May 24, 2021 • 41 mins
Operation Paperclip, also known as Project Paperclip, which was the U.S. effort to bring German scientists to the U.S. after World War II.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Friday. Today we
are going to talk about Operation paper Clip, which is
(00:21):
also known as Project paper Clip, and this was the
US effort to bring German scientists to the United States
after World War Two. And to be clear, the US
was definitely not the only Allied nation doing this, as examples,
the UK and France and the Soviet Union all had
their own programs to try to exploit German scientific and
(00:45):
engineering knowledge after the war. But in most cases those
other programs involved specialists and researchers who were either working
in occupied Germany or they were sent back to Germany
after a few years of provised work in another country.
But for the United States program, a lot of the
(01:05):
people who were part of it ultimately became permanent residents
or citizens of the US, and this included people who
were ardent Nazis or who had committed war crimes. A
lot of the time. The rockets scientists are the ones
who get the most discussion around this program today. So
people like Verner von Brown, who developed ballistic missiles for
(01:27):
the U. S. Army before joining the space program at NASA.
But paper Clippers really came from a wide range of
scientific and engineering specialties, including flight, medicine and chemical warfare
and aeronautics. They worked in military and in civilian roles.
It was like every layer of American industry and the
(01:49):
military industrial complex. When I started on this episode, my
intent was that today we were going to talk about
the context for this program and its precursor, which was
called Operation Overcast, and then the program itself and some
of the most prominent and notorious people who were part
of it. That turned out to be too much for
(02:12):
one episode, which people listening to me list all those
things off may not be that surprised by. So this
episode is going to whack through the arc of this
program's creation and its existence, and we'll have more about
some of the specific scientists and engineers and other specialties
(02:33):
in another episode sometime soon, possibly the next episode, but
since it's not written yet, I don't want to promise anything.
This is one of those things that became clear at
like three o'clock yesterday afternoon that this could not all
be one episode. So that means that while there will
be some references to some Nazi atrocities during World War
(02:55):
Two and the general era of thees and forties. There's
just that there's not as much detail about the specifics
in this particular episode. It is something that will be
discussed more in a future episode about the researchers themselves,
so to establish a bit of background on this subject.
In June of nineteen forty two, Adolf Hitler issued the
(03:16):
Decree of the Feur on the Reich Research Council. It read,
in part, quote, the necessity to expand all available forces
to highest efficiency in the interest of the state requires
not only in peace time, but also, and especially in wartime,
the concentrated effort of scientific research and its channelization toward
the goal to be aspired. It then went on to say,
(03:40):
leading men of science above all are to make research
fruitful for warfare by working together in their special fields.
In nineteen forty four he issued another decree, and this
one called for the development of weapons and equipment that
had quote revolutionary new characteristics. These would put Germany ahead
(04:00):
of its enemies. Nazi propaganda framed these new weapons and
equipment as Vunderwaffe or wonder weapons. Also in nineteen four,
Germany introduced the rocket power measer Schmidt Emmy one sixty three,
which was the world's first rocket powered fighter, the Messer
(04:21):
Schmidt Emmy two sixty two, which was the world's first
operational jet fighter, the V one flying Bomb, which was
the world's first cruise missile, and the V two rocket,
which was the world's first ballistic missile. So a lot
of wartime first there, and it has been widely repeated
that if these technologies had been introduced just a few
(04:43):
months earlier in the war, the Access Powers might well
have won, and there's some debate over whether that's really true,
but Allied military officials definitely saw all of this and
any other innovations that Germany might have had in the
works as a huge threat. There were concerned earned that
Germany's ultimate goal for the V two rocket was for
it to carry a nuclear payload, and concerns that it
(05:06):
was sharing its secrets and technologies with Japan, So the
Allied Powers made it a priority to try to capture
as much German research and technology as possible, both to
replicate it for themselves and to try to develop countermeasures,
especially after the D Day invasions started on June, teams
(05:27):
really searched for German research facilities and weapons factories that
copied blueprints and technical materials. They questioned scientists and confiscated
weapons and technology. This included disassembling and removing big pieces
of equipment like V two rockets and wind tunnels and aircraft.
This process really accelerated in the last months of the war.
(05:50):
The UK and the US formed the Combined Intelligence Objective
Subcommittee to coordinate a huge sweep for German military secrets
and equipment. This really s scalated after Hitler issued the
Destructive Measures on Rke Territory Decree also known as the
Nero Decree, that happened on March nineteenth nine, and this
(06:10):
decree called for the destruction of anything that could be
used by enemies of Germany. British and American units became
increasingly competitive as they tried to capture resources before Germany
could destroy them and before Soviet forces who had similar
objectives could move into an area. In some cases it
was literally an area that the Soviets were supposed to
(06:31):
be occupying, but British or American forces are both together
would be like, we we're got to get as much
of the stuff ourselves as possible before they get here.
As all of this was happening, military officials also started
to shift their focus a little bit, because no matter
how many blueprints or technical manuals or formulas or actual
(06:51):
pieces of technology they managed to secure, and no matter
how many specialists they interviewed, that still wouldn't be the
same of having ongoing access to the minds behind all
of this stuff. So the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee started
developing lists of people to target and bring in for
(07:12):
more long term work. Initially, there was a blacklist of
targets of military value and a gray list of targets
of quote vital postwar interest, but those people were not
of immediate military value. Often, though, these lists are kind
of lumped together as just the black list. One source
for the names on these lists was a document prepared
(07:34):
by senior Gestapo officer of Werner Ozenberg, who supervised the
planning office of the Reich Research Council. He had compiled
a list of about fifteen thousand names, part of which
was discovered in an unflushed toilet in March of nine.
When Osenburg himself was captured, he surrendered the entire list
along with documents that detailed the qualifications of the people
(07:56):
on that list and other documents related to the German
war or effort. The U. S. Army established the Field
Information Agency Technical or FIAT to help it exploit German
knowledge and resources, including finding and capturing people from this list,
and the term exploit comes up over and over in
(08:18):
descriptions of this whole phase of the project. Allied militaries
and governments were increasingly interpreting all of this as a
form of German reparations for the war, and German scientists, engineers, technicians,
and researchers were all resources to exploit as part of
those reparations. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force had established internment
(08:43):
camps for scientists and engineers in Germany and informally German
occupied territory. Some of these camps housed hundreds of people,
and beyond interrogating them about their work and getting to
interpret and explain technical documents, at first, officials weren't quite
sure what to do with them. Simply letting people go
after they'd been interrogated wasn't really an option. The people
(09:06):
who had developed the aircraft, bombs, and chemical and biological
weapons for the Third Reich still presented a threat. And
then on top of that, the Potsdam Agreement, which was
signed in August of n called for the quote complete
disarmament and demilitarization of Germany and the elimination or control
of all German industry that could be used for military production.
(09:30):
And that meant that for a lot of these specialists,
the industries that they had been working in, as well
as other related industries where they might have been able
to find jobs, those just would not exist anymore. So
it wasn't like they could interrogate someone, release them, keep
tabs on them to make sure they were, you know,
not doing anything dangerous while they went to some job
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they had gotten because those industries they would have worked
in no longer were to exist. Although the US and
the UK were at eyes and the Combined Intelligence Subjective
Subcommittee had been established as a joint effort between the
two nations, over time they became increasingly competitive. For example,
on April, Colonel Donald L. Putt was led to the
(10:14):
Herman Geering Aeronautical Research Center at Vulcan Road, which had
been camouflaged under trees. This secret facility was in an
area that was supposed to be under British control, so
American forces worked as quickly as possible to secure as
much as they could before the British arrived. This kind
of stuff led to various toe stepping, basically from a
(10:37):
military perspective, and then the United States having to like
work with Britains to say, Okay, we took all these
V two rockets that you were supposed to get access to,
so we will work with you to figure out how
they work and to launch sums you can see how
they work. Some of this was specifically focused on trying
to secure information and weapons that could be used full
(11:00):
in the War in the Pacific, which was still ongoing.
