Operation Paperclip: Top-Secret U.S. Army Program to Recruit & Bring 1600 Nazi Scientists to America

Top Secret - covert operations, double agents, commando raids, botched missions, narrow escapes, black ops, intelligence failures & military blunders of World War 2. *New videos every week* | *Please Like & Subscribe* Hunting Nazis Black Ops Long Docs Espionage Conspiracies & Cover-ups As the Second World War came to an end and the German forces surrendered to the Allies, the United States found a new enemy. The Soviet Union had begun aggressively recruiting former Nazi and German scientists to their ranks, usually with threats to their family, occasionally at gunpoint. Their hope was to further their space program and gain an advantage in the Cold War. As the Germans surrendered, it became clear just how advanced their military arsenal was and just how valuable their weapons intelligence could be. In retaliation, the United States began secretly recruiting their own scientists. Just two months after the Germans surrender, the Joint Chiefs of Staff created Operation Paperclip, the first secret recruitment program. The name stemmed from the secret method Army officers would use to indicate which German rocket scientists they wanted to recruit. When they came across a viable candidate, they would attach a certain colored paperclip to the folder, before passing it back to their superiors. By September of 1946, Operation Paperclip had been officially, but secretly, approved by President Truman. It had also been approved to expand to include 1,000 German rocket scientists, moved to the U.S. under “temporary, limited military custody.” After the operation was signed off on, those 1,000 scientists were secretly relocated to the United States to begin working. One of the most valuable and talented recruits for Operation Paperclip was a man named Wernher von Braun. During World War II, von Braun was one of the leading rocket scientists in Germany. For most of his early life, he worked for Germany’s rocket development program, helping to design the V-2 rocket, the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile. Before World War II, he had been working at an operations base in Peenemünde, researching the launch specs and ballistics of warheads. Those who worked with him in Peenemünde claim he had always dreamed of one day using his research to send a manned aircraft into space. He had also, like most of the German scientists recruited, been a member of the Nazi party, and an SS officer. According to affidavits that he produced for the Army upon his acceptance into Operation Paperclip, he applied for membership with the Third Reich in 1939, though his membership was not politically motivated. According to his statement, he claimed that had he refused to join the party, he would no longer have been able to continue working at Peenemünde, the German Army Rocket Center. He added that he had even been arrested by the Gestapo for making comments about the war that were construed as being anti-Nazi as well as making “careless comments” about the use of the rockets. Later in his statement, he included that he never liked Hitler, referring to him as a “pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin mustache.” The Army later disclosed that he surrendered to them without a fight after being located in Bavaria. Regardless of his political stance, his work for the Germans during World War II proved to be invaluable, especially for the United States. While he had created the V-2 while in Germany, most of his important breakthroughs would occur during the years he worked for the United States after the war. Upon arriving in the United States after being selected for Operation Paperclip, Wernher Von Braun began working for the Army, testing ballistic missiles, based on the designs of his original brainchild, the V-2. His work with the missiles led him to research launching missiles for space travel, rather than warheads. Under the supervision of the Army, von Braun helped create test launch sites for the Redstone and Jupiter ballistic missiles, as well as the Jupiter C, Juno II and Saturn I launch vehicles. As he had while working at Peenemünde, von Braun dreamed of one day manning his launches and sending men into space. Having more freedom in the United States than he ever did under the Third Reich, von Braun published his ideas for manned-rocket powered space exploration in various magazines. Von Braun even conceptualized a space station, that would be locked in orbit around the Earth, and continually manned by international space teams.