American History Hit - Nazi Scientists in America: Operation Paperclip

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Why would the United States have welcomed Nazis after the Second World War? Through Operation Paperclip, more than 1,500 German and Austrian scientists and engineers moved to America to share technology developed in the Third Reich.Don is joined by Eric Lichtblau in this episode to find out who these people were, why the US needed them, and whether any of them should have faced punishment.Eric Lichtblau is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of 'The Nazis Next Door - How America Became A Safe Haven For Hitler’s Men'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Tim Arstall. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. At the end of World War II, so many cities and nations are physical and economic ruins. Around the world, more than 60 million people have died.

Millions more are displaced. Across Europe, especially in Germany, there are shortages of, well, everything. But for a group of Germans who faithfully served the Nazi regime, a group that will eventually number in the thousands, the end of the war means something else entirely. their lives will be transformed in many ways for the better. Some are directly implicated in the Nazi war crimes for which others will be severely punished, even put to death. Yet these men, of all people, are plucked from the wreckage

and given new lives in the land of the free, in an America determined to harness their unique scientific and technological expertise, to prepare for a new world order and a new kind of war. Hi, everyone. Welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Guided missiles, jet engines, aerospace medicine, advanced submarine technology. In World War II, Nazi Germany had developed all of them and were far ahead in many cases. And as the war ended, the United States wanted the people who possessed the knowledge and expertise. Under a top secret program called Operation Paperclip, the U.S.

out to bring those scientists and engineers to America. But who were these guys? What did they do during the war? And how much of their dark past was America willing to overlook? Joining me to discuss this is Eric Lishblow. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who worked for decades at the New York Times and the L.A. Times. And he authored the best-selling book, The Nazis Next Door,

How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men. what we will discuss today. Hello, Eric. Thanks for joining me. Really appreciate the time. My pleasure. Thank you, Don. At the conclusion of World War II, it's a total collapse for the Axis powers, obviously, Allied takeover of Berlin, widespread laying down of arms. There's VE Day, victory in Europe, officially happens on May 8th, 1945. Japan, September 2nd, a month after the bombs are dropped. Italy has already surrendered back in 1943. All this is happening, and the Allies have to set up what's called the denazification program.

Explain what that means, denazification. Well, in theory, it was the intent of reading the now occupied Germany of all of the extremist Nazi elements who had served under Hitler. In practice, it did not quite reach its conclusion. It was a fairly intense effort, but there were certainly elements of the Third Reich that continued to exist, both inside and outside Germany, despite that massive denatzification effort. We all know about the Nuremberg trials, but those are for the leadership and the high-ranking officers. Eventually 177 Nazis are tried at Nuremberg and then the secondary Nuremberg trials. And thousands are tried in lower German courts.

What about the rest? What happens to most Nazis at that point? A lot of them scattered to the wind, really, and saw the writing on the wall even before the final fall of the third. fall of the third right in spring of 45. And some fled within Europe, some fled to South America, some fled even to Australia. And a large chunk, really more than many people realized for years and years, came to the United States. And they came really in three different ways. They came either just slipping through the cracks of immigration, because there was a massive immigration intake into the U.S. from Eastern Europe, from survivors of occupied Nazi countries.

And it was fairly easy for lots of ex-Nazis from low-ranking campguards up to commandants and senior Nazi officers to slip in just not with any great difficulty disguising their history and posing as war refugees. But then you also had the element of both spies and scientists coming into the U.S. working for the U.S., unlike that first group of immigrants who lived out their life in the United States without any real attention for the most part. But you had, under Operation Paperclip, you had 1,600 Nazi scientists who were brought into the United States were really courted by the war department at that time and by senior U.S. officials. And they were seen as a way for the U.S. to exploit their knowledge of the Nazis' great war machine, which had been,

pretty darn successful for the early stages of the war with technology, especially in the air bombing raids and missile programs that none of the allies had. And then there's a third group, which was the spies who were not scientists. They weren't even good spies, to be honest, in most of these cases, who the U.S. hired as part of what became the CIA later a few years after the war to, for the most part, spy on Russia, which of course had been our ally during the war, but there was already a sense that was a very fractured relationship and soon became the target of the Cold War and the tensions there. And there was a feeling that no one knew the Russians better than the Germans because they hated each other so much and the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

