Overview
Operation Paperclip was a classified US programme, initially run by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later administered by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) with CIA involvement, that recruited over 1,600 German scientists, engineers, physicians, and technicians from the defeated Third Reich in the years following World War II. The programme ran from 1945 into the early 1960s. Its explicit purpose was to deny German scientific expertise to the Soviet Union and to exploit that expertise directly for American military, space, and intelligence programmes.
The operation was fully confirmed by declassified documents including JIOA personnel files at the National Archives and Records Administration, OSS records, and State Department correspondence. Its most controversial aspect — systematically falsifying or concealing the Nazi Party affiliations and war crimes records of recruited scientists — was documented in those same official files.
Background
In the final months of the war, American and British intelligence teams raced into Germany ahead of Soviet forces, tasked with capturing German technical expertise. The OSS and Army’s “T-Force” units secured German rocket scientists, aeronautical engineers, chemical weapons researchers, and aviation medicine specialists. President Truman authorised the recruitment of German scientists in August 1945 but specified they were not to be Nazis or war criminals.
The JIOA almost immediately began falsifying personnel records to circumvent this restriction. Files documenting Nazi Party membership, SS rank, and involvement in forced labour and human experimentation were altered or withheld. The State Department protested repeatedly; the JIOA overrode its objections.
Key Figures
The most prominent Paperclip recruit was Wernher von Braun, former SS-Sturmbannführer and technical director of the V-2 rocket programme, which used slave labour from the Mittelwerk underground factory — where thousands of concentration camp prisoners died in production. Von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo 11 to the Moon in 1969.
Arthur Rudolph, von Braun’s operations director at Mittelwerk, was also recruited. He directed the Saturn V programme before a 1984 US investigation found sufficient evidence of war crimes to convince him to renounce his American citizenship and return to West Germany rather than face prosecution.
Walter Schreiber, a Wehrmacht General and physician who supervised medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, was brought to the US before State Department objections resulted in his relocation to Argentina. Kurt Blome, a Nazi biological weapons researcher who had conducted plague experiments on prisoners, was recruited and tested for American biowarfare programmes before his contract was terminated.
Scale and Sectors
Beyond rocketry, Paperclip recruits contributed to: the US Air Force’s aviation medicine programme, early CIA interrogation and mind-control research (some Paperclip physicians later appeared in MKUltra-adjacent programmes), the US chemical weapons stockpile, early ballistic missile development, and the foundational work of what became NASA. Approximately 700 scientists were brought to Fort Bliss, Texas; Redstone Arsenal, Alabama; Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; and other facilities.
Declassification and Assessment
The programme was officially declassified in 1973. A 1999 report by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) — the unit that prosecuted Nazi war criminals — found that the JIOA had knowingly imported individuals who had committed war crimes, and that the CIA had withheld relevant records from OSI investigators for decades. No Paperclip recruit was ever prosecuted in the United States.