Operation Paperclip

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Operation Paperclip began, in one sense, with a Polish laboratory technician at Bonn University in March 1945. He found torn pieces of a document stuffed into a toilet. That scrap of paper would help move more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians to the United States, where they worked for the government between 1945 and 1959. Operation Paperclip was a secret American intelligence program. It carried experts out of a defeated Nazi Germany and into American laboratories. Several of them were confirmed as former members of the Nazi Party, including the SS and the SA. How did American officers find these people, and how did they decide whom to take? What happened to the men and families who were swept up along the way? What did their work add to American rockets, aircraft and spaceflight? And how did a country that had just fought the Nazi state justify employing some of its servants? The answers start with the list itself, and with the man who compiled it.

  609635761

• 2. The Osenberg List

  ›

  By early 1943, Germany had failed to conquer the Soviet Union, and its war economy was short of resources. The government began pulling scientists, engineers and technicians out of combat and putting them to work on research and development. About 4,000 rocketeers were sent back to Peenemünde, on the northeast coast. The recall was abrupt. Doctorate holders were released from kitchen-police duty, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics stopped driving trucks.

  Before anyone could be recalled, the government had to find these men and judge whether they were politically and ideologically reliable. Werner Osenberg, an engineer-scientist who headed the Defense Research Association, wrote the names of the cleared men on what became the Osenberg List. Appearing on it meant a return to scientific work.

  Pieces of that list reached MI6, the British service, which passed it to American intelligence. Major Robert B. Staver, chief of the Jet Propulsion Section in the Research and Intelligence Branch of the US Army Ordnance Corps, used it to build his own list of Germans to capture and question. At the top of Staver's list stood Wernher von Braun, described as Germany's best rocket scientist. Most of the engineers on the Osenberg List worked at the German Army Research Center at Peenemünde, developing the V-2 rocket. Staver first meant only to interview them, but what they told him changed the purpose of the whole operation.

  1056138

• 3. From Overcast to Paperclip

  ›

  In February 1945, Allied headquarters created T-Force, a unit that grew to more than 2,000 personnel by June. T-Force examined 5,000 German targets. Its wish list ran from synthetic rubber and oil catalysts to V-2 weapons, jet and rocket aircraft, field radios, secret-writing chemicals and aero medicine research.

  On the 22nd of May 1945, Staver sent the War Department a telegram from Colonel Joel Holmes. It urged that 100 of the 400 German scientists in custody be evacuated to America, because they were important for the Pacific war. By late April, advancing forces had been finding scientists in large numbers, so a special unit called the Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section was set up to manage and interrogate them.

  The US Joint Chiefs of Staff then established the first secret recruitment program on the 20th of July 1945. It was called Operation Overcast, and its stated aim was to help shorten the war with Japan and aid postwar military research. The name had a modest origin. Family members of the scientists first used it for the housing camp in Bavaria where they were held.

  Late that summer, the Joint Chiefs created the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency to oversee the effort. Its representatives came from army intelligence, naval intelligence, air force intelligence and the State Department. Special agents of the Army's Counterintelligence Corps did most of the fieldwork.

  In November 1945, the name Camp Overcast had become known locally, and the program needed a new one. Ordnance Corps officers renamed it Operation Paperclip. They had been attaching a paperclip to the folders of rocket experts they wanted to employ in the United States. Air Force general Donald L. Putt led the operation.

  On the 3rd of September 1946, a secret directive from President Truman officially approved Paperclip. It expanded the program to include 1,000 German scientists under what it called "temporary, limited military custody". The press had already interviewed several scientists in 1945, and news media revealed the program as early as December 1946.

  515491758

• 4. Evacuation and Limbo

  ›

  On Friday the 22nd of June 1945, one evacuation order told scientific personnel to gather with their families at the town square in Bitterfeld at 1300 hours. It said "There is no need to bring winter clothing." It advised taking easily carried possessions, such as family documents and jewelry. Vehicles would carry them to a railway station, and from there they would travel west.

  The reason was geography. On the 1st of July 1945, Saxony and Thuringia were due to become part of the Soviet occupation zone. Many research facilities and staff from the Berlin area had been evacuated there. American officials feared a Soviet takeover would limit their access to German expertise, and they did not want Moscow to benefit from it. Earlier planning, a project called Safehaven, had worried instead that scientists might emigrate and keep working in countries that had stayed neutral. By 1947, the evacuation had netted an estimated 1,800 technicians and scientists, plus 3,700 family members.