So we hired as many as a thousand spies working as part of the Cold War ex-Nazi senior officers. These weren't camp guards. These were people who were part of the German intelligence operation. And for the most sort, they were really either bumbling fools who were not very good at espionage or were knowingly taking advantage of the U.S. reliance on them and the money that was being provided along with alcohol and cigars and all sorts of kutrebutts and providing almost nothing of any great intelligence value for the most part, while, of course, the U.S. intelligence helped to whitewash their past ties to the Nazi regime. These were not ex-Nazis now working at spies.

These were boilerplate, people who had officially nothing to do with wartime atrocities. It is a phase of World War II and then early Cold War history that escapes a lot of folks, that there was this transitional phase, institutional, transitional phase, where America really retooled itself to fight a different kind of war with an amazing amount of work being done in a short, a period of time. if I'm not wrong, right? About 1944 this whole thing starts? Yes, the Cold War was pivoting really on a dime to the new enemy, as strange in some way as that sounds, since we had been in this awkward but still significant partnership with Russia for the entirety of the war. But they were seen as almost the enemy even before the German surrender. And that was the immediate target of men like Alan Dulles, who was at OSS at that time,

and a very influential figure in fighting that Cold War. In fact, he was, even before the end of the war, already making plans and, in fact, meeting with Nazis in beginning and, again, at least a year before the end of the war, to cultivate them as operatives and agents in what he foresaw correctly would be this new Cold War against Russia. So there were officially supposed to be no talks of surrender negotiations with the Nazis, especially given the just the magnitude of the atrocities and horrors that they had committed. Yet he held secret negotiations with some of their top commanders, especially those in Italy, about bridging the gap and relying on them. And in fact, he then became a key part of what became Operation Paperclip in terms of putting that into

motion. And the War Department was talking, again, starting in around late 1944 or even mid-1944, when it looked like victory was likely, certainly not assured, but likely for the U.S. at that point, that they wanted to bring some, and that's important, it was supposed to be originally a small number of scientists perhaps to the U.S. as part of what became Operation paperclip later. And there was resistance from the get-go during the war from the State Department. We saw this as basically a deal with the devil and resisted that in internal memos and correspondence said that this was a horrible idea, legally, diplomatically, morally, and otherwise. And not only did it happen anyway at the insistence of people at the War Department, but it grew enormously what was supposed to be a fairly small, discrete program of perhaps a few dozen or so. scientists eventually bloomed to 1,600 scientists. And some of them, to be honest, weren't even

really scientists. They were, for instance, the administrators at some of the horrible slave labor camps that the Nazis used to build the V2 missiles. They had no scientific knowledge or reason to become to the U.S. They had the logistical knowledge of how to put together these incredible missiles that Hitler had used. And yeah. It was a general recognition towards it's 1944, that the Germans were way ahead, and they were proving it over and over again in so many different quarters, certainly in science and certainly in rocketry. And that understanding was percolating through the intelligence community, especially, obviously, but it also had to sort retrain the diplomatic circles in that same regard. But it was that central knowledge that,

whoa, these guys were going to defeat them, but they have already set a new benchmark for what's possible in these regards. So we need a program that's going to get them, especially from the Russians, to keep them from the Russians getting them, but also to get them on our side and start working on this new science that's happening. And that was essentially Operation at first, Overcast, right? It was first called that? Yes. Yes. It was called that initially. And then it switched operation paperclip, which, according to the reports at the time, was a result of literally taking a paperclip and taking their old Nazi files and paper clipping them together with their new U.S. immigration status.