On April twenty second, nineteen forty five, the US Army
Air Forces Intelligence Service launched Operation Lusty, which stood for
Luftwaffa's Secret Technology, and that was to secure technical and
scientific intelligence that could be used in the war against Japan.
The US started copying German munitions that had been used
(11:23):
against Britain during the Blitz. By the time Germany surrendered
on May eighth of nineteen forty five, the US had
captured most of Germany's most respected aircraft engineers. Two days later,
Allied forces intercepted the German submarine U eight five eight,
which surrendered in Delaware on May fourteenth. It was carrying
(11:44):
civilian engineers to Japan, along with advanced weaponry and supplies,
including an entire disassembled aircraft. Among its cargo were twelve
hundred pounds of uranium ox side. This was most likely
meant to be used for aircraft fuel, but it raised
fears of the possibility of nuclear weapons development. So this
(12:04):
made the ongoing exploitation of German researchers more urgent. An
officials started to question whether some of this work might
be done more effectively in the United States. Although it
was generally agreed that exploiting German researchers in Germany was
vital and was generally ethical, the idea of bringing people
(12:25):
into the US was a lot more controversial. On Under
Secretary of War Robert Patterson wrote a letter to Admiral
William D. Lahy which read, in part quote, I strongly
favored doing everything possible to utilize fully in the prosecution
of the war against Japan all information that can be
obtained from Germany or any other source. These men are enemies,
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and it must be assumed they are capable of sabotaging
our war effort. Bringing them to this country raises delicate questions,
including the strong resentment of the American public, who might
misunderstand the purpose of bringing them here and the treatment
accorded them, But the idea of military necessity ultimately went
(13:09):
out over these and other concerns. After this letter, the
War Department General Staff held a meeting at the Pentagon
to develop a plan to give some German researchers, specifically
ones who were not Nazis or war criminals, temporary contracts
to work in the United States under protective military custody.
We will talk more about that after a sponsor break.
(13:38):
The first project to bring German scientists to the US
to work under a temporary contract was called Project Overcast,
and it was launched on July. Under this program, Germans
specialists and researchers would be brought to the US, where
they would temporarily work under military supervision before eventually returning
(14:01):
to Germany. Each person assigned a contract was supposed to
undergo a background check to confirm that they were not
an ardent Nazi. Like the word exploit, That phrase ardent
Nazi is a term that comes up a lot in
documents about Operation paper Clip and its related programs. Officials
recognized that under Adolf Hitler, Germany had been a single
(14:23):
party dictatorship, and that at least some involvement with Nazism
was essentially mandatory for non Jewish Germans. The researchers, who
the U saw is the most skilled and important, were
of course seen the same way by the Nazis, so
in many cases they had been targeted for leadership roles
and rewarded with honors and awards that were bestowed by
(14:43):
the party. Some people who joined the party also did
so out of a sense of self preservation or even opportunism.
So with all this in mind, the general conclusion among
American military authorities was that it was just not feasible
to restrict anyone who had any connection at all to
the Nazi Party. That would leave them with no researchers
(15:05):
to exploit. Instead, the focus was on banning ardent Nazis,
and ardent Nazis were described as people who had joined
the Nazi Party before Hitler declared himself, bureer people who
were leaders in the party or in one of its
affiliated organizations like the s S or the essay people
who had been convicted in a post war denazification court,
(15:29):
or people who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.
This process involved interviews, examining people's records, and confirming that
they were not on the Central Registry of War Criminals
and Security Suspects that's also known as the crow Cast List.
This list was described as quote an unwieldy monster archive.
It was often vague, it was full of undocumented allegations.
(15:52):
There's a lot of hearsay, But in terms of the
people conducting these background checks, it became a useful check
off to say this person was not a suspected war criminal.
This program, Operation Overcast, grew really quickly. It expanded to
include a huge assortment of government and military programs and
(16:12):
their associated acronyms. There were a lot of Every book
that I read on this had just a list of
acronyms at the beginning and what they all stood for.
The Joint Intelligence Objective Agency that is abbreviated j I
o A and usually said JOAH was created as part
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during this expansion, and
(16:34):
this agency directed this whole operation and brought about sixteen
hundred German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and researchers to the
US between nine and nineteen seventy. The Office of Strategic
Services and the Joint Intelligence Committee were involved in this
as well. Japan formally surrendered on September two, but even
(16:57):
though that ended the war, the effort to bring German
scientists to the US continued. By January of nineteen forty six,
one hundred sixty German specialists had been brought to the
United States. One hundred fifteen of them were rocket specialists,
including Werner von Braun, and the program got bigger and
broader from their As a relations between the US and
(17:19):
the USSR devolved into the Cold War, the idea of
keeping the other side from getting access to German researchers
and technology became more and more important to both nations.
The United States started to see an eventual armed conflict
with the Soviet Union as inevitable advances in Soviet nuclear
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research led to fears that the Soviets had been getting
aid from German scientists on this, although it later turned
out that they were really getting stolen American nuclear secrets.
On January third of nineteen forty six, the merc report
detailing biological warfare research in Japan became public and that
led for calls for more research into biological agents and
(18:02):
their countermeasures in the United States, and that was yet
another specialty of these German researchers. In March of ninety six,
Project Overcast expanded. It shifted from a limited number of
people with temporary contracts working under military supervision to between
eight hundred and a thousand specialists who would be offered
(18:23):
long term residency in the US and even citizenship. Since
this was no longer intended as a temporary assignment, the
researchers families would be permitted to enter the US permanently
as well. This was the whole process where Germany was
being denocified, like people with Nazi ties were being pulled
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out of leadership positions, and all of these different industries
and all of these different contexts, some of the same
people were being brought to the United States and offered
US citizenship. So by this point, some of the scientists
families who were being housed at a camp in Germany
had started calling that camp Camp Overcast, and that prompted
this project's name chained to Operation paper Clip or Project
(19:05):
paper Clip, depending on the source that you're looking at.
That name came from the paper clips that were used
to discreetly flag the files of candidates whose backgrounds were
potentially too damning for them to be allowed into the
United States. In August, Secretary of State Dean Atchison sent
a top secret memo to President Harry Truman requesting his
(19:28):
approval of the interim exploitation of German and Austrian specialists
under Project paper Clip. The document Truman approved included the
text of State War Navy Coordinating Committee Document to five
seven Slash twenty two, which outlined a revised version for
the expanded paper Clip program that had been launched in March.
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This read, in part quote, persons proposed to be brought
to the US here under shall be screened by the
Commanding General U. S. F Et on the basis of
available rec kords. No person found by the Commanding General U. S.
F Et to have been a member of the Nazi
Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities,
(20:11):
or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism, shall be
brought to the US here under. However, neither position nor
honors awarded a specialist under the Nazi regime solely on
account of his scientific or technical ability, will in themselves
be considered sufficient to disqualify a specialist for evacuation to
(20:32):
the US. Here under where there is doubt as to
the qualification of a specialist under the preceding sentence, the
Commanding General U s F E. T. May transport the
specialist to the US, where further interrogation and screening shall
be conducted immediately in order to determine such qualification. Before
October of nineteen, the State Department had been pre approving
(20:54):
Project paper Clip candidates before they left Europe, but after
that point the process shift did so that the Immigration
and Naturalization Service Commissioner handled them in the US. This
dropped the State Department preclearance requirement, which was required by
law in occupied Germany. The Office of Military Government US
kept security dossier's on all of the candidates, but also
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withheld the most damaging information on many high profile candidates.
