Operation Paperclip

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For other uses of "Paperclip", see Paperclip (disambiguation).

Operation Paperclip scientists pose together.

Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated Nazi scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip. [1]

When the Allies entered Germany in 1945 their scientific intelligence experts were astounded by the sheer scope of the German technical and scientific accomplishments.

Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years the U.S. pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents in Germany. John Gimbel comes to the conclusion, in his book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, that the "intellectual reparations" taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to $10 Billion dollars, equivalent to around $100 Billion dollars 2006.^[1]

The program of acquiring German scientists and technicians for the U.S. was not only founded in profit interests, however; an equally strong motivator was the desire to deny the expertise of German scientists to the Soviet Union.^[2] The case for finding and holding Nobel laurate Werner Heisenberg was summed up thus "…he was worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans. Had he fallen into Russian hands, he would have proven invaluable to them."^[3]

Of particular interest to the U.S. were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats would have disqualified them from officially obtaining visas. An aim of the operation was capturing equipment before the Soviets came in. The US Army destroyed some of the German equipment to prevent it from being captured by the advancing Soviet Army.

The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico; Fort Bliss, Texas; and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program.

Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified.

Separate from Paperclip was an even more secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos). Another American project (TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography.

The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946. [2]

In popular culture, several fictional surviving scientists were the centerpiece of a 1995 early third-season X-Files episode of the same name.

A segment of James A. Michener’s 1982 novel Space was a fictionalized account of Operation Paperclip.