Right. And in the process, really wiping out, whitewashing, their true Nazi records in lots of these cases. Getting to these guys before the Russians did, there was fear somewhat founded that the Russians might actually kidnap a number of these scientists and a number of did end up in Russia. And the United States wanted the first. And they were in a bit of a competition, to be honest, with Britain to some extent. not quite in the same heated enemy sort of way, but we would rather happen in the Britain,

although we were both still in the same side even after the war, but we'd rather have them building rockets and it went beyond building rockets, but certainly that was the main goal at that point. Sure. Of course, Manhattan Project plays some role in the background of this thing, and we had taken over the nuclear work that was being done in Britain at first and co-opted that and brought it to us. Yes, there was a friendly competition, but it was still a competition. We would rather get there first, yes.

Yes. Eventually, as you say, more than 1,500, some 1,600 people are brought to the United States. They work on guided missiles, jet and rocket engines, aerodynamics, aerospace medicine, submarine technology, all of this stuff that suddenly takes a great leap forward in the 50s largely had to do with these ex-Nazis being brought in and folded into a life in America. Is it worth thinking of the, like a witness protection program? Is it something of that same nature? It started that way, but only for a very brief period of time in mid-late 1945. When these guys started coming in to Alabama, to Texas, to San Antonio, to Ohio, it was still considered officially a secret classified program. So the War Department was at that point trying and anxious to guard their identities and somehow help them blend in. but it's a bit hard to hide, for instance, in Huntsville, Alabama, a hundred middle-aged men with heavy German accents carrying around scientific papers.

And what they did, I think it's a bit of brilliant PR, to be honest, is that they very quickly embraced this program and made it public. And not with all the gory details, certainly. Those were not only left out, but were sanitized as to what these men had done. but they would hold events for the press, for instance, in Texas. They held an event with some of, not just the men were brought to America, but then ultimately their wives were brought at the train station of them coming in, and these non-Nazi scientists with whistle-clean records were shown being fetid by the local community and meeting their wives

and contributing to this great technological revolution as part of the Cold War. So they embraced this program, despite the fact that it violated the terms of the conditions that were set first by Truman and then later by Eisenhower, which was that these were supposed to be non-Nazis. Now, officially under the directive that was signed first by President Truman and then later by President Eisenhower, these were not supposed to be, quote, unquote, ardent Nazis, which was an ill-defined term, that they were not. deeply committed or actively involved in the worst of the Nazi atrocities. In reality, a lot of them were. And that included people like Werner von Braun, who was certainly the most visible and noteworthy member of the scientists, who was an architect of the space program, what became the Apollo program. Lesser-known people like Arthur Rudolph, who under von Braun, ran one of these slave factors where they built the V2 missiles and where thousands and thousands of slave laborers

died either from disease, malnutrition, or sometimes by execution and hanging if they tried to sabotage the planes. Who was in charge of this whole operation? Was it a sort of multi-agency operation? It was under the auspices of the War Department, but with some involvement from the State Department despite their misgivings about this. And scientific advisors to President Truman and later to President Eisenhower. Yeah, it was called the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, right? Joya, I would say. And so that's a combination of these different agencies. But who was the key figure running it? Was it Dulles?

Dulles was certainly the inspirational force for it. He was less of the hands-on force for it. I'm sure to remember if there was one person who became identified with it. There's a guy named Major Staver, right, Stavar? Yeah, there were several figures at the War Department, including Major Staver, who were responsible for not only conceiving of the details of this operation, but then building it tremendously. And that's an important point, is that what was supposed to be a small number of men with not only a limited scope, but also a limited time in the United States. This was supposed to be a temporary program by which they would come here for perhaps a few months or more. It grew in every way possible to the point that you had, obviously, 1,600 guys scattered across the country and military installations.

Wow. And that they were given immigration status very quickly after getting to the United States, treated as Americans and told, from now you can consider yourself an American. Through the war department, people like Major Staveer really rolled out the right carpet for them. And what had started is this temporary limited program became a way for them to most of these guys, virtually all of these guys lived out their lives in the United States for another 30, 40, sometimes 50 years. It's amazing. It's just a lens into how fast on the ground we were understanding this. I'm sure it had to do with as our forces move further and further into Germany, taking over bases and finding out there's a jet here. What's that?