Documents that were declassified in the nineteen seventies and afterward
revealed that reports on individual candidates were revised to basically
whitewash their backgrounds. Yes, some of these revisions were really
dramatic that sort of went from, you know, draft one,
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the first thing in somebody's fil being like, this person
is a dangerous Nazi, and then later on being like,
as this person had no more than a nominal involvement
in the Nazi Party. So even though this whole project
had started with a lot of assurances that it absolutely
would not involve ardent Nazis, in the end, Paper Clippers
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included people who had worked directly without off Hitler, Heinrich
Himler and Herman Gurring. Some had been officers in the
Nazi Party or in the s S or the Essay.
Some stood trial at Nuremberg or faced other war crimes trials.
In some cases, people's backgrounds were so egregious that they
were giving contracts to work for the U. S Military,
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but they did that work while still living in Germany.
But in other cases, people with pretty similar backgrounds still
made their way to the US. Of course, this whole
program was classified, but just as this shift was happening
from temporary contracts to American citizenship, the American public was
becoming more aware of what was going on. This started
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thanks to news reports that originated from Russian language newspapers
being printed in Germany. Soon publications like The New York
Times and Newsweek were reporting on German researchers, some of
them Nazis, being brought to the US and offered citizenship.
The War Department tried to respond to all this with
its own favorable propaganda about the program. It's the whole
(23:07):
idea of like nowhere, only bringing the good Germans here,
like interviews with handpicked scientists who were doing relatively neutral
and wholesome seeming work. Of course, this all had to
totally sidestep the fact that many paper clippers had been Nazis,
and even if they had not been ardent, their work
(23:28):
during the war had still contributed to, or at the
absolute very least, been complicit in the German war effort.
This work had been involved in the deaths of Allied
personnel and the widespread atrocities of the Holocaust. There had
been critics of this program within the government in the
military from the beginning. For example, Samuel Klaus was an
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attorney with the State Department and had been chosen to
represent the State Department with Joah. He had argued strongly
against the program since he first became involved, pointing out
out that the United States was giving Nazis the chance
for American citizenship while denying that chance to refugees and
displaced persons who had been persecuted and harmed by the
(24:10):
Nazi regime. Thanks in part to Claus's role, the relationship
between the State Department and the military became incredibly adversarial
during this program, and he wound up being targeted during
the Red Scare. Yeah. He uh. He made a lot
of incredibly strident criticisms of all of this. He was
eventually moved off the project. Aside from his well argued
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criticisms of all of this, he apparently was also kind
of a tricky person to work with and rubbed a
lot of people the wrong way in this and many
other contexts, So he seems like kind of a tangle um.
After these reports, though, there was a lot of vocal
criticism of this program from the public as well. On
December six, the Counsel Against Intolerance in America sent a
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telegram to President Truman which read quote as Americans citizen
permit us to express our profound concern over reports that
Nazi scientists have not only been brought to this country
by the United States Army for research projects, but that
their families are to follow them, and that they may
be permitted to remain here permanently. We hold these individuals
(25:17):
to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred.
Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises
the issue of their fitness to become American citizens or
hold key positions in American industrial, scientific, and educational institutions.
If it is deemed imperative to utilize these individuals in
(25:39):
this country, we earnestly petition you to make sure they
will not be granted permanent residents or citizenship, and the
United States with the opportunity which that would afford of
inculcating these anti democratic doctrines which seek to undermine and
destroy our national unity. That telegram was signed by about
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forty people, including Albert Einstein, A Philip Randolph, and Rabbi B.
Benedict Glazer. Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein worked together to
vocally opposed the program. Other organizations that spoke out against
it included the n double a c P, The Society
for the Prevention of World War Three, and the Federation
of American Scientists, whose statement described the program as quote
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an affront to the people of all countries who so
recently fought beside us, to the refugees whose lives were
shattered by Nazism, to our unfortunate scientific colleagues of former
occupied lands, and to all of those others who suffered
under the yoke these men helped to forge from their
Operation paper Clip continued to make some pretty astounding headlines
(26:44):
that were honestly pretty embarrassing to the authorities who were
behind it. We'll talk about some of these things more
in this upcoming, not yet written episode of the show.
On March nine seven, Drew Pearson wrote an article for
The New York Times that alleged that Carl Crouch had
been offered a paper Clip contract while incarcerated at Nuremberg,
(27:07):
where he was awaiting a trial for war crimes. Crouch
was ultimately convicted of enslavement and crimes against humanity. Project
paper Clip wrapped up in September of ninety but German
scientists were still brought into the US after that point.
We're going to talk more about that after a sponsor break.
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Project paper Clip, also known as Operation paper Clip, formally
ran from March of ninety six to September of ninety,
building on its precursor, Operation Overcast, as we talked about earlier,
but the same basic process continued under various different names
and with various adjustments for much longer. The recruitment of
(27:55):
German scientists actually accelerated during the Berlin Blockade, which is
when the Soviet Union blocked access to parts of Berlin
in nineteen forty eight and nineteen forty nine. The idea
was once again to keep the Soviets from getting access
to more German knowledge and technology, with the CIA and
JOAH basically competing with each other in their efforts to
(28:19):
find and recruit more German specialists. Things escalated once again
during the Korean War under a project that was known
alternately as Accelerated paper Clip and Project sixty three. This
program involved quote evacuating high profile scientists from Germany, and
the focus shifted away from establishing that they were not
(28:40):
Nazis to establishing that they were not communists. Recruits during
this particular period included Walter Schreiber, who had been the
surgeon General under the Third Reich, and he was hired
to work at the U. S. Air Force School of
Aviation Medicine. His time in the US didn't last long, though,
and it was of more information about this program coming
(29:02):
to public light. In nineteen fifty one, former war crimes
investigator Leopold Alexander noticed a brief mention of his hiring
in a medical journal. Alexander wrote to the Massachusetts Medical
Society and to the Boston Globe denouncing this hiring. When
the Globe brand its story, it included a statement from Schreiber,
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who said that he had been the victim of Russian disinformation.
In the face of increasing and increasingly public outrage against
Schreiber's work in the US, plans started to form to
return him to Europe, but intelligence experts were concerned that
he might be a security risk. He had previously been
captured by Russia and had supposedly escaped, but a lot
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of this was mysterious, a little bit fishy, and there
were concerns that he might very well start informing to
the Russians. At the same time, American officials were concerned
that he also presented a security risk if he remained
in the United States, since he had extensive knowledge of
all the other paper clippers who had been high ranking
and ardent Nazis, basically, they were afraid he would blow
(30:08):
their cover. Eventually, the US paid for his passage to Argentina,
where he had family and which had already become home
to a community of high profile Nazi officials. He was
also given an undisclosed allowance. In the nineteen fifties, other
Allied nations that had been working with German researchers within
(30:28):
their own borders generally started returning those researchers to Germany,
but in the US most were on the path to
becoming citizens. In fact, nine of the Germans who were
brought to the US between nineteen forty five and nineteen
fifty two ultimately became US citizens. And even though the
details of the program were still classified, it had really
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become something of an open secret. I mean, the the
War Department had had this whole propaganda campaign about these
being the good Germans. Only when the Soviet Union launched
the satellites spt NICK in nineteen fifty seven, Bob Hope
joked that it meant that quote their Germans were better
than our Germans. Bob Hope is just one of the
people that this quote has been attributed to. Sometimes it's
(31:14):
their German rocket scientists were better than our German rocket scientists.
People knew it was obvious. In nineteen fifty nine, Lieutenant
Colonel Henry Whalen became deputy director of JOAH, which was
still overseeing this work. He was also spying for Russia,
something that went undetected until nineteen sixty three, when the
(31:36):
FBI investigated. It became clear that he had handed over
or destroyed a lot of files related to Project paper Clip,
so at least some of the details about all of
this may never be known. Whalen pleaded guilty to charges
of conspiring with Soviet agents, but the Justice Department dropped
the charge of espionage. By the time Whalen's espionage was uncovered,
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JOAH had actually been disbanded. That happened in nineteen sixty two,
and a few years after that people started combing through
the details of what had happened during and after the war.