  Some Germans chose the Americans themselves. Von Braun and more than a thousand colleagues decided to surrender to American forces, and on the 20th of June 1945 they moved closer to them to avoid the advancing Soviet army. One of the engineers later explained their reasoning: "We despise the French, we are mortally afraid of the Soviets, we do not believe the British can afford us. So that leaves the Americans."

  Hardware was chased too. In April and May 1945, Special Mission V-2, led by Major William Bromley, recovered parts and equipment for 100 V-2 missiles from an underground factory at Kohnstein, inside the Soviet zone. Major James P. Hamill coordinated the move of that equipment on 341 railroad cars, from Nordhausen to Erfurt, just before the Soviets arrived. The Soviets answered in their own way. On the 22nd of October 1946, Operation Osoaviakhim relocated more than 2,200 German specialists and their families, over 6,000 people, to the USSR in a single night.

  Those taken west faced long waits. Interrogation centers included Camp Dustbin, first at Chesnay near Versailles and later at Kransberg Castle outside Frankfurt. Some specialists were questioned there for months. Most were sent to countryside villages with neither research facilities nor work. They received stipends and had to report to police headquarters twice a week, so they could not leave. A Joint Chiefs directive allowed their release only after every interested agency was satisfied that all desired intelligence had been obtained.

  On the 5th of November 1947, the Office of Military Government, United States, held a conference on the evacuees' status. It considered their monetary claims and a possible violation by the US of the laws of war. Its director of intelligence, Robert L. Walsh, started a plan to resettle the evacuees in the Third World. Germans called it General Walsh's Urwald-Programm, the "jungle program", and it was never carried out. In 1948 the evacuees received settlements of 69.5 million Reichsmarks. The currency reform that introduced the Deutsche Mark soon devalued that sum severely. John Gimbel concludes that the United States held some of Germany's best minds for three years, depriving German recovery of their expertise.

  5673010

• 5. Arrivals in America

  ›

  In May 1945, the US Navy received in custody Herbert A. Wagner, the inventor of the Hs 293 missile. For two years he worked at the Special Devices Center, at Castle Gould and Hempstead House on Long Island, New York. In 1947 he moved to the Naval Air Station Point Mugu.

  In August 1945, Colonel Holger Toftoy, head of the Rocket Branch of the Army Ordnance Corps research division, offered the rocket scientists initial one-year contracts. Of those approached, 127 accepted. In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived at Fort Strong. They were Wernher von Braun, Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, William August Schulze, Eberhard Rees, Wilhelm Jungert and Walter Schwidetzky.

  Beginning in late 1945, three more groups reached Fort Bliss, Texas, and the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. They held the title of War Department Special Employees. In 1946, the Bureau of Mines hired seven German synthetic fuel scientists for a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri.

  On the 1st of June 1949, the Chief of Ordnance designated Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, as the Ordnance Rocket Center. On the 1st of April 1950, the Fort Bliss missile operation moved there, including von Braun and his team of more than 130 Paperclip members. Early that year, legal residency for some specialists was arranged through the US consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The scientists therefore entered the country legally from Latin America.

  Between 1945 and 1952, the US Air Force sponsored the largest number of Paperclip scientists, importing 260 men. Thirty-six of them returned to Germany. The Army Signal Corps employed 24 specialists, including the physicists Georg Goubau, Gunter Guttwein, Georg Hass, Horst Kedesdy and Kurt Lehovec. It also hired the geophysicist Helmut Weickmann and the optician Gerhard Schwesinger. A final group of 94 men arrived in 1959, among them Friedwardt Winterberg and Friedrich Wigand. The program's imports were valued at US$10 billion in patents and industrial processes.

  1828193821

• 6. From V-2 to Saturn

  ›

  The V-2 rocket was born at Peenemünde, where von Braun directed a team of engineers, physicists and chemists. The Nazis fired it at Paris, the port of Antwerp and Great Britain, among many other targets. An estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel died in those attacks. After a British raid on the 17th of August 1943, production moved to Mittelwerk, near Nordhausen. There it was supplemented with slave labor from Dora, a nearby concentration camp.

  In March 1946, a V-2 was test-fired in New Mexico, and the first launch of a captured V-2 followed that April. After months of adaptation, a missile fired at White Sands reached a record altitude of 116 miles. These V-2 sounding rockets tested the effects of cosmic rays on fruit flies and seeds. They took the first pictures of Earth from 100 miles up, high enough to show the planet's curvature. They also tested g-force on monkeys.

