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Operation Paperclip
G. Mick Smith, PhD
Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services' program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for the employment of the United States in post-WWII.
President Harry Truman's orders expressly excluded anyone "to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism."
The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists. The JIOA also removed all public records of the scientists' Nazi Party memberships and regime affiliations.
The Osenberg List
By early 1943, the German government began recalling from combat a number of scientists, engineers, and technicians; they returned to work in research and development to bolster German defense for a protracted war with the USSR. The recall from frontline combat included 4,000 rocketeers returned to Peenemünde, in north-east coastal Germany.
Werner Osenberg, the engineer-scientist heading the Military Research Association, recorded the names of the politically-cleared men to the Osenberg List, thus reinstating them to scientific work
In March 1945, at Bonn University, a Polish laboratory technician found pieces of the Osenberg List stuffed in a toilet. The list reached MI6, who transmitted it to US Intelligence. Former US Army Major Robert Staver used the Osenberg List to compile his list of German scientists to be captured and interrogated. Wernher von Braun, Nazi Germany's premier rocket scientist headed Major Staver's list. Therefore, the Americans already received the information that Wernher von Braun was heading the rockets program before March 1945 since Allen Dulles had mentioned him in a Telegram of December 9 in Bern.
Operation Overcast
On 22 May 1945, Major Staver transmitted to the US Pentagon headquarters Colonel Joel Holmes' telegram urging the evacuation of German scientists, and their families, as most "important for the Pacific war" effort.
Beginning on July 19th 1945, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff managed the captured ARC rocketeers under a program called Operation Overcast. However, when the "Camp Overcast" name of the scientists' quarters became locally-known, the program was renamed Operation Paperclip in March 1946. Despite these attempts at secrecy, later that year the press interviewed several of the scientists.
Capture and Detention
Early on, the US created the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee. This provided the information on targets for the T-Forces that went in and targeted scientific, military and industrial installations for their know-how. Initial priorities were advanced technology, such as infrared, that could be used in the war against Japan, finding out what technology had been passed on to Japan, and finally to halt the research.
A project to halt the research was codenamed "Project Safehaven", and it was not initially targeted against the Soviet Union; rather the concern was that German scientists might emigrate and continue their research in countries such as Spain, Argentina or Egypt, all of which had sympathized with Nazi Germany.
By 1947 an evacuation operation had netted an estimated 1,800 technicians and scientists, along with 3,700 family-members. Those with special skills or knowledge were taken to detention and interrogation centers to be held and interrogated, in some cases for months.
On November 5, 1947, the Office of Military Government of the United States, which had jurisdiction over the western part of occupied Germany, held a conference to consider the status of the evacuees, the monetary claims that the evacuees had filed against the US, and the "possible violation by the U.S. of laws of war or Rules of Land Warfare". The OMGUS director of Intelligence, R. L. Walsh initiated a program to resettle the evacuees in the Third world, which the Germans referred to as General Walsh's "Urwald-Programm", however this program never matured. In 1948, the evacuees received settlements of 69.5 million Reichsmarks from the U.S., a settlement that soon became severely devalued during the currency reform that introduced the Deutsche Mark as the official currency of western Germany.
The Scientists
In May 1945, the US Navy "received in custody" Dr. Herbert A. Wagner, the inventor of the Hs 293 missile; for two years, he first worked at the Special Devices Center, at Castle Gould and at Hempstead House, Long Island, New York; in 1947, he moved to the Naval Air Station Point Mugu.
In August 1945, Colonel Holger Toftoy, head of the Rocket Branch of the Research and Development Division of the US Army's Ordnance Corps, offered initial one-year contracts to the rocket scientists; 127 of them accepted. In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived at Fort Strong, Massachusetts.
Beginning in late 1945, three rocket-scientist groups arrived in the US for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as "War Department Special Employees".
In 1946, the United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists at a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri.
Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field, where the US had Luftwaffe aircraft and equipment captured under Operation Lusty (Luftwaffe Secret Technology).
In 1959, ninety-four Operation Paperclip men went to the US, including Friedwardt Winterberg and Friedrich Wigand. Throughout its operations to 1990, Operation Paperclip imported 1,600 men, as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the US and the UK, some $10 billion in patents and industrial processes.
During the decades after they were included in Operation Paperclip, some scientists were investigated because of their activities during World War II. Arthur Rudolph was deported in 1984, but not prosecuted, and West Germany granted him citizenship. Similarly, Georg Rickhey, who came to the United States under Operation Paperclip in 1946, was returned to Germany to stand trial at the Mittelbau-Dora war crimes trial in 1947, was acquitted, and returned to the United States in 1948, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. The aeromedical library at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas had been named after Hubertus Strughold in 1977. However, it was later renamed because documents from the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal linked Strughold to medical experiments in which inmates from Dachau were tortured and killed.