Dan Snow's History Hit - Operation Paperclip: America's Nazi Scientists

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Allied Powers sent research teams into the ruins of the Third Reich to cherry-pick the best German engineers and scientists. The goal was to integrate them into their own R&D programmes and exploit Nazi technology to beat the Soviets in the arms race. Operation Paperclip saw thousands of scientists relocated to the United States, even though many of them had been complicit in Nazi war crimes. So which technologies did they salvage from the wreckage of the Nazi regime? And what scientific breakthroughs did they contribute to after the war? Annie Jacobsen, an investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, joins Dan to answer these questions and more.Produced by Mariana des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hey everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I once went on a journey about 20 years ago now with some veterans of World War II, British veterans of World War II, went up to Hamburg and they were all part of a team that were there to secure German scientists, in particular German radar and U-boat scientists, because Britain historically was most interested in controlling the waters around these islands. It's naval supremacy in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean. Important business if you're a British politician or military strategist. And it was a great trip. We were welcomed by our German hosts who shook the hands of these veterans and thanked them for

liberating them and their forebears from the Nazi tyranny. It was an extraordinary thing to be part of. But it sparked a fascination in me for the removal of these scientists, the Allied desire to basically cherry-pick the best German military engineers and scientists to boost their programs back home. That's the Soviet Union, the French, the British, and of course the Americans. The Americans launched Operation Paperclip, and it was a top secret intelligence program to bring Nazi scientists to America,

most famous among them, of course, Wernher von Braun, who was Hitler's rocket scientist, who would then go and work at NASA and help design the rocket that would carry the Apollo mission astronauts to the moon. It's a crazy thought, crazy thought. Even though he was utterly compromised, he was obviously complicit in many of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazi German state. But he wasn't the only one. There were many of them, some like 1,600 scientists were taken across to the US to work in all sorts of different fields. It's been calculated they contributed tens of billions of dollars to US R&D, economic output,

but it's impossible to come up with any real estimation of their impact. I talked to Annie Jacobson. She's a journalist in the US. She's been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And she told me all about the mission, Operation Paperclip, to get Nazi scientists back to the usa enjoy t-minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on hiroshima god saved the king no black white unity until there is first and black unity

never to go to war with one another again and liftoff and the shuttle has cleared the tower And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Annie Jacobson, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. It must have been weird, those last days of the Second World War, when you go from desperate to defeat the Nazis to thinking, what's coming next? Maybe some of these guys might prove useful. How did that transition occur within the American official mind?

Operation Paperclip was a wild ride to investigate and report because you have expectations about what you think the program was going into it. And then, wow, it was like grenade splatter, learning about how this program unfolded. I think what interested me most on this question you're asking was how it morphed into something that wasn't intended initially. In other words, the U.S. and our British colleagues sent technical teams into the ruins of the Reich to acquire, the term at the time was exploit, Nazi technology, Nazi hardware to grab V2s and perhaps biological weapons or chemical weapons and divvy them up between the Americans and the British, and then use these pieces of hardware, if you will, for future weapons programs for ourselves. And very quickly, the U.S. and the British went to their own corners and became greedy for their own reasons. And on the U.S. side of things, very quickly thereafter, the Americans began to realize, well, wait a minute,

why just get the hardware when you can get the actual minds of the scientists themselves by hiring them? And that began Operation Paperclip. It was hugely ambitious, right? They targeted scientists, they were going to be repatriated with families, just moved over to the States. I mean, how do you choose a scientist? How do you find them? And how do you secure them? It was like a tiny snowball turning into the giant abominable snowman, because it didn't start out so big, but you had individual officers from the US army in their own specific lane. So whether it was jet aircraft or, you know, rockets or chemical weapons or biological weapons or pilot physiology, the top officers in every one of those

fields was sent in on their own with basically like a giant purse. And there was so much chaos and kind of like, okay, do what you think you should. And before you knew it, each of these individuals were just realizing that in every lane, the Nazis were 10 years ahead of the technology. And each of these individuals went, oh my God, imagine what can happen to my program back in the United States, if only I have dot, dot, dot. And the project just took off from there. Tell me about the famous man who was top of the list for the US. Wernher von Braun. The rocket part of the program is, I would say, the most well-known. I do think some of the other avenues of exploitation, certainly more nefarious and, to my eye, even more interesting.

