Project Paperclip | Brian Crim

[00:00:03] Welcome to My Nuclear Life. I'm Shelly Lesher. Today on the podcast, we'll be discussing Project Paperclip. If you noticed, I didn't call it a conspiracy and we don't have the UnCover Up Podcast on because despite what popular media leads you to believe, there is no conspiracy around Project Paperclip.

[00:00:23] Instead, I'm joined by Brian Crim, the Cohen Chair for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College. He is the author of the book, Our Germans, Project Paperclip and the National Security State. Pick up your copy today. What made you want to write this book?

[00:00:48] For me, it started as a graduate paper. When I was a graduate student at Rutgers, I took a diplomatic history seminar and I basically wanted to find something where I could research inside the United States that had a link to my major topic of the Third Reich or modern Germany.

[00:01:05] And I realized that, well, there's this ready-made transatlantic topic about bringing over German scientists who work in the space program but also develop our military-industrial complex. I'd always known about it, but I think maybe like a lot of people, the first time I heard about Paperclip or understood that there was this phenomenon was watching the film The Right Stuff.

[00:01:27] And I'm like, who's this guy with the weird accent who seems to be in charge of our space program? And that led me down the rabbit hole to Von Braun and the rocket team. And so I wanted to return to that, but with the resource base of having English language documents inside the United States because I couldn't travel to Germany at that point. And that just fueled an interest in me that I wanted to return to after I had basically published my dissertation. You know, we were just talking about higher education and the problems of funding.

[00:01:57] I don't have money at a small college like University of Lynchburg to go to Germany every summer like my colleagues do. But I can go to the National Archives. I can go to the National Air and Space Museum Archive. I can get declassified documents from the Air Force through Freedom of Information requests. And that really just dictated why I could do the project while teaching at a basically impoverished university,

[00:02:23] is that I could stay in the United States and write something that's transatlantic, which is an appealing and important way to do history these days, especially the United States, is to kind of connect cultures that are bound by a common event, in this case, Cold War cooperation or Cold War context. I was going to say, I'm not sure it was cooperation. Yeah. Well, we had a buyer and a seller is what you had. Yes.

[00:02:53] So what I knew about Project Paperclip was pretty basic, right? That we brought over German scientists to basically start our space program. That was pretty much it. And that we didn't really care if they were Nazis or not. I will say, I told you in an email, that your book infuriated me. It wasn't the writing. It was the topic.

[00:03:17] And just how blatant it was that some of these scientists were Nazis. We didn't care. And that they knew their value. And they were kind of milking the U.S. for everything we had. It was so blatant that we were being used. Yes. And those who called attention to that were silenced. They're usually junior intelligence officers or a few opponents inside the bureaucracy

[00:03:46] who were not even morally opposed to paperclip, some of them. But Jake basically said, look, this is not worth giving the headache of granting these people citizenship or contracts or integrating them into our economy. They're selling you a bill of goods. And yes, we look at the rocket team. But there were 1,400 other scientists and technicians that came over who had very minimal value that got the same bargain.

[00:04:13] And it's because they were coached by either people like Von Braun or army officers who said, look, here's what you should say to get around the headache of getting a visa and later citizenship. So many of the early histories of paperclip, especially in the 70s and 80s, the ones that tried to milk the controversy part called it conspiratorial. But I think what my book really lays out is that there was nothing conspiratorial about paperclip.

[00:04:39] It was entirely just a pure open bureaucratic policy and from the highest level. And no one tried to hide anything. And it wasn't very secret for long because the army a few months later was announcing we're doing this. They may have lied about the motives and the true nature of what we're getting out of it, but they had to admit it. And most of the public shrugged, which I'm afraid still happens. Yes. Yes.

[00:05:06] And when I heard about paperclip, I did think it was a conspiracy. Like, oh, my God, it was uncovered that all these Nazis came. But it's like, no, they knew they were Nazis. And they I mean, some of them, they knew how deep it went and they blatantly disregarded our stated denazification policies. So there was nothing secret about any of this. And just no one cared.

