Project Paperclip
- Also called:
- Operation Paperclip
Project Paperclip, U.S. government program that sponsored the post-World War II immigration of German and Austrian scientists and technicians to the United States in order to exploit their knowledge for military and industrial purposes. Project Paperclip itself lasted less than two years, but similar programs continued until 1962. Ultimately, approximately 1,500 German and Austrian professionals and their families were relocated to the United States, the majority of them going on to become U.S. citizens. All of these German and Austrian scientists and technicians, regardless of the program into which they were recruited, are commonly said to have been part of Project Paperclip.
Postwar competition for German and Austrian scientists
Project Paperclip was one of many ways in which Allied forces extracted “intellectual reparations” after the conquest of Germany. Gaining control of the human sources of advanced technical knowledge was a logical Allied priority in the final year of the war, as it became clear that the defeat of Germany was imminent and would predate the defeat of Japan. With this situation in mind, the team of German and Austrian scientists and engineers who had developed the highly advanced V-2 rocket system abandoned their chief research complex and deliberately put themselves in the path of approaching western Allied forces. After being captured on May 2, 1945, the entire team was transported to the United States as part of Project Overcast and given facilities to continue their research, which was considered vital to the U.S. “national interest” because it had the potential to accelerate the defeat of Japan. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff created a special subcommittee to oversee the further acquisition of German information and personnel, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA). Because the name of the project had become publicly known and even discussed in the press, all future immigration of German and Austrian scientists and technicians to the United States occurred as part of a newly named operation, "Project Paperclip," so-named for the paperclips that held together the many pages of information about the scientists possessing more problematic pasts during the Nazi era.
Japan’s defeat did not alter the opinion of American military and industrial decision makers that contracting German and Austrian scientists and technicians and bringing them to the United States was in the national interest. On the contrary, something of a competition developed between the U.S. and other Allied powers. The British, French, and Soviets were all known to be actively recruiting such experts who they believed would be able to advance their interests in a variety of ways, both militarily and industrially. German and Austrian professionals, facing the prospect of uncertain employment in a devastated postwar economy, were generally eager to accept such offers. American personnel on the ground reported that, short of putting such experts under guard to keep them in Germany (which actually did happen on occasion), they had no way to prevent other countries from exploiting the experts’ knowledge.
The creation and conduct of Project Paperclip
Responding to this competitive pressure, the U.S. State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), in coordination with the JIOA, developed Project Paperclip. The final version of the project appeared in directive SWNCC 257/22 and was approved by Pres. Harry S. Truman on September 3, 1946. It allowed U.S. military departments to sponsor the immigration of “chosen, rare minds.”
Project Paperclip was not given carte blanche. Experts selected by the program had to be screened by the JIOA, and, according to official policy, anyone who had been more than a nominal member of the Nazi Party was to be excluded. The ethical and moral concerns of the project were immediately obvious to many within the U.S. government. Some considered these experts to be a national security risk, given their change in loyalty. Nevertheless, U.S. policy at the time called for pressure to be put on other countries—particularly those in the Americas—to repatriate Germans who had fled their country. At the same time, denazification policies in the U.S.-occupied sector of Germany set a notably higher bar than Paperclip. Indeed, Samuel Klaus, the U.S. State Department representative in the JIOA, demanded background checks on Paperclip candidates so thorough that he was widely believed to be deliberately delaying the implementation of the program.
When news of the project was released, there were protests from prominent public figures in the United States, including Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. Nonetheless, the increasingly urgent sense of competition ultimately led the State Department to back down and issue visas to designees of Project Paperclip.
As the Cold War developed, it was increasingly used as the core justification for Project Paperclip. In 1946 the Soviet Union had carried out its own version of the project, called Operation Osoaviakhim, and it continued to contract experts in the Soviet-occupied portion of Germany. In 1948 Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia wrote an article in which he publicly defended Project Paperclip in utilitarian terms, arguing that giving up invaluable knowledge to the Soviet Union because of moral qualms related to the holders of that knowledge would be foolish.
Many of those who came to the U.S. through Project Paperclip and related projects achieved great success. The most famous is likely Wernher von Braun—the scientist who had led the development of the V-2 rocket for the Wehrmacht and who later played a prominent role in the U.S. space program. After completing the government contracts that had brought them to the U.S., many other scientists and engineers who had come to the U.S. through Paperclip-related programs went on to have profitable careers in the private sector.
The complicity of Project Paperclip experts in Nazi crimes and the implications of their recruitment
While Project Paperclip scientists and engineers were said to have unwillingly joined the Nazi Party, solely as a condition of securing employment in the Third Reich, the truth proved to be far more complicated. There were numerous instances when U.S. military staff covered up information about the backgrounds of former Nazis who the Americans had determined would be national security assets. To achieve scientific success in the Third Reich, it had often been necessary to demonstrate loyalty to the regime and to develop close relationships with Adolf Hitler’s inner circle. Moreover, weapons factories and labs that had conducted experiments in Nazi Germany had employed slave labour. While experts recruited through Project Paperclip often said that they had been ignorant of the breadth and criminality of the slave labour and concentration camp system, their claims were questioned by later analysts. Some infamous cases came to light in which Nazi experts who had acted as persecutors had been granted residency in the United States or had been allowed to enter the country through Paperclip-related projects. One of the most notable examples was Otto Ambros, a German chemist and a convicted war criminal, who had at least twice been granted visa waivers to visit the United States.
Investigative journalism in the 1970s led to a series of hearings on Project Paperclip in the U.S. House of Representatives, which concluded that American military leaders had made morally bankrupt decisions on the grounds of national security. Partially as a result of the hearings, in 1979 the Justice Department opened the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Its mission was to find and bring to justice any Nazi war criminals who were living in the United States. While the OSI did not bring to trial any of the scientists or engineers involved in Project Paperclip, its investigations did lead to a deal under which Arthur Rudolph, who had been a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) executive and a close collaborator of Braun’s, left the U.S. permanently and surrendered his American citizenship to avoid prosecution.
The legacy of Project Paperclip
The legacy of Project Paperclip remains the subject of debate and investigation to this day. The moral and ethical questions it has raised about complicity, accountability, and necessity are difficult to answer. Did the V-2 development team’s awareness that their rockets were being built through slave labour make them fully complicit in war crimes? Records indicate that Braun himself went to Buchenwald concentration camp to recruit skilled prisoners to work on his rockets. Apparently, however, he treated such prisoners respectfully. For his part, Rudolph maintained his innocence of war crimes until his death, insisting that he had advocated for improvements in prisoners’ living and working conditions and had even helped them get increased rations. The breadth and depth of these men’s knowledge of and participation in the systematic war crimes being committed around them is difficult to gauge objectively, but the fact of their knowledge and participation is inarguable.