But von Braun had developed the rocket at a time when America wasn't even close to being able to accomplish such a thing, and it would be another decade before we did. So the idea of capturing von Braun and his team and bringing them back to the United States, I mean, they were in the U.S. in a matter of months. And this led the charge of paperclip in general with the Joint Chiefs of Staff back at the Pentagon was, well, wait a minute, if we don't get them, the Soviets surely will. And that is accurate. The Russians were actively trying to recruit von Braun among them. And so the rocket team, all 112 of them, very quickly came to the United States and set

up shop and brought a lot of the V2 rockets with them. He was ethically completely compromised. He'd gone to Buchenwald concentration camp. He'd handpicked slaves to work for his laborers. Was that a problem in the US? The whitewashing of von Braun's backstory. It's so interesting to see how perception entwines with reality. So, for example, when he became such a hero in America for leading the Apollo space program, and he would be interviewed by journalists, particularly British journalists, they knew a lot more about him than the average American because of the V2 attacks. They would ask him really pointed questions, very specific questions. It was not known about his picking slaves from Buchenwald at that point in time,

but other things were known, like that he had been a member of the SS. And von Braun had been coached by the PR team at NASA to say things like, the United States government is entirely familiar with my history, period. And meaning they were. They just weren't going to let anyone else know about it. And von Braun goes on to help design the Saturn V rocket, really, which would take the astronauts to the moon. It's an incredible, incredible career. I mean, also, you cannot forget Kurt Debus, who became our first director of the Kennedy Space Center. He was a hardcore Nazi. Documents I found, he would turn

in colleagues to the Gestapo that he felt were not loyal enough to Hitler. Arthur Rudolph, who was in charge of the Saturn V rocket program, he was one of the only paperclip scientists who actually got kicked out of the United States. And that was all the way in the 80s. The Department of Justice said to him, go home or face trial. And he went back to Germany. So there was a group of them that were all responsible for heinous war crimes. And by the time the public learned about them, they were all either dead or in their 80s. Tell me about some of the other ones. One of the most evil figures, to my eye, was a guy called Otto Ambrose. to my eye was a guy called Otto Ambrose. And when you think of sarin gas,

it's an acronym for names. And the A in sarin gas is Ambrose. I found a document in the National Archives that showed Hitler himself gave Ambrose 1 million Reichsmarks, a bonus for his excellent work in Reich warfare. He ran the slave labor facility at Auschwitz, a place called Buna, because that is where the Reich was working on making synthetic rubber because they had no more rubber supplies. You know, the tanks needed treads. Otto Ambrose would end up being tried at Nuremberg and convicted of genocide, of slavery. And yet he was released from prison and worked for paperclip. This gives you an idea of how important the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed our chemical weapons program was, again, out of fear that the Soviets had a better chemical weapons program, that they were willing to take someone like Otto Ambrose into the fold. You listen to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Nazi scientists working

for the USA after the war. More coming up. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway, visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with the British, see Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists, and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Hubertus Strugholz is sort of almost seen as the father of space medicine, yet he had an incredibly evil record during the Second World War.

You cannot have been a high-ranking weapons maker for the Reich and not have gotten your hands dirty, full stop. And that is my experience based on reading thousands of pages of documents in America and also at the Bundesarchives in Germany. And Strokehold is no exception. And yet, as you say, he's considered the father of American space medicine. There was a building with his name on it until the 80s. The sign was quietly taken down when some of these truths first became revealed, thanks to a very excellent journalist named Linda Hunt, who first exposed paperclip. And so on the flip side of that, why would we hire such a Nazi? Well, keep in mind, you know, America wanted a space program. And to get astronauts into space begins with understanding how you can get pilots up into altitude that they hadn't normally been. And so the Nazi program during World War II to get their pilots flying higher, faster, further was so far advanced. The Air Force was drooling over the prospect of having

the physiologists come work for us and was willing to whitewash all of their dark deeds during the war. And you might be saying, well, what kind of dark deeds? So here I will give you a detail. Whereas in the United States, America was experimenting on mice, guinea pigs, and then dogs and apes. The Reich skipped the animals and went straight to the humans because they considered Jews and gypsies and homosexuals and concentration camps equivalent with animals. And they had no problem running experiments on them that ended in death.

And yet, President Truman had forbidden the recruiting of any kind of active Nazi. He said, OK, you can find some scientists, but we don't want any active Nazi party members or active Nazis. How did they get around that presidential order? You know, the devil is in the details because you're absolutely right. Those are the decrees. And that is what is said in much the same way that immediately after the war in like 46 and 47 back here in America, there was a big public relation campaigns to promote the German scientists in America as the good Germans. That is literally what they were called. Because you couldn't exactly have a bunch of professors, quote unquote, with very strong German accents roaming around America and not have a few questions asked. So this propaganda campaign took care of that a little bit. What I found interesting in the research was that the two most outspoken critics of the earliest version of paperclip were Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. And because those were two such high profile figures, there was a real groundswell against the German scientists.

There was a questioning of whether or not they were the so-called good Germans. There was a questioning of whether or not they were the so-called good Germans. But then, all of a sudden, 1949, the Soviets have the atomic bomb? I mean, all bets were off for talking about the last war. Suddenly, the idea in America was, we have got to build up our arsenals of weapons of mass destruction before the Soviets take us all out and we're all speaking Russian. So that's interesting. Was it like sort of ground zero and your resume was just wiped clean in that kind of next crisis? I mean, keep in mind the volume of documents on these Nazi scientists is mind-blowing. The pages and pages of interviews with these guys in the months immediately after surrender, most of the German scientists that we really cared about were kept at this one facility called Dustbin. It was an old castle and it had actually been one of Goering's Luftwaffe headquarters.