[00:05:30] And, you know, I think you made a really good point that the feeling was that even Germans worst scientists were better than our average scientists. Well, that was the myth. And that's what. Why did we believe that? Yeah. I think not to be the most. I mean, again, I'm not a historian of science. But when reading about paperclip and the opinions of historians of science that contributed to this topic, they were sort of insulted for the American scientific communities.

[00:06:00] Like, wait a minute. Weren't we the ones who built the atomic bomb? Yes. Weren't we the ones who had the jet propulsion laboratory? So it was this idea that, well, we can't do anything without these. They called the myth of the German inventive mind. Yeah. That the military was putting out there. And of course, that was just farcical. But it was one of the major reasons why you could go all the way up to Truman himself and say, we need this to be done. And even he acknowledged that maybe this was true because he bought into the myth as well.

[00:06:28] And that's infuriating to read about even decades later, because obviously the truth was the opposite. And all these decades later, I'm offended for those engineers from the 50s. Right. So a few things. I had not realized that we pretty much took the whole V2 team from Germany and brought them over. A lot of them, yes.

[00:06:54] So the Soviets managed to get a guy named Heinrich Gotrup, who was really the genius behind the kind of navigation, the gyroscope that was used. Not that the V2 is particularly accurate, as we know, but at least that was a breakthrough. And he was their best find. And the Soviets wound up getting a lot of more junior people in the V2 program. But yes, as far as the brains and the administrative personnel that kind of knew how to take a blueprint and turn it into an actual product,

[00:07:23] Wernher von Braun made sure that that whole gang made their way to the U.S. what would be the U.S. occupation zone at the right time. And the Soviets did get a share of that, but they really had to deal with the scraps. They were left with who was stuck and wasn't put on that train that was going toward the western zones as opposed to the eastern zones. Von Braun made sure that the U.S. was going to give them a better deal.

[00:07:51] And so he made sure to gather the right people and the right equipment, I guess, and ship them to the western zone. Right. I mean, of course, nobody wanted to be in the way of the Soviet army. Everyone, every German, whether they're a farmer or a scientist, knew that this was going to be what became called the orgy of revenge, based on what the Nazis had done to the Soviet Union. And so the smart money was no matter who you are, go west.

[00:08:20] But von Braun and his brother and Walter Dornberger, who was the general in charge of the program, also not only had to contend with the Soviets, but also the SS, because the SS had really stolen the V-2 program away from the regular army and wanted to murder all the scientists before they could get into the hands of the Soviets and also just really sort of had asserted direct control over them in the last phases of the war.

[00:08:50] So they were really escaping both groups. And Wernher von Braun knew that getting to the Bavarian Alps was probably the safest bet and had a few days sort of advantage in May. Remember, the war ends in May 8th, 1945, is Victory in Europe Day. They're captured in quotes, May 2nd, as they drove into the middle of the U.S. Army unit and went, here we are, and immediately counterintelligence corps and people knew. No, they were on the list. They were looking for them.

[00:09:19] And they just fall into their laps, but not really. That was interesting because even the soldiers or the scientists that initially interviewed them said they're a risk, that we shouldn't bring them to the U.S., yet everyone ignored them. Well, I wouldn't say plural. It was one person in particular, a very fascinating person named Walter Jessel, who was a German-Jewish emigre.

[00:09:48] He was one of what we call the Ritchie Boys. There were 2,000 German and Austrian Jews who escaped the Third Reich and were trained in Camp Ritchie, Maryland to be translators and intelligence officers because they were obviously fluent in German and also knew the German people and the Reich better than anyone. So to have someone like that be the very first person to encounter von Braun and his team, to me, was such a fascinating encounter.

[00:10:16] And because he knew them so well and kind of reviled this type of German, he was very honest in a way that most intelligence people weren't about what you're getting with this group. Because by all means, they have expertise, exploit them, but know that they're going to lie to you. They're going to sell a myth of their expertise and promise you more than they can deliver because they know that they have this advantage. Do not fall for it completely.