The first book on Operation paper Clip to come out
of this work was Clarence Lasbie's Project paper Clip German
Scientists in the Cold War, which was published in nineteen
(32:18):
seventy one. At that point, though most of the documents
related to the program were still classified, and Lasbie's general
conclusion was that authorities had screened everyone, but that a
few ardent Nazis had unfortunately managed to evade detection. Criticism
of the paper clip program and its successors had been
ongoing through all these years, but public interest reached another
(32:42):
peak in nineteen seventy eight after NBC aired a mini
series on the Holocaust. In night, Eli Rosenbaum, who was
a student at Harvard Law, was browsing through a bookstore.
He picked up both Dora, the Nazi concentration camp where
modern space technology was born in and prisoners died by
Jean Michel, who was imprisoned at the camp, and The
(33:04):
Rocket Team, which traced the history of the V two rocket,
and in reading these books he connected the V twos
development with the use of slave labor from the concentration camp.
So when Rosenbaum finished his law degree, he got a
job at the Department of Justice in the Office of
Special Investigations. The o s I had been established in
(33:24):
nineteen seventy nine to investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals
who were living in the US. Rosenbaum convinced the head
of the o s I to open an investigation into
paper clipper, Arthur Rudolph, who designed the Saturn five rocket
and had been a big part of the V two
development team. In addition to coordinating the use of enslaved
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labor at the German development facility known as Middle Work,
he had known about and been complicit in, or possibly
been actively involved in atrocities that were committed there. He
maintained that he was innocent of these accusations. Rather the
stand trial, he renounced his US citizenship in nineteen eighty
four and returned to Europe after thirty eight years in
(34:06):
the US. After this happened, investigative journalists started trying to
get more and more information about Operation paper Clip, including
through the Freedom of Information Act, which had been signed
into law in nineteen sixty seven. In nineteen eighty five,
journalists Linda Hunt broke a story by publishing an article
titled US cover Up of Nazi Scientists in the Bulletin
(34:30):
of the Atomic Scientists. This article read in part quote,
formerly classified documents revealed detales of the U. S military's
employment of alleged Nazi war criminals in highly sensitive defense projects.
They show that government officials concealed information about many specialists
in order to secure their legal U S immigration status.
(34:51):
The cover up seems to have stemmed from a belief
that US national security would be best served by keeping
these Nazi special lists away from the Soviet Union, but
it was a direct contravention of the presidential directive which
formally set up Project paper Clip. Hunt published a book
based on this and other research in Journalist Tom Bauer
(35:15):
had done the same in seven. Both Hunt and Bauer
framed Project paper Clip as a conspiracy. In the US
passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which mandated the
declassification of roughly eight point five million pages of records
related to all this. This mass declassification led to the
(35:36):
publication of U S Intelligence and the Nazis in two
thousand and four. A key sentence from its introduction is
quote Granted, some intelligence activities involve a degree of secret
and messiness which strained conventional moral standards, but there was
no compelling reasons to begin the post war era with
(35:57):
the assistance of some of those associated with the worst
crimes of the war. Between its establishment in and its
merge with the Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section in
the Office of Special Investigations, work led to at least
one hundred Nazi war criminals being stripped of their US
citizenship or removed from the United States. In two thousand six,
(36:20):
O s I legal historian Judith Fagan wrote a six
hundred page report called Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath
of the Holocaust, which detailed both the O. S i
s efforts to investigate Nazi war criminals and the U
S efforts to shelter them. After the Department of Justice
released an incredibly heavily redacted version in response to a
(36:42):
Freedom of Information Act request, former officials leaked the entire,
unredacted thing to The New York Times. Yeah. I read
an article that described this as an incredible cell phone
because they had they had released something that was so
incredibly redacted to the point of uselessness that that other
people were like, well, We're just going to leak the
(37:02):
entire thing. In part because of all the information that
has been declassified and released in the last few decades,
there are various organizations and institutions that are really still
wrestling with how to reconcile their own histories with paper
clippers and their own connection to the Nazi Party and
war crimes. We'll be talking about that, Uh, but since
(37:25):
that will involve some of the discussion of more specific
people who were part of the program in a future episode.
It might be the next episode, but since I haven't
written it yet, as I said at the top of
the show, I don't quite want to promise anything. Do
you have a little bit of listener mail? I do
have listener mail. This is actually a listener Facebook comment,
which I don't think we read a lot of, and
(37:46):
listener to mail because they tend to be a little
trickier for us to keep up with than the email
which is just there in the inbox. UM. And this
is from Anne, who was commenting on the behind the
scenes where Uh, Holly and I had been talking about
the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. UM. And I talked about how
when I was a kid, I would go on road
(38:07):
trips with my mom to western North Carolina. UM, and
when we got to the Lynn Cove Dot, we would
just turn around before we got to the Lynn Cove
Viaduct because we were both scared of heights and my
mom didn't want to drive on it and I didn't
want to ride on it. Uh. And I was like,
I assume it's still there. So Anne has left a
comment to say, just listen, Tracy. The Lynn Cove Viaduct
(38:28):
is indeed still there on the Blue Ridge Parkway. When
we used to live in Atlanta, we would drive that
section of the Blue Ridge Parkway on our way to
family get togethers in Blowing Rock. As a passenger, it
never really bothered me, but I've never driven it. The
way it is set up against the side of the mountain,
it feels like more of the same curvy mountain roads
and less like being on a bridge to me. And
I've definitely been on way scarier curvy mountain roads than
(38:52):
the Blue Ridge Parkway Rocky Mountain National Park anyone. Anyway,
thanks ladies for the great podcast. As always, I've listened
since the short episode Day is not from the very beginning,
but I found it early enough that listening from the
beginning wasn't nearly the shore it would be now stuff
you miss and History Class remains and one of my
favorite podcasts of all the ones that listened to, and
I have learned so much about so many things over
(39:12):
the years, So thank you Anne for this comment. It's
been so long since I've been able to go to
western North Carolina that I was like I assume that
registered there. I did, uh. So I went to college
in Asheville, North Carolina. I grew up outside of Winston Salem,
North Carolina. And when I got to the point that
(39:34):
I was going to be able to take a car
with me to college, I was like, I'm gonna have
to get over this fear of heights, because I cannot
drive myself up the mountain if I don't. So I
did eventually drive on the Lynco Viaduct myself without my
mom um, and I have, you know, driven on things
(39:58):
that are definitely much scary er than that. Weirdly, one
of them was UM going to a thing that used
to happen once a year called max fun Con, which
was held in Lake Arrowhead, California, which involved driving out
a road that felt like a lot like driving up
the mountain on I forty to go to Asheville from
(40:20):
from points east of there, except it would go on
a lot longer um. And so the first time that
I was going to go there, I had kind of
asked people like, how how scary is this drive, and
They're like, Oh, it's not that bad. And as I
was driving up there, I was like, Oh, this just
feels just like driving on I forty. But it just
kept going. Um, and there was one of those low
lying cloud days and at some point I got above
(40:44):
the cloud and was able to see down it. And
that's when I was like, oh, this is a little
higher than I might like to be right now. I
can't understand that. So anyway, thank you Anne for this comment. Um,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcasts were History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. We're all over social media A miss
(41:06):
in History? Uh, That's where you'll find our Facebook and
Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. Even though we don't read
Facebook comments on the show very often, we do see
them when people leave them. We don't really see the
ones that people really leave on our website though. The
thing we don't have the power to turn off with
folks leave comments there. Um. You can subscribe to our
(41:28):
show on the I heart Radio app and anywhere else
do you get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Friday. Today we
are going to talk about Operation paper Clip, which is
(00:21):
also known as Project paper Clip, and this was the
US effort to bring German scientists to the United States
after World War Two. And to be clear, the US
was definitely not the only Allied nation doing this, as examples,
the UK and France and the Soviet Union all had
their own programs to try to exploit German scientific and
(00:45):
engineering knowledge after the war. But in most cases those
other programs involved specialists and researchers who were either working
in occupied Germany or they were sent back to Germany
after a few years of provised work in another country.
