What was Operation Paperclip? Inside the secret program that brought Nazi scientists to the U.S.

What is Operation Paperclip?

In the spring of 1945, Allied forces were closing in on Nazi Germany, and the end of the war in Europe was in sight. Officials started to make plans for what the post-war world would look like—and that involved securing some of Germany’s best scientific minds to support American technological advancement. 

After all, Americans were simultaneously impressed and terrified by what they had considered to be German technological supremacy during the war. They braced themselves for a next-generation Wunderwaffen (wonder weapon) and heard reports of fatally precise weapons like the V-1 cruise missile and V-2 rockets.  

The U.S. worried that France or the Soviet Union would poach the best German scientists, especially as the Cold War intensified. “The U.S. had to deny German scientists from the Soviet Union by keeping them in the U.S.,” says Brian Crim, professor of history at the University of Lynchburg and author of Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State. Americans wooed scientists that had formerly worked for the German Nazi Party with promises of contracts and a home in the U.S.

Operation Paperclip—sometimes called Project Paperclip—was overseen by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. It hoped to harness this technological expertise to develop America’s aeronautics, military, and space programs. Lasting officially until 1947, but continuing on through similar programs until 1962, Operation Paperclip brought 1,500 scientists from Germany and Austria to the United States, where most of them became citizens.

When deciding which German scientists to recruit, U.S. officials worked off a list of 15,000 scientists curated by German engineer Werner Osenberg during the war. As Allied troops advanced in 1945, German officials panicked. They tore up Osenberg’s documents and attempted to flush them down a toilet at Bonn University. The almost-destroyed documents were recovered and helped American officials decide which scientists to select.

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