Rocket designer Wernher von Braun, for example, had inspected the infamous Mittelwerk facility, where enslaved technicians from throughout occupied Europe were worked to exhaustion and death assembling V-2s. Others were morally tainted by their knowledge of, and involvement with, the Nazis’ use of slave labor in weapons plants.
Some were guilty of nothing more than lending their expertise to their nation’s war effort. Operation Paperclip gathered up samples of the shells, along with canisters of uranium oxide, research notes on weaponized diseases, a hundred V-2 rockets in various states of assembly, and technical documents by the ton.įirst and foremost, however, agents of Operation Paperclip rounded up people: scientists, engineers, and medical researchers. The shells were filled with a lethal nerve agent called Tabun, capable of penetrating exposed skin and killing within minutes. When British and American forces overran western Germany in early 1945, they discovered fortified bunkers stacked with thousands of artillery shells each painted with three green bands. Atomic, biological, and chemical weapons also figured prominently in plans for the next war, and Nazi scientists had worked on all three. Germany led the world in advanced aerospace technology, and although its cutting-edge “wonder weapons”-the Me-262 jet fighter, V-1 cruise missile, and V-2 ballistic missile-had not altered the outcome of the last war, senior military officers believed that their descendants would likely decide the next one. Advanced technology - from radar and supercharged aircraft engines to proximity-fused shells and atomic bombs - had been essential to the Allies’ victory in World War II, and there was no reason to believe that pattern would change. There were reasons, of course there are always reasons. Scores of foreign rulers have benefitted from cynical blessings similar to the one that Roosevelt supposedly gave to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”Īnnie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip recounts one chapter in that story: How, in the closing months of World War II and the years immediately after, the United States government rounded up hundreds of Nazi scientists and engineers from the ruins of the Third Reich, and gave them new lives in America. Franklin Roosevelt made common cause with Stalin, Dwight Eisenhower propped up Ngo Dinh Diem, and Ronald Reagan armed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for war against Iran in the ’80s.
The United States government has a long history of collaborating with evil men for what seemed, at the time, to be good reasons.
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