Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

After World War II, the U.S. government launched Operation Paperclip, a decades-long covert program to recruit Nazi scientists and their families to America. Many of these men faced accusations of war crimes, had been tried at Nuremberg, or were convicted of serious crimes including mass murder and slavery. They were also key figures in Nazi advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and weapons development. Annie Jacobsen investigates whether Operation Paperclip represented a moral violation or a strategic necessity in winning the Cold War. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, German archival documents, Freedom of Information Act files, and government archives, she traces the postwar lives of more than a dozen German scientists. The book examines how these scientists contributed to major advances in the U.S. space program and other fields while revealing the complex and controversial nature of this twentieth-century government secret maintained in the name of national security.