[00:10:44] And he was chastised for being the one person to really lay out the unvarnished truth about this group when everyone else wanted to celebrate the fact that they got him in the first place. And so he was only a second lieutenant. So historians have come to revere him. Not before me was Michael Neufeld who wrote the biography of von Braun because he really called it early on. Like, these people are being coached and they are manipulative

[00:11:12] and they are part of the Nazi establishment and here's how they operate. And he really laid a groundwork for people like me to return to those reports and then piece it together and see, wow, this guy really had some clarity that others did not. So looking back as a historian, well, you say you're not a science historian, but you are a historian. But as a historian, looking back and having that as the point in the beginning, was he right? Did they overpromise?

[00:11:40] Did they sell this bill of goods that they didn't live up to? Well, yeah, the thing is, and I had to focus on the rocket team because most of the sources were there for them in a way that it wasn't for the 1,400 others. For the rocket team, you could just look at what they produced and how they helped the United States save time in the field of rocketry. You could say that it was a fair bargain. They are a success story. But he wasn't just talking about them.

[00:12:10] He was talking about the whole notion of a paperclip, because he knew this was happening around the rest of the country, that hundreds of others of these technicians and scientists are just going to be what he called drones. People who could get an engineering degree at Georgia Tech should probably get the job that you're going to give to a Nazi. And he's like, why are you doing this? You don't need to. And he never, and someone like Walter Jessel and others who were more critical said,

[00:12:38] look, we're not denying their expertise, but why do you need to offer them the keys to the kingdom? Why integrate them into the United States military industrial complex to give them citizenship, to elevate them to senior positions in companies and in the government of all places when you're denying other Americans or not allowing Jewish refugees in at the same time. That, to them, was not only a moral outrage, but just a security risk. Yeah.

[00:13:07] So you do have this small group of really high-ranking scientists coming in. But as you said, there's hundreds of just worker bees. And so those are the ones that probably didn't contribute anything. Exactly. And a lot of them went home after their contracts were up. And certainly when the Federal Republic of Germany was established in 1949, that also was a way, the ones that were offered citizenship, many of them chose to return to Germany.

[00:13:36] Now that it was an independent country, the conditions were better. Voluntarily, they left life in America to go back. Very few, and certainly no one we brought over were even allowed to go back to East Germany. But the establishment of West Germany made it possible for those worker bees who wanted to go back home to go back home. But the vast majority obviously really found a great life in America. And some of them, they contributed. They became professors.

[00:14:06] They worked at corporations. They weren't necessarily the worst of the worst Nazis. So they blended in pretty well. But that part of the story is not as well-known as these elite, well-known names of von Braun and his team. What I thought was interesting is when von Braun and his team came over, they kind of just recreated what they had in Germany. Like, it was a little Germany.

[00:14:30] The practices, the way they talked to people, just they didn't integrate into the U.S. at all. Yeah, it took a while for that to happen. But certainly the way they did business in terms of for the military, to them, it seemed very similar to what happened in the Wehrmacht. And that was maybe an uncomfortable reality. It basically said, well, let's recreate Penemunda. Penemunda was the research base that was on the Baltic coast where they built the V2. I mean, they had everything they wanted except slave labor.

[00:15:00] And they still were able to use German POWs who are still in the country in America. What? To basically do office work and do muscle work. And so they even were able to use their own countrymen who were still technically POWs to do a lot of the work that they had Russian POWs doing up in Penemunda, which is so bizarre to think about. But when they did go to Alabama, Huntsville, they did kind of integrate into society.

[00:15:28] There's a great book by a colleague of mine named Monique Laney. She's a granddaughter of a paperclip scientist. She's a historian at Auburn. And she wrote a book called German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie. And it was about how the German community there basically fit in very well in the Jim Crow South. It made sense to them. And they bought up all these houses in a neighborhood that they called Sauerkraut Hill. And von Braun became a Baptist.

[00:15:57] And a lot of them, you know, basically adapted quite well to living in the South in ways that we might find uncomfortable, like the racial part of it. But that took about five or six years for them to really come out of that little islands of Germans scattered across the United States. Places like Wright-Patterson Air Force Base or Texas, Fort Sill, White Sands in Nevada. You had these little communities of Germans that, yes, were very insular.