But for the United States program, a lot of the
(01:05):
people who were part of it ultimately became permanent residents
or citizens of the US, and this included people who
were ardent Nazis or who had committed war crimes. A
lot of the time. The rockets scientists are the ones
who get the most discussion around this program today. So
people like Verner von Brown, who developed ballistic missiles for
(01:27):
the U. S. Army before joining the space program at NASA.
But paper Clippers really came from a wide range of
scientific and engineering specialties, including flight, medicine and chemical warfare
and aeronautics. They worked in military and in civilian roles.
It was like every layer of American industry and the
(01:49):
military industrial complex. When I started on this episode, my
intent was that today we were going to talk about
the context for this program and its precursor, which was
called Operation Overcast, and then the program itself and some
of the most prominent and notorious people who were part
of it. That turned out to be too much for
(02:12):
one episode, which people listening to me list all those
things off may not be that surprised by. So this
episode is going to whack through the arc of this
program's creation and its existence, and we'll have more about
some of the specific scientists and engineers and other specialties
(02:33):
in another episode sometime soon, possibly the next episode, but
since it's not written yet, I don't want to promise anything.
This is one of those things that became clear at
like three o'clock yesterday afternoon that this could not all
be one episode. So that means that while there will
be some references to some Nazi atrocities during World War
(02:55):
Two and the general era of thees and forties. There's
just that there's not as much detail about the specifics
in this particular episode. It is something that will be
discussed more in a future episode about the researchers themselves,
so to establish a bit of background on this subject.
In June of nineteen forty two, Adolf Hitler issued the
(03:16):
Decree of the Feur on the Reich Research Council. It read,
in part, quote, the necessity to expand all available forces
to highest efficiency in the interest of the state requires
not only in peace time, but also, and especially in wartime,
the concentrated effort of scientific research and its channelization toward
the goal to be aspired. It then went on to say,
(03:40):
leading men of science above all are to make research
fruitful for warfare by working together in their special fields.
In nineteen forty four he issued another decree, and this
one called for the development of weapons and equipment that
had quote revolutionary new characteristics. These would put Germany ahead
(04:00):
of its enemies. Nazi propaganda framed these new weapons and
equipment as Vunderwaffe or wonder weapons. Also in nineteen four,
Germany introduced the rocket power measer Schmidt Emmy one sixty three,
which was the world's first rocket powered fighter, the Messer
(04:21):
Schmidt Emmy two sixty two, which was the world's first
operational jet fighter, the V one flying Bomb, which was
the world's first cruise missile, and the V two rocket,
which was the world's first ballistic missile. So a lot
of wartime first there, and it has been widely repeated
that if these technologies had been introduced just a few
(04:43):
months earlier in the war, the Access Powers might well
have won, and there's some debate over whether that's really true,
but Allied military officials definitely saw all of this and
any other innovations that Germany might have had in the
works as a huge threat. There were concerned earned that
Germany's ultimate goal for the V two rocket was for
it to carry a nuclear payload, and concerns that it
(05:06):
was sharing its secrets and technologies with Japan, So the
Allied Powers made it a priority to try to capture
as much German research and technology as possible, both to
replicate it for themselves and to try to develop countermeasures,
especially after the D Day invasions started on June, teams
(05:27):
really searched for German research facilities and weapons factories that
copied blueprints and technical materials. They questioned scientists and confiscated
weapons and technology. This included disassembling and removing big pieces
of equipment like V two rockets and wind tunnels and aircraft.
This process really accelerated in the last months of the war.
(05:50):
The UK and the US formed the Combined Intelligence Objective
Subcommittee to coordinate a huge sweep for German military secrets
and equipment. This really s scalated after Hitler issued the
Destructive Measures on Rke Territory Decree also known as the
Nero Decree, that happened on March nineteenth nine, and this
(06:10):
decree called for the destruction of anything that could be
used by enemies of Germany. British and American units became
increasingly competitive as they tried to capture resources before Germany
could destroy them and before Soviet forces who had similar
objectives could move into an area. In some cases it
was literally an area that the Soviets were supposed to
(06:31):
be occupying, but British or American forces are both together
would be like, we we're got to get as much
of the stuff ourselves as possible before they get here.
As all of this was happening, military officials also started
to shift their focus a little bit, because no matter
how many blueprints or technical manuals or formulas or actual
(06:51):
pieces of technology they managed to secure, and no matter
how many specialists they interviewed, that still wouldn't be the
same of having ongoing access to the minds behind all
of this stuff. So the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee started
developing lists of people to target and bring in for
(07:12):
more long term work. Initially, there was a blacklist of
targets of military value and a gray list of targets
of quote vital postwar interest, but those people were not
of immediate military value. Often, though, these lists are kind
of lumped together as just the black list. One source
for the names on these lists was a document prepared
(07:34):
by senior Gestapo officer of Werner Ozenberg, who supervised the
planning office of the Reich Research Council. He had compiled
a list of about fifteen thousand names, part of which
was discovered in an unflushed toilet in March of nine.
When Osenburg himself was captured, he surrendered the entire list
along with documents that detailed the qualifications of the people
(07:56):
on that list and other documents related to the German
war or effort. The U. S. Army established the Field
Information Agency Technical or FIAT to help it exploit German
knowledge and resources, including finding and capturing people from this list,
and the term exploit comes up over and over in
(08:18):
descriptions of this whole phase of the project. Allied militaries
and governments were increasingly interpreting all of this as a
form of German reparations for the war, and German scientists, engineers, technicians,
and researchers were all resources to exploit as part of
those reparations. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force had established internment
(08:43):
camps for scientists and engineers in Germany and informally German
occupied territory. Some of these camps housed hundreds of people,
and beyond interrogating them about their work and getting to
interpret and explain technical documents, at first, officials weren't quite
sure what to do with them. Simply letting people go
after they'd been interrogated wasn't really an option. The people
(09:06):
who had developed the aircraft, bombs, and chemical and biological
weapons for the Third Reich still presented a threat. And
then on top of that, the Potsdam Agreement, which was
signed in August of n called for the quote complete
disarmament and demilitarization of Germany and the elimination or control
of all German industry that could be used for military production.
(09:30):
And that meant that for a lot of these specialists,
the industries that they had been working in, as well
as other related industries where they might have been able
to find jobs, those just would not exist anymore. So
it wasn't like they could interrogate someone, release them, keep
tabs on them to make sure they were, you know,
not doing anything dangerous while they went to some job
(09:52):
they had gotten because those industries they would have worked
in no longer were to exist. Although the US and
the UK were at eyes and the Combined Intelligence Subjective
Subcommittee had been established as a joint effort between the
two nations, over time they became increasingly competitive. For example,
on April, Colonel Donald L. Putt was led to the
(10:14):
Herman Geering Aeronautical Research Center at Vulcan Road, which had
been camouflaged under trees. This secret facility was in an
area that was supposed to be under British control, so
American forces worked as quickly as possible to secure as
much as they could before the British arrived. This kind
of stuff led to various toe stepping, basically from a
(10:37):
military perspective, and then the United States having to like
work with Britains to say, Okay, we took all these
V two rockets that you were supposed to get access to,
so we will work with you to figure out how
they work and to launch sums you can see how
they work. Some of this was specifically focused on trying
to secure information and weapons that could be used full
(11:00):
in the War in the Pacific, which was still ongoing.
