Behind the Scenes Minis: Paperclips

Tracy and Holly discuss Tracy's research on Operation Paperclip and how recently information about it has been uncovered. After talking about taking some time off, Tracy also shares how she selected the Paperclippers to focus on for Wednesday's episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
I'm Holly Frying. This week we talked about Project paper Clip,
also known as Operation paper Clip, and we have once
again come to those, uh, one of those points where

(00:24):
by the time people here this behind the scenes, this
issue will be totally solved. But at the moment it's
a little bit of a mystery. When I will get uh,
the episode about some specific scientists and engineers and other
specialists who are part of this program done. I it'll
probably be the next episode. Um, but number one, I'm

(00:46):
getting my second COVID vaccine tomorrow. Number two, you and
I are gonna take a break. The show is not
taking a break. Br each you won't even know we're
not here but right because we have have backfilled and
made sure we have new episodes ready to go. Yeah,
it just means that I don't want to promise that

(01:06):
the next the literal second half of this episode might
be about Project paper Clip scientists. Um yeah, it really
did become clear to me at about three o'clock yesterday afternoon. Oh,
this is not going to just be one episode. It's
gonna have to be too. And unlike normally when I'm
doing a two part something, both parts are not already written,

(01:27):
only one of them is. It happens once in a while.
I read two different books as part of this research.
So in addition to all the books that we mentioned
at the very end of the episode that we're written
in the like the seventies, eighties, and nineties, UM, I
also read Annie Jacobson's Operation paper Clip, the secret intelligence

(01:50):
program that brought Nazi scientists to America, and that came out.
And I also read Brian Crim's Our Germans Project paper
Clip and the National Security State, and that came out
in UM. And both of those books were really possible
because so much information about all of this has been
declassified in the years since the first books about it

(02:14):
were written. UM, so people who want to research this
have a lot more available information UH now than before. Also,
UH as I was reading particularly Annie Jacobson's book because
she profiles a lot of the specific scientists who were

(02:35):
really the most notorious. UM. There are a lot of
just horrific atrocities that some of the people who either
made their way to the US or were considered to
be brought to the US were involved in. Yeah, it's
a little bit mind boggling, I know. For me, even
though I have have known that this was an ongoing thing,

(02:57):
I still have those moments where I go, we're still
uncovering stuff. Yeah, this far later especially, I think it
feels especially surprising because there has been so much scholarship
around World War two, post World War two, all of
these things, and yet we continue to have new information appear,

(03:22):
and we have to continue to acknowledge that some information
is gone. Yeah, um, which is just a little bit
tricky to wrap one's head around. I think. Yeah. Yeah.
The mental gymnastics even at the time that um that
the people involved with planning this program had to kind
of go through too, to move from the idea of

(03:46):
will interview and work with people while they're still in
Germany too, will bring people to the US for a
temporary like let's say, six month contract, they will be supervised,
and then they'll go back in Germany. UH. And then
to go from that to UH these scientists can get
American citizenship basically taking up spots or getting magical new

(04:11):
spots that could have been given to somebody who had
been displaced by the war, somebody who had survived the Holocaust. Um,
I I don't know. Sometimes people get mad when we
say our personal opinions on the show, my personal opinions.
Whatever national security concern that was used to justify that

(04:34):
was not enough, Like, no, there were other choices that
could have been made. Uh. Yeah, it's just it's a
weird thing. It's also a good I don't know if
it's a good reminder. It's a reminder to me that, um,
you know, every big thing, whether it is a conspiracy

(04:54):
or a great movement or any any other kind of
watershed event or or organization in history, is composed of
a bunch of humans who are fallible and who can
talk themselves into things that they sort of intellectually might
know they should not. But somehow psychologically we're able to
get over some fairly weird barriers at times. Um yeah, yeah,