[00:16:23] And because the United States military didn't know any better, basically let them run the show they wanted because it's how they got results in Germany. They could do the same here. And it took about a decade to really change that culture. And why didn't we do the same with Japanese scientists? Because they were working on really good things, too. Yes. And I would have loved if I could have a follow-up book, I would love to kind of investigate that question further.

[00:16:52] I looked into it because when I submitted my manuscript the first time, the Johns Hopkins, one of the reviewers came back and said, I really want to know more about why we didn't do the same for the Japanese. So I did look into it. And one of the more uncomfortable but maybe predictable reasons why is because the Japanese were seen as racially inferior. It almost seemed like there was no myth of the great Japanese scientists the same way there was for the German scientists.

[00:17:19] They did do investigations into their nuclear program, which was non-existent. But there was a fear that they had done some enriched uranium somewhere. And so they located all the spots at the Japanese universities where they had uranium and they secured it. And they did bring over a few scientists to work on aeronautics because they did have some pretty amazing developments in aeronautics briefly for the U.S. Navy.

[00:17:48] Approximately 30 Japanese scientists worked on something I don't even know what it was because it's still classified. Called Project 77 in Long Island somewhere. And I don't know what they were doing other than I know that the FBI was very worried that they were there. They were afraid their presence would be discovered, again, for racial reasons. You can hide a German. You can't hide a bunch of Japanese scientists in Long Island very well.

[00:18:13] So there's things I would love to revisit, but I don't know how much visibility we have on the documents. But in general, there was a racial attitude. They're not as smart. And also, their industry was annihilated early in the war compared to what Albert Speer was able to do for German industry and put it underground.

[00:18:35] So the scientists were available to the United States and Japan, but the actual prototypes and things we got in Germany were destroyed along with everything else. Yeah, and it's really interesting because I had never thought of war reparations as you talked about in the book that the U.S. saw the scientists and the equipment as reparations. And it's uncomfortable to think that people are considered war reparations.

[00:19:05] But they didn't have that same attitude in Japan. And it is racial, right? Because the Japanese had great scientists. They brought 40 over for a couple of months where they brought 1,400 Germans over and offered them permanent citizenship. Yeah, I guess they just didn't think of war reparations in the same way in Japan.

[00:19:25] No, and the logic of paperclip that actually finally resonated with Truman, who was pretty skeptical of it, was the business community were the ones that were pushing paperclip on him at big time because they wanted shortcuts to basically every type of industry you could think of. And they thought this is cheap labor, and it was cheap labor.

[00:19:47] So it was an economic argument that more than a national security one, that probably pushed Truman and Henry Wallace, who was the commerce secretary, to really abandon all scruples about paperclip and say, yeah, let's do this. I mean, Bolivar Watch Company, of all people, on their own, without even telling the U.S. military, sent investigators into Germany while the whole war was still burning a little bit in May.

[00:20:14] They sent a couple guys in to kind of steal patents and talk to the people who made watches and say, well, let's bring him here. And Kodak did the same thing. Dow Chemical. So you had all these businesses chirping in Truman's ear saying, look, these are the only reparations we're going to get. This isn't World War I. There's not a Germany left that you can tax and saddle with some sort of massive debt for a generation.

[00:20:40] Let's take what they have and give it to the businesses who can steal the patents because who's going to question it now? And take all the blueprints and prototypes and save some time in industry, not for national security, not just the rocket field, but in things like Kodak and watches and electronics, radio, whatever it was. They all wanted a piece of this pie. I never even thought of that.

[00:21:09] I had never thought of the business side of it. I just thought it was we have to beat the Soviets to space. Yeah. As with so many things, that became a thin veneer for some other motives. The emerging Cold War was certainly part of it. But when they talked about denying German scientists to the Soviets, that also meant denying those scientists to your allies as well.

[00:21:34] Well, the thing that amazed me most about Paperclip is how often the U.S. side would complain about the French and the British trying to undermine an effort to get a particular scientist and not the Soviets. They really saw themselves in competition with each other. All four major powers were really playing this game of outfoxing one another and grabbing the scientists or that scientist. And more often than not, our concerns were not the Soviets. It was the French and the British.