All this kind of stuff was. real in real time understanding of the technology that we did not have. And my goodness, we need to catch up. When we come back from this break, we're going to talk about a few of them for more famous names involved. One I grew up with listening to all the Apollo takeoffs, a guy named Werner van Braun. Eric, I want to talk about Werner von Braun. I remember this guy very well from my youth as a eight-year-old hearing exciting news about the Apollo space program. There was this German guy. Of course, I would have no idea that this was a Nazi being that young, but did anybody in America know this? Certainly there were people at the War Department who knew that.

Absolutely, yes. Who knew of his past and intentionally concealed it. Von Braun had been the man responsible for building the V2 missiles for Hitler that rained down on London and Antwerp through his technological progress that he had made in missile warfare. And the way he was, you did this was through the horrible atrocities at two different factories, underground factories, the second one was underground, where thousands of men died, prisoners of war, from France, from Poland, from Germany, some of them Jews, but most of them probably non-Jews. And they died, they worked and died under horrendous conditions under von Braun's nose. He was a big-time officer. He met with Hitler, right? He met with Hitler multiple times.

to a dozen times. And Hitler would tell him how many V2 missiles he wanted that month. And von Braun would then carry that information back to the serific slave labor camp at Dora Middlewerk. It was called the second incarnation of the factory after the Allies bombed the first one out of existence. And then they would decide how many men they needed to work to death literally to produce those. And there, again, were thousands who died at Dora from malnutrition, from disease, from typhoid, and also from execution, if they were seen as belligerent or trying to sabotage machinery. They would gather all of the prisoners around if someone was suspected of Ron Dewing, one of the prisoners. They worked in assembly line to literally to build these missiles, the V2. And everyone was made

to gather around and watch as the suspects were hanged from. one of the construction cranes visible to everyone. This was obviously a lesson to them. He was the man who architected the program and worked out the details with the scientist on the ground who also came to the U.S., a man by the name of Arthur Rudolph. But von Braun was the man right there

who knew everything that was going on and with full knowledge and publicity. I want to understand him better. This guy was an aristocratic German. He comes from an aristocratic family. It's like a goddard. He's like any of these guys. He's obsessed with rocket,

when he was a kid, this whole adventure that it goes on. He joins the Nazi party in 1937, which was the year after Kristallnacht and the Nuremberg rallies. They're in high gear. He is a committed man to this idea of a fascist Germany behind this dictator. Yes, he joined. He was a very young man at that point, his probably mid-20s at that point. And there was a scientific prodigy. And I think he did believe in the Nazi ideals, but he believed even more in science at any cost. I see him. as a scientific mercenary. He thought that whoever will pay me to build my rockets, that will be my benefactor. He said as much after the war, even after he was in the United States. And his attitude,

as he said, was that if I didn't build it, someone else would. So he was willing to take the support, the logistical and financial and political support of the Nazis in order to further his scientific goals. And he did that very effectively. He realized, that he was looking at potential war crimes, charges, and he very quickly agreed to sign on with the Americans as the key figure, really, in this whole genesis of Project Paperclip. He had really patented this technology of jet propulsion, which, of course, then later became so critical

in the Apollo space program and other space programs, and was way ahead of his time there. And there's a story that I tell in the book, which I'd come across in the archives, of General Patton going to the compound where the imprisoned Nazi scientists were kept, not von Braun, but his boss, who he reported to was a guy named Dornberger, a senior Nazi officer, a much older guy. And Patton talked to them with just obvious admiration and respect. And actually, he walked up and said, you're Dornberger in sort of a German accent. And Dornberger says, Yvall, he says, you have all. He says, you

ran the space program. He says, yes. He says, congratulations. We couldn't have done it. And he gave, he gave him three cigars. That's how impressed they were. Now, that was under the boy wonder, von Braun, under Dornberger, who was, I believe, not yet in custody when that conversation occurred. This was the marvel of the world what he had done. And the U.S. wanted to exploit it in every way possible. I don't want to skip too fast because it's important to understand this story that how terrifying the V2 really was. What a role it played in the bombing of London when this sudden crazy thing started happening with its screaming sound came over, elevating the whole idea of what had been the blitz into a whole other realm, stranger and scarier in many ways. That on one