(05:20):
that's always a difficult thing to try to put yourself
in that head space of like, I don't know, how
do you get to know? I think it's okay, this
guy is important enough that even though he's horrible, we
want him on our side. What But it's happened many times,
so we know that like that that mental shift can
happen for people that we might consider very smart and

(05:42):
well thinking. Um yeah, that's always That's where it gets
really murky and slightly terrifying for me, because I'm like,
I'm not always well thinking. What am I capable of? Right? Yeah?
Most likely the literal next thing people are going to
hear right now is more on the same subject. We'll see,

(06:06):
we shall see. So when we left off our previous
half of this, behind the scenes, we weren't sure what
was coming next, and it was like, it might be
an episode on people who were involved in Operation paper Clip,
but we don't really know, and we're both going to
take a week off. We have now had a week
off and the mystery is solved. Did indeed follow the

(06:27):
previous episode on Operation paper Clip with an episode on
four people who were part of it? Which is just
a whole weird thing. And it's always it's always weird
when we have a week off and we come back
to look at things that we started working on before
we left. It's particularly weird to do that and then

(06:48):
also have an earlier episode that is already recorded and
is connected to the thing that we took a week off.
In the middle of working on It's also just weird
to take a week off this point, right, I mean, yeah, yeah,
it's it's weird, and like it's exciting. Yeah. My week
off was largely a week dedicated to doing things I

(07:11):
just haven't had the capacity to do while also working,
so like thoroughly cleaning the kitchen, nice, calling to make
appointments for things that need to be done around our house,
things like that. See I I went to Disney World. Yeah,
once we once we hit fully vaccinated status, I felt okay, going, um, yeah,

(07:38):
you are fully vaccinated, and as of when we are
recording this, I will be fully vaccinated tomorrow. It's really exciting.
It is, it's actually been. It's kind of funny, right,
We had talked about it. My husband and I like, okay,
we are planning a trip um maybe once we reach
fully vaccinated status. In that that brief time time between

(08:00):
when we're fully vaccinated and when we leave, we should
like go out and test the waters. Right, we should
go to a restaurant. We should maybe just go to
like a mall and walk around and see how that feels.
Because Disney is like crowds, I mean, even with the
reduced capacity that they're doing. We kind of were a
little afraid and built in for ourselves. If we get
there and we're there for two days and we freak out,

(08:23):
we can come home and it's okay, like we'll just
get in the car and come home. Um. But we
didn't get around to doing any of that because we
had a lot of other stuff coming up and like,
as you know, anytime you're trying to get ready to
go on vacation, you're getting a million work things squared away.
So we didn't. So it was a little bit of
like here's the deep end, um, but it was lovely.
I had to give Disney World some kudos because they are,

(08:46):
for for the most part in our experience, they are
definitely enforcing masking guidelines and and distancing the way they're
handling queues for rides. I hope they do it forever, um,
because you're people aren't cramming up against each other and
it's a much more enjoyable experience. Yeah, which is all

(09:07):
lighter fair than our show this week. Yeah, so this
week was not lighter fair at all. And um, it
was a tough one to work on, not just because
of the horrific aspects of uh of what happened in
in Nazi Germany and German occupied territories during World or two. Like,

(09:30):
in addition to that, just sort of reading about these
horrific things. A lot of the information about all of
this is just really spread out and among all of
these different sources, and so sort of piecing things together
and confirming things, um was more time consuming and unwieldy

(09:51):
than it often is. Like they're like, like we said
in the episode itself, like there's a ton of information
about Werner Ron Brown. Some of it doesn't reference the
fact that there were any questions about his Nazi involvement
at all, which is a little weird, but like, there's
just a ton of it. But for the other folks
that we talked about, there was just took a lot
more digging and cross referencing to try to make sure

(10:13):
that I had everything right and to like reference back
to primary documents as much as possible. Um, it was
just it was all kind of a tangle, and deciding
which people to talk about also kind of a challenge.
I knew obviously I was going to talk about Berner
von Brown, like that was a given from the beginning,
but like deciding which other people to talk about on