[00:22:04] And then, yes, by the late 1940s, clearly the Soviet Union emerges as a specter. But we're still angrier sometimes at the French trying to steal a guy than the Soviets. I even came across a meeting between the United States and the Soviet Union representatives. They got together and said, well, how do we stop these French bastards from kidnapping our scientists in the middle of the night, which they were doing sometimes?

[00:22:30] And I found that to be an amazing moment where all of a sudden the Cold War is a reseed in the background. And it's our allies who are a thorn in our side. And wasn't it one German said, we hated the French, we were scared of the Soviets, which just left the Americans? Yes, and the British were too broke, which is also true. Oh, that's right. The British couldn't afford them. Yeah. And that's exactly von Braun's thinking.

[00:22:55] His famous quote was, the United States is the golden goose for our efforts here. They will fund anything. They have money to throw at this and no one else does. Again, it's just so infuriating, right? Because he was right. And he used us just as much as we used him. Yeah. And I don't think anyone, even at the time, thought much of that. They knew the bargain they were making.

[00:23:19] And we had made far more insidious deals with Germans who had no value scientifically or even economically, like their entire intelligence establishment, were war criminals of the worst kind. And because they had been collecting information about the Soviet Union for five years at that point, we basically brought the entire apparatus into our sector in Germany and recreated what would become known as West Germany's intelligence service.

[00:23:48] They're all ex-Nazis. And that had already happened before really paperclip was fully fleshed out. So if you broke one moral barrier, why not many others? So what did denazification actually mean then? I'm actually asking. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Yeah. Like, who did it actually apply to then if it doesn't apply? I mean, I'm kind of asking.

[00:24:12] Like, did it just apply then to the little person on the street that's trying to apply that they had to somehow prove they were a Nazi? Because it doesn't seem to apply to anyone else. Yeah, to give you a real kind of short history of denazification, in the plans that were drawn up by the four major powers were extremely strict and comprehensive about denazification.

[00:24:36] They created four categories of Nazis from the very worst to what they called the Mitlaufer, the followers. And basically, they kind of wanted to go after the first two categories, the top Nazis, the ones you see at Nuremberg and all that, those first two groups. And then they understood, like, the groups three and four, the ones that were basically the followers, sometimes the mailman in order to get their job had to be a Nazi party member.

[00:25:02] Those people, you're never going to really – they're going to have to be let off some way and be reeducated and all of that. But those first two categories were anyone in the SS, anyone in certain organizations were going to be automatically subject to penalties. And in the first year, not even, but let's call it a year, between 45 and 46, denazification was an earnest and authentic attempt to pursue this policy and denazify.

[00:25:29] But two things happened. One, the Soviet threat became more pressing. And also, the mechanics of denazification became so overwhelming at the same time you're trying to feed a starving country and rebuild that there was a kind of a realistic assessment by all the major powers.

[00:25:50] We can't be as thorough as we like, so let's let this third and fourth rung of people basically get off scot-free and focus on the major war criminals. So where does that leave the paperclip type of scientists? Most of them fell into that nether zone of the second and third category where they could either be given – be slapped on the wrist or they had legitimate reasons to be tried.

[00:26:16] The ones that were usually the most talented and needed and seen as necessary happened to be more senior. So von Braun likely would have – was a class two person because he was a member of the SS and he did use slave labor and so did – and knew about it. But as I show in the book that if you – the dossiers that they filled out, they – everyone had to fill out what's called a – well, in English is basically a giant personal history of what they did in the Third Reich.

[00:26:45] And everyone, every German citizen had to do that. So the paperclip scientists did this and then the U.S. military officials who wanted to use them would look at it and be like, maybe you want to – maybe you should write something else. And they put them in that third category as opposed to the second category.

[00:27:02] And that is really how the paperclipers avoided for a very long time serious scrutiny when it came to denazification trials because they were coached by sometimes the U.S. military themselves on how to fill out these forms. Some of them legitimately were not major Nazis and – Right, because – But many of them were. In order to get your degree or in order to get a scholarship or to get your education paid for, you just had to sign up for the party.

