Operation Paperclip Quotes

“By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Dayton had no civilized culture.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“The name came from the fact that prisoners could be “concentrated” in a group and held under protective custody following Nazi law. Quickly, this changed. Himmler made concentration camps “legally independent administrative units outside the penal code and the ordinary law.” Dachau”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Himmler offered Blome a medical block at a concentration camp like Dachau where he could complete this work. Blome said he told Himmler he was aware of “strong objections in certain circles” to using humans in experimental vaccine trials. Himmler told Blome that experimenting on humans was necessary in the war effort. To refuse was “the equivalent of treason.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“The past is a foreign country.” —L. P. Hartley”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“The war in Europe was over. Germans called it die Stunde Null, zero hour. Cities lay in ruins. Allied bombing had destroyed more than 1.8 million German homes. Of the 18.2 million men who had served in the German army, navy, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS, a total of 5.3 million had been killed. Sixty-one countries had been drawn into a war Germany started. Some 50 million people were dead. The Third Reich was no more. Heinrich”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“General Loucks’s secret Saturday roundtable at his house in Heidelberg with the Nazi chemists remained hidden from the public for six decades. Here was a brigadier general with the U.S. Army doing business with a former brigadier general of the Third Reich allegedly in the interests of the United States. It was a Cold War black program that was paid for by the U.S. Army but did not officially exist. There were no checks and no balances. Operation Paperclip was becoming a headless monster.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“To General Loucks, moving forward on military programs considered vital to U.S. national security was more important than dredging up an individual’s Nazi past. Through the lens of history, this remains one of the most complicated issues regarding Operation Paperclip. When working with ardent Nazis, some American handlers appear to have developed an ability to look the other way. Others, like General Loucks, looked straight at the man and saw only the scientist, not the Nazi.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“To jog the prisoners’ memories back to the reality of their grave situation we decided to show them atrocity films taken at Buchenwald.” Colonel Andrus assembled his fifty-two Nazi prisoners in one room. Before the film began, he addressed them with the following words: “You know about these things and I have no doubt many of you participated actively in them. We are showing them to you not to inform you of what you already know, but to impress on you the fact that we know of it, too.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Olson had traveled across the United States overseeing field tests that dispersed biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters in San Francisco, the Midwest, and Alaska. Some field tests involved harmless simulants and others involved dangerous pathogens, as Senate hearings later revealed. One such dangerous experiment was conducted by Olson and his Detrick colleague Norman Cournoyer. The two men went to Alaska and oversaw bacteria being sprayed out of airplanes to see how the pathogens would disperse in an environment similar to that of a harsh Russian winter. “We used a spore,” Cournoyer explained, “which is very similar [to} anthrax, so to that extent we did something that was not kosher. Because we picked it up all over [the United States] months after we did the tests.” A third man involved in the covert tests with Cournoyer and Olson was Dr. Harold Batchelor, the bacteriologist who learned airborne spray techniques from Dr. Kurt Blome, whom Batchelor consulted with in Heidelberg. Olson and Batchelor also conducted covert field tests in closed spaces across America, including in subways and in the Pentagon. For these tests, the Special Operations Division used a relatively harmless pathogen that simulated how a deadly pathogen would disperse. A congressional inquiry into these covert tests found them “appalling” in their deception.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Albert Einstein was the most esteemed figure to publicly denounce Operation Paperclip. In an impassioned letter, written on behalf of his FAS colleagues, Einstein appealed directly to President Truman. “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous.... Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Stripped of their power, small details spoke volumes to Dolibois. Göring was terrified of thunderstorms. Keitel was obsessed with sunbathing and staring at his reflection in Ashcan’s only mirror, in its entrance hall. Robert Ley was repeatedly reprimanded for masturbating in the bathtub. Joachim von Ribbentrop, named by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda as the best-dressed man in Germany for nine consecutive years, was a lazy slob. Day in and day out, John Dolibois interviewed them.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“General Loucks’s secret Saturday roundtable at his house in Heidelberg with the Nazi chemists remained hidden from the public for six decades. Here was a brigadier general with the U.S. Army doing business with a former brigadier general of the Third Reich allegedly in the interests of the United States. It was a Cold War black program that was paid for by the U.S. Army but did not officially exist. There were no checks and no balances. Operation Paperclip was becoming a headless monster. The”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“The U.S. war crimes office for the chief counsel wrote up a list of doctors involved in medical research that resulted in “mercy killings,” a euphemism used by the Reich for its medical murder programs. The list was classified with a strict caveat that access to it remain “restricted for 80 years from the date of creation.” This meant that, by the time the world would know who was on this list, it would be the year 2025, and everyone named would be dead. A”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Manuscript”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“In the fall of 1946, of the 233 Nazi scientists in America, 140 were at Wright Field.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“fast, out-of-the-box thinking from American pilot-engineers like Putt. The Army Air Forces put the old philosophy to the side and Putt’s expertise to use.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Because von Braun was a public figure, his Nazi past was always there, but in shadow. By the 1960s, it was sometimes treated as a joke. One night, before an Apollo mission, von Braun stormed out of a press conference after a reporter asked him if he could guarantee that the rocket would not hit London.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Operation Paperclip was transitioning from a temporary program to a long-term one. Former enemies of the state would now be eligible for coveted U.S. citizenship.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“After four days of deliberation Truman gave his official approval of the program and agreed that Operation Paperclip should be expanded to include one thousand German scientists and technicians and allow for their eventual immigration to the United States.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“The employment of German scientists was specifically and strategically aimed at achieving military supremacy over the Soviet Union before the Soviet Union was able to dominate the United States.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“If it came out that the State Department was providing not only safe haven but employment opportunities for Nazi scientists in the United States, that would be cause for an international scandal.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“And yet in less than a year Arthur Rudolph, Georg Rickhey, Wernher von Braun, Major General Walter Dornberger, and other rocket engineers would secretly be heading to America to work. In the last days of World War II few would ever have believed such a thing.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“In order to successfully unleash a biological weapon against an enemy force, the attacking army had to have already created its own vaccine against the deadly pathogen it intended to spread. This vaccine would act as the shield for its own soldiers and civilians; the biological weapon would act as the sword.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“War is the father of all things.” —Heraclitus”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“found to contain a markedly potent and hitherto unknown organophosphorus nerve agent” had been developed by the Nazis”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America