Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

the Reich had first sterilized and then euthanized nearly its entire population of mentally ill persons, including tens of thousands of children, under the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.

Kept secret from the public was an astonishing hypocrisy. Less than 150 miles from the Nuremberg courtroom, several of the physicians who had participated in, and many others who were accessory to, these criminal medical experiments were now being employed by the U.S. Army at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, the classified research facility in Heidelberg.

In a matter of weeks, these physicians had gone from being employed by the U.S. Army to being tried by the U.S. military for war crimes.

The suggestion is that perhaps someone in the Army Air Forces felt Benzinger’s expertise was more in the “national interest” than was trying him for war crimes.

The documentation revealed a vast web of profitable relationships between hundreds of Nazi war criminals and U.S. military and intelligence agencies.