I went there and visited it and walked around with a historian. These areas where, you know, these Nazis were here and these guys were here. And we had just hundreds of young officers interviewing them and transcribing what they said. And this is that pivotal moment in history, if you're really a history nerd and you want to ever look at these documents, I source them all in the back of the book. Because you read them and you realize, my God, this is this moment in time where the United States is deciding, okay, is this someone we should hang or is this someone we should hire? Or is this someone we should hire? And ultimately, the way in which that decision was made was a simple paperclip attached to the top of their file as a wink and nod. Oh, this is someone

we might want not to hang, but rather to hire. And that's how Operation Paperclip got its name. And you mentioned that otherwise the Soviets will get him. And there was an element of truth to that, right? That the Soviets also had their own slightly more, well, equally robust recruitment of German scientists after the war. Absolutely. And, you know, these German scientists, to my eye, were so tricky and they absolutely knew that both sides were interested in them. Take, for example, Kurt Blum, who was Hitler's biological weapons designer. He was an incredibly high-ranking Nazi. He wore the Golden Party badge, which meant he had favor from the Fuhrer. He was Deputy Surgeon

General of the Third Reich. The only person higher than him was the surgeon general of the Third Reich, Walter Schreiber, who also became part of paperclip. And when we had Blum in custody, he plays this game you can see in the transcripts of his interviews, where he is goading the officers with this idea that his main biological weapons research lab, where he was developing a bubonic plague weapon for Hitler, was actually over in Poland, which meant the Russians had it. At which point, you know, you see the officers like, wait, wait, wait, tell us more. Oh, yes, yes, yes. You know, I'm paraphrasing, of course, but the point is you see Blum really pushing this idea that, oh, my goodness, that's where I left all the vials. He would say things like that.

And so suddenly the individual in charge of biological weapons for the United States had to go back to their superior offer and say, look, we're really worried that the Soviets have the really good stuff. So we better grab Blum. We better have him work for us because my God, can you imagine if the Soviets have his bubonic plague weapon? And Britain and France, I was on a trip to Germany once with a bunch of veterans whose job was capturing U-boat scientists and bringing them back to the UK. It was particularly interesting submarine warfare. People were scouring occupied Germany for all of their experts. Two officers interested in warfare.

It was a goldmine because the research and development that had gone in to the weapons programs of the Third Reich was the entire national GDP. I mean, they had everyone working on it, and they certainly had slave laborers galore to do the work that no one else could keep up with. And the U.S. government, to my eye, by the way, was really flat footed on this because so much of the effort was spent searching for the team of Reich scientists that the United States believed were developing nuclear weapons. And that proved to be the least advanced program because we now know, of course, that when discussing this, Speer and Hitler had this discussion. And Hitler said, well, nuclear is Jewish science, so I'm not interested in it.

And he was really working much more at building up chemical weapons and biological weapons to a far greater degree than the US had any idea before we went in. How should it make us all feel that so many of these great breakthroughs, civilian and military, that second half of the 20th century were based on scientists that worked for the Nazis, had taken advantage of their appalling human rights violations under the Nazi regime? How do we feel about that? I think that the great lesson from looking at history is to ask oneself exactly this question. Does the end justify the means, right? And so when you look at the legacy of what the Nazis gave us, on the one hand, space exploration, that's a difficult one because there does seem to be so much extraordinary benefit for humankind, I think, by looking out, looking beyond.

But when you look at the billions of dollars spent on creating mass arsenals, if people had any idea how much money was spent building up a biological weapons program and a chemical weapons program that would then be destroyed. You know, it took Nixon of all people in 1969 to sort of realize, my God, this is Russian roulette, literally, that we're playing with the Russians with these kind of weapons. If a biological weapon gets out, we're all dead. And that is where the beginning of prohibition of these kinds of WMD began. So it was like, wow, that was a lot of hiring of really bad, dark war criminals. For what purpose? So Operation Paperset was secret. When did it emerge that it had happened?

There was a journalist named Linda Hunt, who has since really disappeared. And she single-handedly came across this idea. She was working for CNN at the time. And this is in the early 90s. And she did Freedom of Information Act requests for these documents and was given a bill of several hundred thousand dollars and like a very small trove of documents, just enough to kick open the door for people like me later. But there was really no reporting on it, very little reporting until my book in 2013. And I think, again, a lot of my reporting came from the fact that a lot of the scientists at Area 51 worked directly with these Nazi scientists, and they gave me a lot of the keywords to use in my search. Because as we know, you don't exactly call a program the bad Nazi scientist

we hired program. You cover it. You give it a code name that makes it impossible to find down the road. Well, Annie Jacobson, people can read about your paperclip work. Tell us the name of this book. Operation Paperclip. Annie, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me.