On April twenty second, nineteen forty five, the US Army
Air Forces Intelligence Service launched Operation Lusty, which stood for
Luftwaffa's Secret Technology, and that was to secure technical and
scientific intelligence that could be used in the war against Japan.
The US started copying German munitions that had been used
(11:23):
against Britain during the Blitz. By the time Germany surrendered
on May eighth of nineteen forty five, the US had
captured most of Germany's most respected aircraft engineers. Two days later,
Allied forces intercepted the German submarine U eight five eight,
which surrendered in Delaware on May fourteenth. It was carrying
(11:44):
civilian engineers to Japan, along with advanced weaponry and supplies,
including an entire disassembled aircraft. Among its cargo were twelve
hundred pounds of uranium ox side. This was most likely
meant to be used for aircraft fuel, but it raised
fears of the possibility of nuclear weapons development. So this
(12:04):
made the ongoing exploitation of German researchers more urgent. An
officials started to question whether some of this work might
be done more effectively in the United States. Although it
was generally agreed that exploiting German researchers in Germany was
vital and was generally ethical, the idea of bringing people
(12:25):
into the US was a lot more controversial. On Under
Secretary of War Robert Patterson wrote a letter to Admiral
William D. Lahy which read, in part quote, I strongly
favored doing everything possible to utilize fully in the prosecution
of the war against Japan all information that can be
obtained from Germany or any other source. These men are enemies,
(12:48):
and it must be assumed they are capable of sabotaging
our war effort. Bringing them to this country raises delicate questions,
including the strong resentment of the American public, who might
misunderstand the purpose of bringing them here and the treatment
accorded them, But the idea of military necessity ultimately went
(13:09):
out over these and other concerns. After this letter, the
War Department General Staff held a meeting at the Pentagon
to develop a plan to give some German researchers, specifically
ones who were not Nazis or war criminals, temporary contracts
to work in the United States under protective military custody.
We will talk more about that after a sponsor break.
(13:38):
The first project to bring German scientists to the US
to work under a temporary contract was called Project Overcast,
and it was launched on July. Under this program, Germans
specialists and researchers would be brought to the US, where
they would temporarily work under military supervision before eventually returning
(14:01):
to Germany. Each person assigned a contract was supposed to
undergo a background check to confirm that they were not
an ardent Nazi. Like the word exploit, That phrase ardent
Nazi is a term that comes up a lot in
documents about Operation paper Clip and its related programs. Officials
recognized that under Adolf Hitler, Germany had been a single
(14:23):
party dictatorship, and that at least some involvement with Nazism
was essentially mandatory for non Jewish Germans. The researchers, who
the U saw is the most skilled and important, were
of course seen the same way by the Nazis, so
in many cases they had been targeted for leadership roles
and rewarded with honors and awards that were bestowed by
(14:43):
the party. Some people who joined the party also did
so out of a sense of self preservation or even opportunism.
So with all this in mind, the general conclusion among
American military authorities was that it was just not feasible
to restrict anyone who had any connection at all to
the Nazi Party. That would leave them with no researchers
(15:05):
to exploit. Instead, the focus was on banning ardent Nazis,
and ardent Nazis were described as people who had joined
the Nazi Party before Hitler declared himself, bureer people who
were leaders in the party or in one of its
affiliated organizations like the s S or the essay people
who had been convicted in a post war denazification court,
(15:29):
or people who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.
This process involved interviews, examining people's records, and confirming that
they were not on the Central Registry of War Criminals
and Security Suspects that's also known as the crow Cast List.
This list was described as quote an unwieldy monster archive.
It was often vague, it was full of undocumented allegations.
(15:52):
There's a lot of hearsay, But in terms of the
people conducting these background checks, it became a useful check
off to say this person was not a suspected war criminal.
This program, Operation Overcast, grew really quickly. It expanded to
include a huge assortment of government and military programs and
(16:12):
their associated acronyms. There were a lot of Every book
that I read on this had just a list of
acronyms at the beginning and what they all stood for.
The Joint Intelligence Objective Agency that is abbreviated j I
o A and usually said JOAH was created as part
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during this expansion, and
(16:34):
this agency directed this whole operation and brought about sixteen
hundred German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and researchers to the
US between nine and nineteen seventy. The Office of Strategic
Services and the Joint Intelligence Committee were involved in this
as well. Japan formally surrendered on September two, but even
(16:57):
though that ended the war, the effort to bring German
scientists to the US continued. By January of nineteen forty six,
one hundred sixty German specialists had been brought to the
United States. One hundred fifteen of them were rocket specialists,
including Werner von Braun, and the program got bigger and
broader from their As a relations between the US and
(17:19):
the USSR devolved into the Cold War, the idea of
keeping the other side from getting access to German researchers
and technology became more and more important to both nations.
The United States started to see an eventual armed conflict
with the Soviet Union as inevitable advances in Soviet nuclear
(17:39):
research led to fears that the Soviets had been getting
aid from German scientists on this, although it later turned
out that they were really getting stolen American nuclear secrets.
On January third of nineteen forty six, the merc report
detailing biological warfare research in Japan became public and that
led for calls for more research into biological agents and
(18:02):
their countermeasures in the United States, and that was yet
another specialty of these German researchers. In March of ninety six,
Project Overcast expanded. It shifted from a limited number of
people with temporary contracts working under military supervision to between
eight hundred and a thousand specialists who would be offered
(18:23):
long term residency in the US and even citizenship. Since
this was no longer intended as a temporary assignment, the
researchers families would be permitted to enter the US permanently
as well. This was the whole process where Germany was
being denocified, like people with Nazi ties were being pulled
(18:43):
out of leadership positions, and all of these different industries
and all of these different contexts, some of the same
people were being brought to the United States and offered
US citizenship. So by this point, some of the scientists
families who were being housed at a camp in Germany
had started calling that camp Camp Overcast, and that prompted
this project's name chained to Operation paper Clip or Project
(19:05):
paper Clip, depending on the source that you're looking at.
That name came from the paper clips that were used
to discreetly flag the files of candidates whose backgrounds were
potentially too damning for them to be allowed into the
United States. In August, Secretary of State Dean Atchison sent
a top secret memo to President Harry Truman requesting his
(19:28):
approval of the interim exploitation of German and Austrian specialists
under Project paper Clip. The document Truman approved included the
text of State War Navy Coordinating Committee Document to five
seven Slash twenty two, which outlined a revised version for
the expanded paper Clip program that had been launched in March.
(19:49):
This read, in part quote, persons proposed to be brought
to the US here under shall be screened by the
Commanding General U. S. F Et on the basis of
available rec kords. No person found by the Commanding General U. S.
F Et to have been a member of the Nazi
Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities,
(20:11):
or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism, shall be
brought to the US here under. However, neither position nor
honors awarded a specialist under the Nazi regime solely on
account of his scientific or technical ability, will in themselves
be considered sufficient to disqualify a specialist for evacuation to
(20:32):
the US. Here under where there is doubt as to
the qualification of a specialist under the preceding sentence, the
Commanding General U s F E. T. May transport the
specialist to the US, where further interrogation and screening shall
be conducted immediately in order to determine such qualification. Before
October of nineteen, the State Department had been pre approving
(20:54):
Project paper Clip candidates before they left Europe, but after
that point the process shift did so that the Immigration
and Naturalization Service Commissioner handled them in the US. This
dropped the State Department preclearance requirement, which was required by
law in occupied Germany. The Office of Military Government US
kept security dossier's on all of the candidates, but also
(21:18):
withheld the most damaging information on many high profile candidates.
