Thank you so much!!
That was an eye opener on "operation paper clip".
I searched a lil more about it...
Operation Paperclip (also Project Paperclip)
was the code name for the O.S.S.–U.S. Military rescue of scientists from
Nazi Germany, during the terminus and aftermath of
World War II. In
1945, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was established with direct responsibility for effecting Operation Paperclip.
Following the failure of the German invasion of the
Soviet Union(codenamed
Operation Barbarossa), and (to a lesser extent) the entry of the
U.S. into the war, the strategic position of
Germanywas at a disadvantage since German military industries were unprepared for a long war. As a result, Germany began efforts in spring
1943 to recall scientists and technical personnel from combat units to places where their skills could be used in research and development:
“Overnight, Ph.D.s were liberated from KP duty, masters of science were recalled from orderly service, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics ceased to be truck drivers.” — Dieter K. Huzel
The recalling first required identifying the men, then tracking them and ascertaining their political correctness and reliability, before being recorded to the Osenberg List, by Werner Osenberg, a University of Hannover engineer-scientist, head of the
Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (Military Research Association). In March 1945, a Polish laboratory technician found the pieces of the Osenberg List in an improperly flushed toilet. Major Robert B. Staver, U.S.A., Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance, London, used the Osenberg List to compile his Black List of scientists to be interrogated, headed by rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.
The original, unnamed plan — to interview only the rocket scientists — changed after Maj. Staver sent Col. Joel Holmes’s cable to the Pentagon, on 22 May 1945, about the urgency of evacuating the German technicians and their families as “important for [the] Pacific war”. Most of the scientists were rocketeers of the V-2 rocket service; initially housed with their families in Landshut, Bavaria.
On 19 July 1945, the U.S. JCS designated the handling of the
Nazi scientists and their families as Operation Overcast, but when their housing’s nickname, “Camp Overcast”, became common, conversational usage, Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip. Despite the effort to secrecy, by 1958, much about Operation Paperclip was mainstream knowledge, mentioned in a panegyric
Time magazine article about Wernher von Braun.
In early August 1945, Colonel Holger N. Toftoy, chief of the Rocket Branch in the Research and Development Division of Army Ordnance, offered initial one-year contracts to the rocket scientists. After Toftoy agreed to take care of their families, 127 scientists accepted the offer. In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived from Germany at Fort Strong in the US: Wernher von Braun, Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard F. M. Rees, Wilhelm Jungert and Walter Schwidetzky. Eventually the rocket scientists arrived at Fort Bliss,
Texas for rocket testing at White Sands Proving Grounds as “War Department Special Employees.”
In early 1950, U.S. legal residence for some “Paperclip Specialists” was effected through the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua,
Mexico; from which country the Nazi scientists legally entered the U.S. In later decades, the War time activities of some scientists were investigated — Arthur Rudolph linked to the
Mittelbau-Dora slave labor camp, Hubertus Strughold implicated with Nazi
human experimentation.
Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field, which had acquired Nazi aircraft and equipment under Operation Lusty.
The United States Army Signal Corps employed 24 specialists — including physicists Drs. Georg Goubau, Gunter Guttwein, Georg Hass, Horst Kedesdy, and Kurt Levovec; physical chemists Professor Rudolf Brill and Drs. Ernst Baars and Eberhard Both; geophysicist Dr. Helmut Weickmann; technical optician Dr. Gerhard Schwesinger; and electronics engineers Drs. Eduard Gerber, Richard Guenther and Hans Ziegler.
The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana,
Missouri in 1946.
In 1959, ninety-four Operation Paperclip men went to the U.S., including Friedwardt Winterberg and Friedrich Wigand. Through 1990, Operation Paperclip immigrated 1,600 Nazi personnel, with the “intellectual reparations” taken by the U.S. and the
U.K. (patents and industrial processes) valued at some $10 billion dollars
Those who had worked on the V2 at Peenemünde were moved to Fort Bliss in Texas. Here they developed their knowledge on rocket technology. Testing of their new rockets was carried out in New Mexico. These men and their families were given legal US residency in 1950.
Operation Paperclip was perfectly understandable in the context of the Cold War and desired weapons supremacy over the USSR. However, it had its detractors who believed that some of the scientists who were brought to the US had been involved in crimes that made it untenable that they should have been given US citizenship. It was said, for example, that Von Braun must have known about the underground factory at Nördhausen where V2 rockets and jet engines were made – and where many thousands of forced labourers died. If he did know about Nördhausen, JOIA ensured that it was suitably removed from his history. One of the Paperclip scientists, Arthur Rudolph, was deported from America to West Germany in 1984 but never prosecuted. Georg Rickhey, who was brought to America as part of Operation Paperclip, was charged with war crimes in 1947. However, he was acquitted and returned to America where he continued his work. One Paperclip scientist, Hubertus Strughold, was linked by written evidence to medical experiments at Dachau but faced no charges.
