June 21-22, 2025: American Nazis: Project Paperclip and Hunters

[In the summerof 1945, Nazi scientists began arriving in the United States, recruited towork in the US government and eventuallyits space program as part of OperationPaperclip. But they weren’t the first nor the only American Nazis by anymeans, and this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of others, leading up to thisweekend post on an interesting and fraught recent cultural representation ofPaperclip.]

[NB.Serious SPOILERS for the first season of AmazonPrime’s Hunters in this post’sfinal paragraph; I haven’t seen season two.]

On a morehistorical and a more fictional side to a recent TV show’s depiction of Nazisin America.

Like allthe histories about which I’ve written in this week’s series, the USgovernment’s ProjectPaperclip program needs a great deal more of a place in ourcollective memories. The program’s very name reflects the idea that the Nazipasts of the scientists brought to the United States in the months after thewar’s end would be excised from their files, these personal and collectivehistories elided so that the US could advance its Cold War and (eventually) Space Racegoals and deny the Soviet Union the same opportunities. We can debatewhether bringing the scientists over and employing them was the right or wrongdecision (I’d side with “wrong,” but I understand the other arguments), but tomy mind the purposeful erasure of their Nazi histories was unequivocally wrong,and frankly an implicit recognition that there was a shameful side to thisprogram that was always intended to be withheld from the American people. Soany means by which we can better remember Paperclip and those fraught decisionsand questions is a very good thing indeed.

One suchmeans, and I’ll freely admit the one through which I initially learned aboutProject Paperclip (I had already written inthis space about von Braun, but I don’t think I had known about thatoverall/official frame for the operation until watching the show earlier thisyear), is Amazon Prime’s controversialalternate history show Hunters. Iunderstand and largely agree with that hyperlinked article’s critiques of theshow’s depiction of the Holocaust, but would say that when it comes to thehistories of Paperclip and Nazis in America, Hunters get a couple of seemingly contradictory, equally accurate thingsimpressively right. On the one hand, the show depicts the ways in which themajority of the ex-Nazis disappeared into everyday American life, many of them in Huntsville,Alabama (site of the U.S. Space& Rocket Center). And at the same time, the show recognizesthat some ex-Nazis (like von Braun) ended up instead in far more prominentpublic positions—while the show’s choice to make the first ex-Nazi we meet the USSecretary of State is as exaggerated as everything else about Hunters, I’d argue that exaggeration(and perhaps especially the fact that his Nazi past has been kept secret) isnot all that far from the truth of von Braun’s influence on the US governmentfor decades.

The lastex-Nazi we meet in Season 1 of Huntersis also a prominent figure who has been hiding his Nazi past—but in this case,I would argue that in service of a “twist” the show does a significantinjustice to its historical subjects. [Again, SPOILERS from here on out.] Throughoutthe show’s arc, AlPacino’s Meyer Offerman serves as a mentor and father-figure to LoganLerman’s Jonah Heidelbaum, bringing Jonah into the team of Nazi hunters who aretracking down these hidden figures and delivering vigilante justice to them. Butin the finalepisode’s final minutes, Jonah learns that Meyer is himself anex-Nazi, none other than “The Wolf” who terrorized Jonah’s grandparents duringtheir time in a concentration camp. The revelation allows Jonah the chance tomake his own final decision about vigilante justice and murder (something he’sbeen struggling with throughout the show), but it doesn’t quite work within theshow’s plot—and much more importantly, to my mind it doesn’t work at all withinthe show’s historical and cultural themes. After all, this twist literally collapsesthe distinctions between Nazis and Jews, Holocaust perpetrators andvictims/survivors—and that’s an injustice not only to the Holocaust itself, butalso to better remembering the histories of those Nazis who found their way tothe United States in the decades after committing those horrors.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?