Documents that were declassified in the nineteen seventies and afterward
revealed that reports on individual candidates were revised to basically
whitewash their backgrounds. Yes, some of these revisions were really
dramatic that sort of went from, you know, draft one,
(21:39):
the first thing in somebody's fil being like, this person
is a dangerous Nazi, and then later on being like,
as this person had no more than a nominal involvement
in the Nazi Party. So even though this whole project
had started with a lot of assurances that it absolutely
would not involve ardent Nazis, in the end, Paper Clippers
(22:00):
included people who had worked directly without off Hitler, Heinrich
Himler and Herman Gurring. Some had been officers in the
Nazi Party or in the s S or the Essay.
Some stood trial at Nuremberg or faced other war crimes trials.
In some cases, people's backgrounds were so egregious that they
were giving contracts to work for the U. S Military,
(22:21):
but they did that work while still living in Germany.
But in other cases, people with pretty similar backgrounds still
made their way to the US. Of course, this whole
program was classified, but just as this shift was happening
from temporary contracts to American citizenship, the American public was
becoming more aware of what was going on. This started
(22:43):
thanks to news reports that originated from Russian language newspapers
being printed in Germany. Soon publications like The New York
Times and Newsweek were reporting on German researchers, some of
them Nazis, being brought to the US and offered citizenship.
The War Department tried to respond to all this with
its own favorable propaganda about the program. It's the whole
(23:07):
idea of like nowhere, only bringing the good Germans here,
like interviews with handpicked scientists who were doing relatively neutral
and wholesome seeming work. Of course, this all had to
totally sidestep the fact that many paper clippers had been Nazis,
and even if they had not been ardent, their work
(23:28):
during the war had still contributed to, or at the
absolute very least, been complicit in the German war effort.
This work had been involved in the deaths of Allied
personnel and the widespread atrocities of the Holocaust. There had
been critics of this program within the government in the
military from the beginning. For example, Samuel Klaus was an
(23:50):
attorney with the State Department and had been chosen to
represent the State Department with Joah. He had argued strongly
against the program since he first became involved, pointing out
out that the United States was giving Nazis the chance
for American citizenship while denying that chance to refugees and
displaced persons who had been persecuted and harmed by the
(24:10):
Nazi regime. Thanks in part to Claus's role, the relationship
between the State Department and the military became incredibly adversarial
during this program, and he wound up being targeted during
the Red Scare. Yeah. He uh. He made a lot
of incredibly strident criticisms of all of this. He was
eventually moved off the project. Aside from his well argued
(24:32):
criticisms of all of this, he apparently was also kind
of a tricky person to work with and rubbed a
lot of people the wrong way in this and many
other contexts, So he seems like kind of a tangle um.
After these reports, though, there was a lot of vocal
criticism of this program from the public as well. On
December six, the Counsel Against Intolerance in America sent a
(24:55):
telegram to President Truman which read quote as Americans citizen
permit us to express our profound concern over reports that
Nazi scientists have not only been brought to this country
by the United States Army for research projects, but that
their families are to follow them, and that they may
be permitted to remain here permanently. We hold these individuals
(25:17):
to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred.
Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises
the issue of their fitness to become American citizens or
hold key positions in American industrial, scientific, and educational institutions.
If it is deemed imperative to utilize these individuals in
(25:39):
this country, we earnestly petition you to make sure they
will not be granted permanent residents or citizenship, and the
United States with the opportunity which that would afford of
inculcating these anti democratic doctrines which seek to undermine and
destroy our national unity. That telegram was signed by about
(26:00):
forty people, including Albert Einstein, A Philip Randolph, and Rabbi B.
Benedict Glazer. Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein worked together to
vocally opposed the program. Other organizations that spoke out against
it included the n double a c P, The Society
for the Prevention of World War Three, and the Federation
of American Scientists, whose statement described the program as quote
(26:23):
an affront to the people of all countries who so
recently fought beside us, to the refugees whose lives were
shattered by Nazism, to our unfortunate scientific colleagues of former
occupied lands, and to all of those others who suffered
under the yoke these men helped to forge from their
Operation paper Clip continued to make some pretty astounding headlines
(26:44):
that were honestly pretty embarrassing to the authorities who were
behind it. We'll talk about some of these things more
in this upcoming, not yet written episode of the show.
On March nine seven, Drew Pearson wrote an article for
The New York Times that alleged that Carl Crouch had
been offered a paper Clip contract while incarcerated at Nuremberg,
(27:07):
where he was awaiting a trial for war crimes. Crouch
was ultimately convicted of enslavement and crimes against humanity. Project
paper Clip wrapped up in September of ninety but German
scientists were still brought into the US after that point.
We're going to talk more about that after a sponsor break.
(27:33):
Project paper Clip, also known as Operation paper Clip, formally
ran from March of ninety six to September of ninety,
building on its precursor, Operation Overcast, as we talked about earlier,
but the same basic process continued under various different names
and with various adjustments for much longer. The recruitment of
(27:55):
German scientists actually accelerated during the Berlin Blockade, which is
when the Soviet Union blocked access to parts of Berlin
in nineteen forty eight and nineteen forty nine. The idea
was once again to keep the Soviets from getting access
to more German knowledge and technology, with the CIA and
JOAH basically competing with each other in their efforts to
(28:19):
find and recruit more German specialists. Things escalated once again
during the Korean War under a project that was known
alternately as Accelerated paper Clip and Project sixty three. This
program involved quote evacuating high profile scientists from Germany, and
the focus shifted away from establishing that they were not
(28:40):
Nazis to establishing that they were not communists. Recruits during
this particular period included Walter Schreiber, who had been the
surgeon General under the Third Reich, and he was hired
to work at the U. S. Air Force School of
Aviation Medicine. His time in the US didn't last long, though,
and it was of more information about this program coming
(29:02):
to public light. In nineteen fifty one, former war crimes
investigator Leopold Alexander noticed a brief mention of his hiring
in a medical journal. Alexander wrote to the Massachusetts Medical
Society and to the Boston Globe denouncing this hiring. When
the Globe brand its story, it included a statement from Schreiber,
(29:23):
who said that he had been the victim of Russian disinformation.
In the face of increasing and increasingly public outrage against
Schreiber's work in the US, plans started to form to
return him to Europe, but intelligence experts were concerned that
he might be a security risk. He had previously been
captured by Russia and had supposedly escaped, but a lot
(29:44):
of this was mysterious, a little bit fishy, and there
were concerns that he might very well start informing to
the Russians. At the same time, American officials were concerned
that he also presented a security risk if he remained
in the United States, since he had extensive knowledge of
all the other paper clippers who had been high ranking
and ardent Nazis, basically, they were afraid he would blow
(30:08):
their cover. Eventually, the US paid for his passage to Argentina,
where he had family and which had already become home
to a community of high profile Nazi officials. He was
also given an undisclosed allowance. In the nineteen fifties, other
Allied nations that had been working with German researchers within
(30:28):
their own borders generally started returning those researchers to Germany,
but in the US most were on the path to
becoming citizens. In fact, nine of the Germans who were
brought to the US between nineteen forty five and nineteen
fifty two ultimately became US citizens. And even though the
details of the program were still classified, it had really
(30:50):
become something of an open secret. I mean, the the
War Department had had this whole propaganda campaign about these
being the good Germans. Only when the Soviet Union launched
the satellites spt NICK in nineteen fifty seven, Bob Hope
joked that it meant that quote their Germans were better
than our Germans. Bob Hope is just one of the
people that this quote has been attributed to. Sometimes it's
(31:14):
their German rocket scientists were better than our German rocket scientists.
People knew it was obvious. In nineteen fifty nine, Lieutenant
Colonel Henry Whalen became deputy director of JOAH, which was
still overseeing this work. He was also spying for Russia,
something that went undetected until nineteen sixty three, when the
(31:36):
FBI investigated. It became clear that he had handed over
or destroyed a lot of files related to Project paper Clip,
so at least some of the details about all of
this may never be known. Whalen pleaded guilty to charges
of conspiring with Soviet agents, but the Justice Department dropped
the charge of espionage. By the time Whalen's espionage was uncovered,
(31:57):
JOAH had actually been disbanded. That happened in nineteen sixty two,
and a few years after that people started combing through
the details of what had happened during and after the war.