[00:27:29] So, I mean, that I kind of understand. But, oh, first, I think we never said why is it called Project Paperclip? Yes. So it was originally called Overcast. And that was the plan in July 1945. The idea was among the Air Force and the Navy Army, which there was no independent Air Force yet. But so the Army and the Navy decided, well, let's get a couple hundred of these guys and just bring them over temporarily and use their knowledge. And that was called Overcast.

[00:27:59] But then that got leaked out. So what happens when a codename is leaked? You have to change the name. So then it becomes Paperclip.

[00:28:05] And the irony of the name is that what it represented was when Army ordnance officers, the people who were in charge of really vetting the best scientists to exploit, when they wanted to avoid a lot of scrutiny on their personnel file, they put a paperclip at the top left-hand corner of the file, which was a way to communicate to the security officials, let this one slide. Don't look into this one too carefully.

[00:28:34] So every dossier that had a paperclip on it on that particular side of the file was someone who was eligible to be part of the project and be brought over to the United States first temporarily. And then when the decision was made, you could get more out of them by offering them citizenship, becoming a potential U.S. citizen. So it was really very descriptive. Often these codenames mean nothing.

[00:29:01] This one was descriptive of reality, which is the paperclip means don't look into their backgrounds in such a way that it makes it difficult for us to bring them over to the United States. And that's the story. Was the paperclip removed then or did it stay on the file? I think eventually it became kind of a metaphorical paperclip. I was able to see the original dossiers and they didn't, you can actually see, because they're old, like old-fashioned rusty paperclips. Like you could see the indentation of where they were.

[00:29:30] And I found, I thought that was really cool to still, to see where they actually had the paperclips affixed. That's what I was asking, because they were those old paperclips. If someone eventually went and took them off, you could still see the indentation. So you could still, there was still that indication that someone was a paperclipper. Oh, yeah. And then sometimes you could see that where you had someone scratch out key words, like an independent evaluation might say,

[00:30:00] Magnus von Braun, for example, who's Renner von Braun's brother, that says he, quote, Magnus von Braun is an ardent Nazi. That was the term they used for like someone who's really, you just can't excuse what they did and they're going to be a problem. And then you see crossed out in red ink, the word ardent is ardent. I mean, ardent Nazi is scratched out totally. And then you see in one case it added, is not an ardent Nazi.

[00:30:26] And that was done by the U.S. military security people who are trying to get him through. And that I was not the first to see that. That was investigative journalists first saw that. But I verified that that was the case. Again, there's no conspiracy here. No, it's different parts of the government are kind of trying to outfox each other. The military versus the State Department, for example, who were concerned about this.

[00:30:51] But that's what's saying, though, one constant truth of the federal government is that you have factions inside of it. And one faction was fighting with the other over paperclip. And the military faction won. But it was openly contested, which surprised me. So did we ever allow someone in that was really a one or in the category one or two?

[00:31:19] Like, like, could you give us an example of someone who really should not have been let in? We came close a few times. So there are people sort of Georg Ricci was someone who ran the Nordhausen underground factories. He was a major part of that effort. What happened was that after Penemunda was destroyed in a air raid, the Albert Speer and von Braun and Dornberger all decided we need to move this underground for safety. So they did that.

[00:31:48] But in order to build what was necessary in the caves in this area of around Nordhausen, you needed massive amounts of slave labor. And also, once that was done to build the V2 itself, you needed slave labor. The people who were in charge of that engineering marvel and also the decision to use slave labor that led to 20,000 deaths. Those people were almost brought here.

[00:32:15] But their records were so impossible to cover up in this way that they did wind up being prosecuted. Someone like Arthur Rudolph, I talked about him in the book, who was one of the fathers of the Saturn rocket, clearly was someone who would have fallen into the category one. And only until the 1980s was it discovered just how guilty he was of also playing a role in the Nordhausen complex.

[00:32:41] But the ones that were really on the margins of being truly unacceptable, we were still able to exploit because what the CIA did, eventually the CIA did, was they would help take a scientist who had obviously a questionable background and get them to a place like Argentina, which we know, like homeland of all the big Nazis, right?

