fields. The programme's scientific record is the principal historical justification offered for it.⁹

The political-historical legacy is the documentation of a pattern: the willingness of an executive-branch programme to operate in deliberate contradiction to a directive of the President, with that operation supported by the active sanitisation of the underlying personnel records. The pattern is not unique to Paperclip — it appears across the same period in Operation Rusty, in the Gehlen Organization, in Operation Bloodstone, and in single-officer-protection cases including the Klaus Barbie case — but it is most extensively documented in Paperclip because of the particular accessibility of the JIOA, Army G-2, and CIC records under successive declassifications.¹⁰

The recruits themselves are now largely deceased; the institutional practice that absorbed them is no longer operational. The Paperclip dossier is now an open historical case, with the principal primary documentary record substantially declassified and with the principal academic and journalistic reconstructions established. Specific individual cases — Strughold, Rudolph, Walter Schreiber, Kurt Blome, and others — remain the subject of contested historical assessment in their particular features.¹¹

Related dossiers and agencies

This dossier runs in parallel with Operation Rusty and the Gehlen Organization (military-intelligence recruitment), Operation Bloodstone (émigré covert-action recruitment), and the Klaus Barbie case (a single-officer-protection case). The agency-level entry most directly engaged is the Central Intelligence Agency, although the principal institutional actors during Paperclip itself were the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), US Army G-2, and the Counter Intelligence Corps. The country-level context is on the pages for the United States and Germany.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Joint Chiefs of Staff, JCS Memorandum, 19 July 1945, authorising "Operation Overcast"; renaming to "Operation Paperclip," March 1946; Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (St. Martin's Press, 1991), ch. 1.
2. Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Knopf, 2007); Bob Ward, Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun (Naval Institute Press, 2005).
3. Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) records, declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and held at the National Archives, RG 330 (Office of the Secretary of Defense); Hunt, Secret Agenda; Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little, Brown, 2014).
4. Hunt, Secret Agenda, chs. 6–8; Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, on the aerospace-medicine cohort; Frank Ruff and Hubertus Strughold, Aviation Medicine During the War Years (German Aviation Medicine, World War II, US Government Printing Office, 1950), and subsequent critical historiography.
5. Presidential directive of 3 September 1946; Hunt, Secret Agenda, ch. 4; declassified JIOA security-dossier records at NARA RG 330.
6. United States Department of Justice, Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (successor to OSI), public records on Nazi-era denaturalisation cases; Arthur Rudolph denaturalisation proceedings, US v. Rudolph, 1984.
7. Linda Hunt, "U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1985; Hunt, Secret Agenda; Final Report to the United States Congress, Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, April 2007; Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip.
8. Eli Rosenbaum (former Director, OSI), Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up (St. Martin's, 1993); United States Air Force public statements on the renaming of the Strughold Aeromedical Library, 2012.
9. Roger E. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles (NASA SP-4206, 1980); Neufeld, Von Braun.
10. Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).
11. Brian E. Crim, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Hunt, Secret Agenda; Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip.