Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip was the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program in which more than 1,500 German scientists, engineers, and technicians (many of whom were formerly registered members of the Nazi Party and some of whom had leadership roles in the Nazi Party) were recruited and brought to the United States for government employment from post-Nazi Germany (after World War II). The primary purpose for Operation Paperclip was for the U.S. to gain a scientific and military advantage in the burgeoning Cold War, and later Space Race, between the U.S. and Soviet Union. By comparison, the Soviet Union were even more aggressive in recruiting Germans: during Operation Osoaviakhim, Soviet military units forcibly (at gunpoint) recruited 2,000+ German specialists to the Soviet Union during one night.

Operation Paperclip was conducted by Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA). The JIOA's recruitment of German scientists began after the Allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1945, but U.S. President Harry Truman did not formally order the execution of Operation Paperclip until August 1945. Truman's order expressly excluded anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism." However, those restrictions would have rendered ineligible most of the leading scientists whom the JIOA had identified for recruitment, among them rocket scientists Wernher von Braun, Kurt H. Debus, and Arthur Rudolph, as well as physician Hubertus Strughold, each earlier classified as a "menace to the security of the Allied Forces."

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