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.
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.
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. 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.
Heisenberg was in charge of the German secret atomic bomb
program code-named "Virus House". Had he fallen into Russian
hands, he would have proven invaluable to them."
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.
Another aim of the operation was
capturing German equipment before the Soviets came in. Where
that was not possible, the US Army destroyed some of the
equipment to prevent its capture by the advancing Red Army.
For example, a prototype Horton Ho-229 jet-powered, flying
wing fighter/bomber was captured by the Americans and sent
to the Northrop Corporation for evaluation, while several
more partial Ho-229 airframes were destroyed.
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.
A UK equivalent of Operation
paperclip was Operation surgeon. Its purpose was to deny
German aeronautical expertise to the Soviet Union and
instead exploit the scientists in order to further British
research.