(10:36):
the show was a little trickier. Yeah, I mean it's
just one of those things where I I can't help
I can't quite shut down my Like I don't know
if it's an empathy synaps or what, but like, I
just I can't I can't wrap my head around how
people can do some of the things that were done

(10:57):
in that we talked about, UM and still sleep at night.
So it's it's hard. Was most of your process of
elimination to select the ones that we talked about about
level of available information or did you edit like to
try to keep it balanced and not too horrific but
still indicative of the situation. Yeah, I wanted to um

(11:19):
provide some more detail about some of the folks that
we had talked about in the Operation paper Clip episode. UM,
so that that was a deciding factor. The availability of
information was also a factor because in some cases it
was like, here is just a paragraph of this person

(11:39):
and what they were suspected of and what they did
as part of Operation paper Clip, and it was just
like wasn't really enough to really explain or give context.
It was sort of like here's four sentences summing this up, Um,
and then I really went back and forth about Hubertus

(11:59):
struggled because he um, I feel like he has some
some question marks. And there are a lot of folks
who were just absolutely convinced that he was directly involved
with or at least new extreme details about all of
these experiments, and that as a result, um, he should

(12:19):
just sort of be stricken from the honors and awards
that that he earned during his his career. And then
there are other people who were like, all of this
is really circumstantial. Some of the things some of the
folks that have written about him have, like, as I
said in the episode, conflated multiple different German institute says

(12:41):
one thing when it seems like they were not actually
operating that way. But then also like his the fact
that he has continued to be removed from the names
of honors and awards and things like that. That's something
that has continued to be discussed into like the last
five years. So I felt like I couldn't just skip

(13:01):
over him because I felt like I had the least
clear opinion about what his involvement actually was by the
time I was done researching it. Well, it becomes a
good indicator right of the complexity of unfurling all of this,
particularly when we know that a lot of things have
been edited, stricken from the record, redacted, etcetera. His case,

(13:25):
I think really is like I said, it makes a
good example of like, this is not easy history to
pull apart. Mm hmm. I think for a lot of us,
UM would really like to believe that had we been
alive in Germany in the nineteen thirties, if we were

(13:46):
basically told you're going to join the Nazi Party or
you're gonna like be on the list of people who
are going to be targeted, I think a lot of
us like safe in our safe as in station marks
is not that's safe for a lot of people. But like,
I think a lot of us want to believe the
best in ourselves that we would be like, Okay, I'm

(14:08):
never joining the Nazi Party. You're just gonna have to
kill me, and like the reality is that that's not
the decision that a lot of people wind up making, UM.
And so it's like it seems likely to me that yeah,
probably there were a lot of people that came through
Operation paper Clip who had basically been like I'm signing

(14:28):
my name to this piece of paper so that my
family and I have a chance of surviving this war.
And they had no, oh, no other involvement in the
Nazi Party really, but like there were definitely a lot
of others who were either involved in or or highly
complicit and horrific, horrific things. Some of these were never
going to know the truth. A lot of them were

(14:50):
never going to know the truth, which is always a
hard thing to accept. Right. I feel like that is
a downer place to end this week's behind the scenes.
I mean, that's history is a downer sometimes. Like whenever
we say that, we get people who email us to uh,
to let us know that they know that, Yes, history

(15:13):
is often horrific in parts. Um So I think the
next thing I work on, I will try to pick
something that is a little less horrific. Pepper yeah. Um So,
if you would like to write to us for history
podcasts that I heart radio dot com. Uh. We're also

(15:34):
on social media at missed in History. Whatever it's coming
up for folks's weekends. I hope that says pleasant and
RESTful as possible. Um. If you're working again, I hope
everyone is great to you at your job and We'll
be back soon with classics and new episodes stuff you

(15:59):
missed in his street. Class is a production of I
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