  At Redstone Arsenal, von Braun's team developed the Redstone and Jupiter missiles. The related Mercury-Redstone rocket carried Alan Shepard on the first American human spaceflight. In July 1960, NASA established the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville after taking control of the Army's Development Operations Division. Von Braun became its first director. Its development team combined American engineers from Redstone with 118 German migrants who came from Peenemünde through Paperclip.

  The center was one of three NASA institutions involved in the Apollo program. Its laboratories covered aero-astrodynamics, astrionics, space sciences, propulsion and vehicle engineering, computation, manufacturing, test and quality. Dieter Grau, head of the Quality lab, described a "rigid inspection program" focused on craftsmanship. The aim was to build prototypes with a higher success rate rather than weaker ones that needed more tests.

  The Saturn rocket line, which sent American astronauts to the Moon, drew on this lineage. Its liquid propulsion system came from von Braun's V-2, and its navigation systems came from the Army's Redstone and Jupiter rockets. American and German engineers at Marshall created the launch vehicles and designed some launching facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The team also worked on the Lunar Roving Vehicle.

  140413844

• 7. Wings and Medicine

  ›

  Adolf Busemann was born in Lübeck in 1902 and received an engineering doctorate from the Carolo Wilhelmina Technical University in Braunschweig in 1924. In 1925 the Max-Planck Institute invited him to become an official aeronautical research scientist. By 1930 he was a professor at Georgia Augusta University in Göttingen, and he went on to direct research at the Braunschweig Laboratory.

  At the Volta Congress in 1935, an international meeting on problems of high-speed flight, Busemann presented his first theory of wing sweep. It held that angling a wing back reduces drag at supersonic speed. After the war he traveled to the United States to help during the tensions with Russia, and he continued developing the theory there. German high-speed flight research and aerodynamic knowledge fed into postwar American aircraft and missile development more broadly.

  German specialists in aviation medicine contributed to early American space medicine research. Their studies covered weightlessness, life-support systems and human performance in extreme conditions. Hubertus Strughold earned the title "the father of space medicine" for his central role in innovations like the space suit and space life support systems.

  A related effort called National Interest, or Project 63, found jobs for German engineers at Lockheed, Martin Marietta, North American Aviation and other aircraft companies. This happened while American aerospace engineers were being laid off.

  36337419

• 8. Honors and Doubts

  ›

  In 1969, four Paperclip men received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the agency's highest award. They were Kurt Debus, Eberhard Rees, Arthur Rudolph and Wernher von Braun, after more than two decades of service. Ernst Geissler received it in 1973. Siegfried Knemeyer won the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 1966. The Goddard Astronautics Award went to von Braun in 1961, Hans von Ohain in 1966 and Krafft Arnold Ehricke in 1984. Two lunar craters carry Paperclip names. One honors Debus, the first director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and the other honors von Braun.

  Truman was undecided about the program for sixteen months before his official approval. In 1963 he recalled that he had not been reluctant at all, because of relations with the Soviet Union: "this had to be done and was done". Yet many Paperclip scientists were later investigated for their Nazi ties. Only Georg Rickhey was formally tried. He was returned to Germany in 1947 for the Dora Trial and acquitted. No Paperclip scientist was found guilty of any crime, in the United States or in Germany.

  In 1951, weeks after his arrival, The Boston Globe accused Walter Schreiber of being a party to human experiments carried out by Kurt Blome at Ravensbrück. He emigrated to Argentina with the aid of the US military. In 1984, Arthur Rudolph, who had been operations director for V-2 production, faced a perceived threat of prosecution over the forced labor from Mittelbau-Dora at the Mittelwerk. He renounced his US citizenship and moved to West Germany, which granted him citizenship.

  Von Braun had joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and was made a junior SS officer in 1940. He was investigated in 1961, and the FBI concluded that he joined the party solely to advance his academic career and avoid imprisonment.

  The Strughold Award, named for the space medicine pioneer, was the Space Medicine Association's most prestigious honor for fifty years, from 1963 to 2013. After a Wall Street Journal article of the 1st of December 2012 highlighted his connection to human experiments during the war, the association retired the award on the 1st of October 2013. The International Space Hall of Fame had already removed him in 2006, and the operation's legacy remains controversial.

  4548473257