[00:33:05] But because that was a friendly government in the Cold War context, they could work there and we could just take the fruits of their labor. And so we actually would help settle the more notorious scientists in a friendly third country just to still use them because we did not want to risk the embarrassment of what happens when you brought them over to the United States because there were people looking. So there was always a way around it.

[00:33:58] So one of the things that I noticed at the State Department was where you had most of the objectors to paperclip. And you can understand why, because they had to deal with visas and who's allowed to come to the country and who isn't. They were also in charge of making sure that the Third Reich did not reconstitute itself abroad in places like South America or in Egypt or Turkey,

[00:34:26] other places where you had a lot of places where you had a lot of prominent Nazis. Ohio? Well, well, that's the thing is that so they were outraged. Like, you want us to chastise Argentina and Brazil and Paraguay and Mexico for flirting with the idea of bringing German scientists over or Nazis in general. But at the same time, we're bringing in 1,500, 1,600 scientists and their families, all with Nazi backgrounds, into our own country. And they lost that argument.

[00:34:56] But yet, when a couple of them, State Department officials, a guy named Samuel Klaus, who was a lawyer, who was the representative on the committee that dealt with paperclip, he objected fiercely. He was Jewish. He dealt with – so he had a personal vendetta, people would say. But I think he just was following the law. But he was notorious for putting roadblocks in front of this plan to make a lot of the paperclippers citizens.

[00:35:26] That, to him, was a bridge too far. J. Edgar Hoover, who was anti-Nazi and did a great job at least destroying Nazi spirings, obviously became a notorious anti-communist Cold Warrior. He was brought in on paperclip on the side of the military after some initial hesitation because he hated Nazis because he was told, we need this for the Cold War and this is to fight communism.

[00:35:54] Let me back up a little because you're asking about McCarthy. Yeah, but still, I'm surprised that he – so Hoover hated communists more than he hated Nazis is what – he hated them both. But on the level like communists are worse than Nazis on the scheme of things. He really was typical, I think, of the U.S. military and foreign policy establishment right after World War II. It was like, the Nazis are done. The Soviets are next.

[00:36:23] What do we need to defeat the Soviets? Some former Nazis, fine. So that was like his logic. That's over and done with. We've stomped that threat. Hitler's dead. Let's move on. And people like Samuel Klaus are saying, well, no. There are thousands of Nazis still abroad that represent a threat and bringing him to the United States is probably a bad idea. He was fired from – well, he was still allowed to work at the State Department, but he was kicked off of that committee.

[00:36:50] And then when the McCarthy hearings come up in 1950, 51, the early 1950s, Samuel Klaus is brought under the microscope there because he dared to challenge paperclip.

[00:37:04] And J. Edgar Hoover and people in the McCarthy allies basically said what you did was almost a tantamount to providing aid and comfort to communists because you dared to slow down this necessary program. And the Korean War escalated the rhetoric about this because it was a surprise attack and everyone was running for the hills here. So it seemed that – let's go – who were the enemies to paperclip?

[00:37:32] It was this Jewish lawyer in the State Department or a few others who dared to say maybe we should still worry about Nazis as well as communists as opposed to completely ignoring one threat for the other. Okay. That's not where I thought this was going to go. Okay. I thought that McCarthyism would have tapped the Nazi scientist and would have gone after them. Oh, no. But that's not how it happened.

[00:38:01] No, they were celebrities by now and absolutely integrated into – But so was Oppenheimer. He ended the war. I mean, that's the crazy thing, right? This was beyond the scope of my book, but I find one of the most remarkable things about the Oppenheimer story is that one of the people that spoke out in defense of Oppenheimer in front of Congress was Werner von Braun. I didn't know that. Yes.

[00:38:31] Von Braun was more trusted with a security clearance than Oppenheimer was. And that to me says everything about where the world – what the world looked like in the early 1950s. That's insane. A Nazi – It's insane. Was more trusted. And to von Braun's credit, he was speaking in favor of Oppenheimer. But why are you willing to listen to von Braun and not the person who helped you win the war here or – I mean, Dr. Strangelove himself you are listening to. Yes. Yes.