The first book on Operation paper Clip to come out
of this work was Clarence Lasbie's Project paper Clip German
Scientists in the Cold War, which was published in nineteen
(32:18):
seventy one. At that point, though most of the documents
related to the program were still classified, and Lasbie's general
conclusion was that authorities had screened everyone, but that a
few ardent Nazis had unfortunately managed to evade detection. Criticism
of the paper clip program and its successors had been
ongoing through all these years, but public interest reached another
(32:42):
peak in nineteen seventy eight after NBC aired a mini
series on the Holocaust. In night, Eli Rosenbaum, who was
a student at Harvard Law, was browsing through a bookstore.
He picked up both Dora, the Nazi concentration camp where
modern space technology was born in and prisoners died by
Jean Michel, who was imprisoned at the camp, and The
(33:04):
Rocket Team, which traced the history of the V two rocket,
and in reading these books he connected the V twos
development with the use of slave labor from the concentration camp.
So when Rosenbaum finished his law degree, he got a
job at the Department of Justice in the Office of
Special Investigations. The o s I had been established in
(33:24):
nineteen seventy nine to investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals
who were living in the US. Rosenbaum convinced the head
of the o s I to open an investigation into
paper clipper, Arthur Rudolph, who designed the Saturn five rocket
and had been a big part of the V two
development team. In addition to coordinating the use of enslaved
(33:45):
labor at the German development facility known as Middle Work,
he had known about and been complicit in, or possibly
been actively involved in atrocities that were committed there. He
maintained that he was innocent of these accusations. Rather the
stand trial, he renounced his US citizenship in nineteen eighty
four and returned to Europe after thirty eight years in
(34:06):
the US. After this happened, investigative journalists started trying to
get more and more information about Operation paper Clip, including
through the Freedom of Information Act, which had been signed
into law in nineteen sixty seven. In nineteen eighty five,
journalists Linda Hunt broke a story by publishing an article
titled US cover Up of Nazi Scientists in the Bulletin
(34:30):
of the Atomic Scientists. This article read in part quote,
formerly classified documents revealed detales of the U. S military's
employment of alleged Nazi war criminals in highly sensitive defense projects.
They show that government officials concealed information about many specialists
in order to secure their legal U S immigration status.
(34:51):
The cover up seems to have stemmed from a belief
that US national security would be best served by keeping
these Nazi special lists away from the Soviet Union, but
it was a direct contravention of the presidential directive which
formally set up Project paper Clip. Hunt published a book
based on this and other research in Journalist Tom Bauer
(35:15):
had done the same in seven. Both Hunt and Bauer
framed Project paper Clip as a conspiracy. In the US
passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which mandated the
declassification of roughly eight point five million pages of records
related to all this. This mass declassification led to the
(35:36):
publication of U S Intelligence and the Nazis in two
thousand and four. A key sentence from its introduction is
quote Granted, some intelligence activities involve a degree of secret
and messiness which strained conventional moral standards, but there was
no compelling reasons to begin the post war era with
(35:57):
the assistance of some of those associated with the worst
crimes of the war. Between its establishment in and its
merge with the Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section in
the Office of Special Investigations, work led to at least
one hundred Nazi war criminals being stripped of their US
citizenship or removed from the United States. In two thousand six,
(36:20):
O s I legal historian Judith Fagan wrote a six
hundred page report called Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath
of the Holocaust, which detailed both the O. S i
s efforts to investigate Nazi war criminals and the U
S efforts to shelter them. After the Department of Justice
released an incredibly heavily redacted version in response to a
(36:42):
Freedom of Information Act request, former officials leaked the entire,
unredacted thing to The New York Times. Yeah. I read
an article that described this as an incredible cell phone
because they had they had released something that was so
incredibly redacted to the point of uselessness that that other
people were like, well, We're just going to leak the
(37:02):
entire thing. In part because of all the information that
has been declassified and released in the last few decades,
there are various organizations and institutions that are really still
wrestling with how to reconcile their own histories with paper
clippers and their own connection to the Nazi Party and
war crimes. We'll be talking about that, Uh, but since
(37:25):
that will involve some of the discussion of more specific
people who were part of the program in a future episode.
It might be the next episode, but since I haven't
written it yet, as I said at the top of
the show, I don't quite want to promise anything. Do
you have a little bit of listener mail? I do
have listener mail. This is actually a listener Facebook comment,
which I don't think we read a lot of, and
(37:46):
listener to mail because they tend to be a little
trickier for us to keep up with than the email
which is just there in the inbox. UM. And this
is from Anne, who was commenting on the behind the
scenes where Uh, Holly and I had been talking about
the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. UM. And I talked about how
when I was a kid, I would go on road
(38:07):
trips with my mom to western North Carolina. UM, and
when we got to the Lynn Cove Dot, we would
just turn around before we got to the Lynn Cove
Viaduct because we were both scared of heights and my
mom didn't want to drive on it and I didn't
want to ride on it. Uh. And I was like,
I assume it's still there. So Anne has left a
comment to say, just listen, Tracy. The Lynn Cove Viaduct
(38:28):
is indeed still there on the Blue Ridge Parkway. When
we used to live in Atlanta, we would drive that
section of the Blue Ridge Parkway on our way to
family get togethers in Blowing Rock. As a passenger, it
never really bothered me, but I've never driven it. The
way it is set up against the side of the mountain,
it feels like more of the same curvy mountain roads
and less like being on a bridge to me. And
I've definitely been on way scarier curvy mountain roads than
(38:52):
the Blue Ridge Parkway Rocky Mountain National Park anyone. Anyway,
thanks ladies for the great podcast. As always, I've listened
since the short episode Day is not from the very beginning,
but I found it early enough that listening from the
beginning wasn't nearly the shore it would be now stuff
you miss and History Class remains and one of my
favorite podcasts of all the ones that listened to, and
I have learned so much about so many things over
(39:12):
the years, So thank you Anne for this comment. It's
been so long since I've been able to go to
western North Carolina that I was like I assume that
registered there. I did, uh. So I went to college
in Asheville, North Carolina. I grew up outside of Winston Salem,
North Carolina. And when I got to the point that
(39:34):
I was going to be able to take a car
with me to college, I was like, I'm gonna have
to get over this fear of heights, because I cannot
drive myself up the mountain if I don't. So I
did eventually drive on the Lynco Viaduct myself without my
mom um, and I have, you know, driven on things
(39:58):
that are definitely much scary er than that. Weirdly, one
of them was UM going to a thing that used
to happen once a year called max fun Con, which
was held in Lake Arrowhead, California, which involved driving out
a road that felt like a lot like driving up
the mountain on I forty to go to Asheville from
(40:20):
from points east of there, except it would go on
a lot longer um. And so the first time that
I was going to go there, I had kind of
asked people like, how how scary is this drive, and
They're like, Oh, it's not that bad. And as I
was driving up there, I was like, Oh, this just
feels just like driving on I forty. But it just
kept going. Um, and there was one of those low
lying cloud days and at some point I got above
(40:44):
the cloud and was able to see down it. And
that's when I was like, oh, this is a little
higher than I might like to be right now. I
can't understand that. So anyway, thank you Anne for this comment. Um,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcasts were History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. We're all over social media A miss
(41:06):
in History? Uh, That's where you'll find our Facebook and
Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. Even though we don't read
Facebook comments on the show very often, we do see
them when people leave them. We don't really see the
ones that people really leave on our website though. The
thing we don't have the power to turn off with
folks leave comments there. Um. You can subscribe to our
(41:28):
show on the I heart Radio app and anywhere else
do you get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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