hand, but also what you've already mentioned about the slave labor that was used to create this. More than 12,000 concentration camp workers died during the construction of that. 12,000 people. At the end of the war, they were discovering these things as we speak, but Werner von Braun's name had already topped the list as far as who they needed to get at this point. And that's what's going on here. The angle of this story that fascinates me is the compressed time involved in making really speedy decisions on how you're going to grab these people and create this whole other industry in the United States based on this technology you don't even understand. a really fascinating aspect of it to me. Yeah. No, it was a major recruitment effort. It's like a college coach going to find the best prospects, the football players, except these were scientists being courted with money and political influence and a wonderful new home in the U.S., which, again,

at the time, they were saying it was only going to be temporary, but became permanent. Well, I guess also a big motivating factor for these guys was not ending up with the Russians, which was a terrible fate for them, right? Right. That was seen as that would be a harsher life, choosing between Russia and the United States, the Russians might have a slight edge scientifically, but the United States in terms of lifestyle, this certainly beat that. And it beat a trial at Nuremberg by a long mile. Yeah, but at the same time, understanding the horrors in which they'd been involved, that's the other aspect of this. And having to make choices based on the priorities of what we need more than what we believe in. Not only realizing it, but covering it up, because

they knew that was not palatable. That's why this started as a secret program. And at the point that it became declassified, they actively whitewashed the records of all these men from Dornberger and Von Braun on down. They could not be seen publicly as ardent Nazis who were involved in any way with any of the wartime atrocities. And they purged their records of that. So the V2 rocket was developed early on, for our purposes, the early 40s, right? And they were working on this throughout those years. Von Braun becomes the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, eventually the chief architect of the Saturn 5 rocket, which is used to take us to the moon in the Apollo program. Yeah, it's an incredible story how they take this.

It's an amazing effort of PR, basically, because I can speak from my own perspective. I actually remember thinking when I was a kid, not in these words, obviously, but what a pleasant and handsome man he was. That's all I thought about. He became a public figure. He had his own Disney show for a while about space and wrote books on getting to Mars. He was a very debonair man, attractive, well-spoken. He played classical piano. He scuba dove. He seemed like this debonair Renaissance man. And to be honest, not your stereotype of the nerdy scientist. He has sort of swagger about him. He had the ear of presidents from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to LBJ and became a public figure in his own right. A few bullet points, as you say, friends with Walt Disney made films about space with him.

I've never seen those, but I'd love to see them. He wrote a prominent series of articles about humankind's future in space. He was on the cover of Time magazine, 1958, the way he used to do with a portrait and all that sort of thing. Even if you weren't in the inner sanctum to know his true history, no one within the government really asked those questions. There were people at Huntsville who would occasionally say something about that dirty kraut, and they would be very quickly shut down. And the first real challenge to his sort of Teflon exterior was from the East Germans. And that came right around the same time just before the 1969 moon landing, which is, of course, his career height, when East Germany was demanding that, under communist control, of course, that he be deposed

to discuss war crimes as part of war crimes trials that were going on in East Germany. The U.S. at that point had really no interest in learning or certainly exposing any of the war crime atrocities, but the East Germans did. And he ultimately did have to give a deposition, I believe it took place in Florida, as opposed to East Germany, which was one of their conditions. And that was the first and really only time his feet was held to the fire by anyone, and it wasn't by the United States. He died at a relative young age. He died in...

777, right? 77, I was going to say 77 or 78, which is important because that was right before the Justice Department, under pressure from Congress, set up its Nazi hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations. And as I talk about in the book, there were active discussions in that unit about a lot. von Braun and wondering what would have happened if he were still alive. They were going after the person right under him, Arthur Rudolph. They did in fact go after him and succeeded in getting him deported. But there were open discussions about Von Braun because they knew of his complicity in these things. And would we have gone after someone as senior as Von Braun? You've got to wonder as Israel is getting its feet after 1948 its founding and its entire

