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

by Annie Jacobsen

in the aftermath of the German surrender more than sixteen hundred of Hitler’s technologists would become America’s own.

Some officials believed that by endorsing the Paperclip program they were accepting the lesser of two evils—that if America didn’t recruit these scientists, the Soviet Communists surely would.

One had a U.S. government building named after him, and, as of 2013, two continue to have prestigious national science prizes given annually in their names. One invented the ear thermometer. Others helped man get to the moon.

The apartment belonged to a German virus expert named Dr. Eugen Haagen, believed to be a key developer in the covert Nazi biological weapons program.

Most of the university’s professors had been replaced with men who were members of the Nazi Party and of Heinrich Himmler’s SS.

he had discovered one of the most diabolical secrets of the Third Reich. Nazi doctors were conducting medical experiments on healthy humans. This was new information to the scientific community.

In 1932 Dr. Haagen had been awarded a prestigious fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York City, where he had helped to develop the world’s first yellow fever vaccine. In 1937 he had been a contender for the Nobel Prize.

Dr. Blome was in charge of the Reich’s biological weapons programs; Dr. Schreiber was in charge of its vaccines. The sword and the shield.

Reich’s Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It was now illegal for non-Aryans to work as civil servants, a ban that included every university teaching position throughout Germany.