Operation Paperclip is about the connection between Nazi scientists and American government secrets. Under this program, more than a thousand of Nazi scientists were brought to America immediately after the end of World War Two. Those scientists helped develop rockets, the NASA program, chemical and biological weapons, aviation and space medicine and many other weapons of mass destruction.They came to America at the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some officials believed that by endorsing the Paperclip program they were accepting the lesser of two evils-that if America didn't recruit theses men, the Soviet Communists would.
- book : "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America" by Annie Jacobsen
- book review: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/operation-paperclip-by-annie-jacobsen.html
- More than 3,000 Nazi scientists were brought to America and lived the American dream
- Many of them, such as the inventor of the sarin gas, were convicted at the Nuremberg trial, but received American clemency and received American contracts at the Department of Energy, etc.
- USA was 20 years behind Germany in rocket development, and these Nazis helped America go to the moon
- The U.S. also granted immunity to the entire Unit 731 medical staff, including their chief, provided they offered what they had learned from their heinous experiments. Many of them continued to work for the U.S. Army and were based at Ft. Detrick, headquarters for the biological defense command. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
listen to the story : http://www.npr.org/2014/02/15/275877755/the-secret-operation-to-bring-nazi-scientists-to-america
Also at NPR Tech Nation; March 11, 2014; Moira speaks with Journalist ANNIE JACOBSEN about how NASA and other federal government agencies came to be staffed by former Nazi Scientists after World War II: http://www.technation.com/
On the U.S. government's efforts to mask the scientists' past
There began a propaganda campaign by the U.S. government to whitewash the pasts of these scientists who we very much knew were ardent Nazis. And it happened on a number of levels, from the bureaucrats in Army intelligence who were asked to sort of re-write the dossiers, on up to the generals in the Pentagon who flatly said we need these scientists, and we're going to have to re-write some history. And that's where it becomes very tricky and very nefarious.
You have to be a Nazi ideologue to move up that chain of command so high. It's almost like someone who is a hedge fund manager in the United States trying to take the line that they don't believe in capitalism, you know? That they're just trying to earn a living for their family. I mean, if you're going to rise to the top of your field, you maintain the party line and that is what I found was the case with Paperclip.
On Wernher von Braun's Nazi past
He is a great example, because you wonder where the deal with the devil really happened in terms of his whitewashed past — because the U.S. government, NASA in particular, was so complicit in keeping his past hidden.
In doing the research, one discovers that not only was von Braun a Nazi, but a member of the SS. And not only was he running the underground slave labor facility where his rockets were being built — he wasn't running the facility but he was in charge of the science there — but when they were running low of good technicians, Wernher von Braun himself traveled nearby to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he hand-picked slaves to work for him as laborers.
When you see that kind of activity during the war, and you have to imagine what he saw and what he knew, it's impossible to excuse him from his Nazi past.
On the fates of the Nazi scientists
They all had different trajectories, but none of them seemed to have been held accountable for what happened and what they were involved in during the war. Dr. Benzinger, who was one of the Nazi doctors, came here, and when he died at the age of ninety-something he had a wonderful obituary in The New York Times lauding him for inventing the ear thermometer. Entirely left out of the story was the work that he performed on concentration camp prisoners.
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