alignment with the United States, how what a horror show this must have been for them to see that these Nazis were so powerful and so excused without any reckoning. And no one could get in the way of the space race. It was everything to do with the Cold War. So you called out for red baiting if you did that kind of thing or whatever. Sure. Kennedy had made that the U.S. mission to get to the moon ahead of the Russians. And we succeeded. And you can debate how much of an impact the scientists had, morality aside, and I don't believe Mauritian generally put aside, but if you look at it just strictly from a scientific technology standpoint, it seems likely that we got to the moon somewhat ahead of where we would have without their knowledge. Was it a year? Was it two? Was it

three? I think that's impossible to know. Then when you had that moral factor, it becomes a heck of a lot messier. There's a lot of nux and crannies to that story, not least of which is the Soviets' vernivro and from dying in the midst of all of that. And so who knows? Yeah, yeah. We'll take another break. And when we return, we'll talk about how these paper-clipped Nazis escaped justice and nearly any reckoning of any kind.

Eric, there's a guy with a very distinctive name, Hubertus Struggold, who played a big part in this in a whole different angle. Who was he in Germany before he ends up in paperclip? He was the top Nazi scientists for medical aviation. So he was considered the grandfather of space medicine of helping at that time pilots, not astronauts, but pilots stay alive as they were, as they were conducting their air missions, which was not an easy thing during, in the Luftwaffe. You know, anybody who's taking one of those flights in one of those jets, so you just, it just knocks you out. So they put you in centrifuges, you do on a centrifugal force machines, all kinds of spinning, trying to mock these things. These guys were already there a generation before.

Yes, and they built these flight simulators, which were known to the prisoners as these terrifying death machines. Right. Because they weren't going to make their own pilots, the guinea pigs for this. They made the prisoners, and they would put people in them with higher, higher levels of pressure, longer and longer to see how much they could withstand. And many of them died. But virtually all of them were sick at a minimum. Some of them were seriously injured. and many of them died.

And then there was a whole other school of experimentation that they did on the prisoners involving salt water for pilots who crashed in the water, because they realized that many of these pilots were dying not from the impact, but from floating out at sea and ingesting salt water. So then they subjected prisoners to ingesting enormous amounts of salt water, trying to purify it sometimes and not purify it. other times to see who died and who didn't die. So there were many more who died under those circumstances, children, women, others. And there are a range of other experiments, too, obviously.

These were, they're human guinea pigs who were subjected to just horrific medical procedures in the name of Nazi science. And in the name of American science, yes. Yes. And he recreated that in Texas. And the flight similar there, of course, without the dark history attached to it, became something he would show off to political VIPs, to academics, including LBJ himself. He got some grief in the United States for doing animal testing from animal rights groups, but there was no knowledge of what he had actually done in the way of human experimentation back in the U.S. And in fact, he literally wrote the book on space science in the U.S. It was a multi-volume treatment that discussed all the ins and outs of space aviation.

but the military took out, again, whitewashed the sourcing of the experiments that traced back to Da Hao and Nazi Germany. Of course, they couldn't afford to expose the source of these conclusions that he had drunk. If you work on rocketry, you would have been in Alabama in Huntsville with Von Braun and his team. If you were working on space medicine, you would have been in Texas at Fort Bliss with a strugglehold. and he had, believe it around 36 Nazi doctors working under him in Texas, three of whom had been tried but then acquitted at Nuremberg for war crimes atrocities. And so the medical atrocities that were going on are a whole other story. Those were conducted at concentration camps like Dachau and elsewhere under Strughold's command with many of these doctors who ended up coming to the United States. totally inhumane experiments on on all prisoners of all types, but including women and children.

