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

by Annie Jacobsen

On August 7, 1947, Georg Rickhey appeared as one of nineteen defendants in the Dora-Nordhausen trial. The Nazis were charged with the deaths of at least twenty thousand laborers who were beaten, tortured, starved, hanged, or worked to death while being forced to build V-2 rockets. The trial, which took place inside a former SS barracks adjacent to the Dachau concentration camp, lasted four months and three weeks. The prosecution requested that Wernher von Braun be allowed to testify at the trial, but the army said it was too much of a security risk to allow von Braun to travel to Germany. The Russians could kidnap him, the U.S. Army said. They did not say that von Braun had recently traveled to Germany to marry his cousin and bring