There were reasons, of course there are always reasons. Scores of foreign rulers have benefitted from cynical blessings similar to the one that Roosevelt supposedly gave to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”Īnnie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip recounts one chapter in that story: How, in the closing months of World War II and the years immediately after, the United States government rounded up hundreds of Nazi scientists and engineers from the ruins of the Third Reich, and gave them new lives in America.

Franklin Roosevelt made common cause with Stalin, Dwight Eisenhower propped up Ngo Dinh Diem, and Ronald Reagan armed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for war against Iran in the ’80s. In this definitive, controversial look at one of America's most strategic, and disturbing, government programs, Jacobsen shows just how dark government can get in the name of national security.The United States government has a long history of collaborating with evil men for what seemed, at the time, to be good reasons. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?ĭrawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich's ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg one was convicted of mass murder and slavery.

So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler's scientists and their families to the United States. These were the brains behind the Nazis' once-indomitable war machine. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich's scientific minds. In the chaos following World War II, the U.S.

The explosive story of America's secret post-WWII science programs, from the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51

Operation paperclip by annie jacobsen