His name was on the list for Nuremberg. He's that prominent and well known. For whatever reason, he probably had a protection. It was three doctors under him who were tried at Nuremberg but were acquitted in the medical, the doctor trials that call him the Brant trials. He was never charged, which is a bit of a mystery, because it was clear that he was directly involved in the same way that. Yeah, in the same way. that there's evidence showing how Von Braun knew his mission from Hitler about how many rockets they needed and went to the factories. There's also clear evidence from several high-level meetings of Strughold seeking out information from the doctors under him about, for instance,

pilots dying in saltwater and directing them to get more information whatever it took, and that meant from the prisoners. So he oversaw that whole operation. very basic question, but I'm curious. Was your research to the point where when they grab a guy named Struggold, like Strugold or Von Braun, they were taken to a base and sent over, or were there groups of these guys that were taken? How was that organized? I'm curious. But by specialty, like the doctors who all came over under Strugold, about three, three dozen of them all together, there was the equivalent of an orientation on the East Coast before they were sent to Texas. And then they were put on the base.

at Fort Bliss and given incredible resources, really, in terms of laboratory equipment and housing accommodations. And they set up the equivalent of their German Space Institute in the United States, and he became an honored figure. It's amazing. There were awards in space medicine named for Strugold. There was a building named after him. He certainly didn't have the profile of Erdo von Braun, but no one did. But within his world in Texas, he was a cherished scientist, a revered guy. He's credited as being the father of space medicine in the United States. He dies in 1986, never faced any serious criticism for his Nazi past until after his death, which is a pretty remarkable thing when you consider he was at Dacowton or nearby there.

Yes, and the same with other senior scientists. Arthur Rudolph is another one that I mentioned earlier, who's worth mentioning. He was the hands-on guy at Dora at this death factory really They were thousands and thousands of men were killed. And he had not a direct knowledge, but direct oversight working in tandem with the SS on these hideous working slave labor conditions. And he was, again, not quite as big as von Braun, but was, if not a father of the space program, maybe an uncle. He was deeply involved in both Apollo and Saturn in Florida for a time and then in California. and he was one guy that once the Justice Department stood up, it's Nazi hunting unit in 1979, they did go after.

They did not go after struggle holds. There was, I believe, a preliminary investigation, but it died on the vine. But Rudolph, there was an enormous amount of information about his direct involvement, not just knowledge, but involvement of what was going on in this factory, that he ran the entire logistical, scientific operation of that. and they forced him out of the country and sent him back to Germany, which Germany was actually not happy about. It was a bit of a surprise to them when he landed in Hamburg. But he lived out of his life in Hamburg without facing any war crime charges.

He was a big shot, and there were many others just in the science program. Those are the top, von Braun, obviously, at the top, and then struggled and Rudolph under him. Well, there's a whole ethical and philosophical discussion to be had about the net outcome of this. People like me lived with the upshot of von Braun's brilliance and celebrated Apollo. And to this day, many Americans think that's the greatest moment of American discovery ever of walking on the moon. And it wouldn't probably not have happened on the schedule that it did. And certainly not before the Russians got there without his involvement. But it's still in question.

We almost certainly got to the moon quicker than we would have without Vernon Braun and people like Arthur Rudolph and Numerter's struggle under him. by how much is probably impossible to say. Was it a couple of years? Was it more than a couple of years? But then there's the big of moral question of, at what cost? We whitewashed these guys' records. We gave them permanent homes to live out their lives in the United States. We treated them as scientific royalty and covered up their horrible, hideous Nazi pasts.

You wrote this book in 2014 or was published then. What had prompted you to write it back then? What was going on in the news? I had written a story at the New York Times where I was at that point about a, I had gotten a hold of this internal report at the Justice Department about their whole Nazi hunting unit. And that revealed a lot of new details about the involvement of the CIA and to a lesser extent, NASA, with a lot of these Nazis. It was a thick 700-page report that had never been put out. And when I got a hold of that, I almost immediately thought, I should write a book on this because it was this hidden chapter in a American history that ran smack dab into the somewhat quaint notion of America turning back the Nazis and sailing off into the sunset. We accepted as many as 10,000 of them when you count all of the scientists, the spies, the guards, the camp, and senior officers as well. There were concentration camp commandants, not just lowly guards who, you know, who had led gilded lives in the United

States for years without any exposure or penalty. Huge things to digest. Eric Lishblow is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter and author who spent three decades covering the national security and legal affairs to New York Times in Los Angeles Times. He wrote the bestselling book we've been discussing the Nazis Next Door. Thank you so much, Eric. It was great to meet you and discuss a very shady topic.

Many people don't understand. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's a hidden chapter in our history. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

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