What is operation paper clip? Why it happen ? Where it happen ? And how?
Answers
Among the trophies of the Second World War captured by Allied intelligence agents were Nazi scientists and their research on biological and chemical weapons. In a classified memorandum titled “Exploitation of German Scientists in Science and Technology in the United States,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff described these men as “chosen, rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.” Such intellectual spoils were not to fall into Soviet hands. In 1945, Operation Overcast (renamed Operation Paperclip for the paper clips attached to the dossiers of the most “troublesome cases”) began. More than 1,600 Germans were secretly recruited to develop armaments “at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War.”
Although some of these men had been Nazi Party members, SS officers and war criminals, they were valued as vital to American national security. Thus it was O.K., American government officials reasoned, to ignore these scientists’ roles in developing biological and chemical weapons, in designing the V-2 rockets that shattered London and Antwerp and in the countless deaths of concentration camp inmates who fell victim to medical experiments at Dachau and Ravensbrück.
The journalist Annie Jacobsen’s “Operation Paperclip” is not the first unveiling of the program. The New York Times, Newsweek and other media outlets exposed Paperclip as early as December 1946. Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rabbi Steven Wise publicly opposed the program, and according to a Gallup poll, most Americans at the time considered it a “bad” idea. But Jacobsen’s book is the first on the topic to appear since President Clinton signed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, which pushed through the declassification of American intelligence records, including the F.B.I., Army intelligence and C.I.A. files of German agents, scientists and war criminals. Jacobsen’s access to these documents, along with her research in various special collections and her interviews with former intelligence personnel and relatives of the scientists, make her study the most in-depth account yet of the lives of Paperclip recruits and their American counterparts.
Jacobsen tracks 21 of these Nazi scientists and technicians. Eight of her subjects had worked directly with Hitler, Himmler or Göring; 15 were active Nazi Party members; 10 served in paramilitary squads like the SA and SS; and six were tried at Nuremberg. A few familiar figures pop up, including several pioneers in space exploration — Wernher von Braun, Hubertus Strughold, Walter Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph.
The “classified body of secrets and lies” behind Operation Paperclip is complex and crowded, and in some places the narrative becomes muddled, as infamous Nazis and American intelligence operatives appear alongside present-day historians and archivists who are unnecessarily cited to provide basic facts. To her credit, Jacobsen deftly untangles the myriad American and German government agencies and personnel involved, though not without repetitious reminders of who is who.
More gripping and skillfully rendered are the stories of American and British officials who scoured defeated Germany for Nazi scientists and their research. One well-known find was the Osenberg list of thousands of German scientists and facilities, which was retrieved from a toilet at Bonn University. Another was a huge cache of tabun (a sarin-like chemical). While searching the I. G. Farben laboratories on the German-Polish border, British soldiers uncovered 175 forested bunkers storing aerial bombs with a powerful organophosphorus nerve agent. They called in American Army chemists, who tested the chemical and found that just a drop on the skin would kill a rabbit in minutes. In 1945, 530 tons of tabun were shipped to various locations in the United States including Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.