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

by Annie Jacobsen

As had Dornberger, von Braun worked carefully to whitewash his Nazi past. He knew never to speak of the fact that he had become a Nazi Party member in 1937. When a reporter once asked him, incorrectly, about his joining the party “in 1942,” von Braun put his scientist’s precision aside and chose not to correct the newsman. Instead von Braun did what he always did—he said that he’d been coerced into joining the Nazi Party. Never did von Braun speak of the SS cavalry unit he joined, in 1933, or that he was made an SS officer in 1944 and wore the SS officer’s uniform, with its swastika on the armband and its cap with the death’s-head image. With a revelation like that, he could have been deported under the Internal Security Act of 1950, which was meant to keep Communists out of the country but also covered anyone who had held membership in a “totalitarian dictatorship.” Instead, the fact that he was an officer with the SS remained a jealously guarded secret by all parties—von Braun, the U.S. military, and NASA until CNN journalist Linda Hunt broke the story in 1985.