[00:39:02] That's very true. One of the three or four people who he's based on has more of a – more trust with the U.S. government than Oppenheimer. Oh, my God. I did not realize that part of the story. That's crazy. It is crazy. And it just tells you – and von Braun was a celebrity. He was a Disney fixture. And he was a young, handsome, articulate man who was selling space travel.

[00:39:27] And it successfully put that dirty past behind them because he had a lot of American officials who wanted to help him do that. And beat the Soviets. He never really put it that way because he thought of himself as the space travel visionary. But in private, that's, of course, why he was brought over. And what the V2 represented was an early version of the ICBM. Yep. I was going to say, when people ask me, how is space travel connected to nuclear?

[00:39:57] And I'm like, if you can put a man on the moon, you can put a bomb on that. I remember very vividly seeing the film Oppenheimer and that scene where the guy is flying across. He's a pilot and he's flying from continental Europe to England. And he sees the V2 overhead. And he realizes at that point that if someone marries an atomic bomb to the V2, that is Armageddon.

[00:40:22] And that's exactly what the Army Air Force had in mind when they brought over von Braun and his team. And also one of the reasons why Eisenhower chose to make NASA a civilian agency because he wanted to make the rocket team be a civilian asset and not a military asset because of those very dangers. But it was too late. Oh, so what was the most surprising thing that you found out when you were researching this book?

[00:40:49] Aside from what happened to the people who objected to it, to me, it was the chapter I have on the Soviet side of things. Yes. Yeah. The Soviets also got some scientists, some war reparations. Yeah, they didn't play around.

[00:41:06] And part of the reason why paperclip could be justified in our own bureaucracy and into the public is that as little as we cared about the backgrounds of the scientists we brought over, the Soviets absolutely did not care. Because they had no intention of making them citizens or treating them with any level of respect other than that they were pretty well compensated. They just wanted to use them and squeeze everything out of them and then send them back.

[00:41:33] I found comparing the approaches of the United States or the Western allies versus the Soviet allies surprising. And I was most interested in the fact that I was shocked that the Soviets let them all go. They did not want to keep their scientists. And I didn't, not because they obviously didn't want to be Soviet citizens or anything, but how could they trust them to be set free and go back to the West if they wanted?

[00:41:57] And it's because they really isolated them from what the Soviet state was doing in their own military industrial complex. They let them work on specific projects, but didn't ever tell them why or integrate them in the same way that we did. And arguably you could say that the reason we were more effective is because we did integrate the Germans into everything we were doing in a military sense and later with the space program. The Soviets didn't do it that way because they were too distrustful.

[00:42:25] And I found that to be odd, but it was true that in the Soviet Union, the political choices mattered more than the purely scientific ones. And that was, I think, to their detriment. But I found that to be a fascinating cultural difference between their version of paperclip and our own. I mean, just the way they took the scientists set the tone, right? They just came in the middle of the night with trucks and packed everyone up and took them away.

[00:42:52] They did for like the worker bee drone types, but they, more so than the United States initially, if you can believe it, were more into bribery at first. So they got, the way they got Helmut Grotrup and some of the big names they did get is they actually said, look, we don't care if you're a war criminal. We don't care what you did. We're going to give you good housing. We're going to give you lard and vodka, which were like the two staples. For the United States, it was like cigarettes and whatever. They just, they did first resort to bribery.

[00:43:22] But when they realized, as we just talked about earlier, that the best names had already gone west, that's when they decided, let's just take thousands of these people and uproot entire factories. And anything that's not bolted down, we're going to send east and exploit.

[00:43:41] And yes, that was why you had so many scientists that were left over looking to the United States as a more gentle and possibly more profitable exercise than being shipped off in a train overnight. Yeah. And how many scientists did the Soviets land up taking?

[00:44:02] That I really can't say, because if you count all the lower level drones, they had about 6,000 of those types of workers. But their equivalent of their rocket team was much smaller. Helmut Grotrup and his group were probably numbered in the dozens, whereas Byron Brown's team was approximately 120 people of that core group.

[00:44:24] But the Soviets already had, as I'm sure you're aware of, a very strong scientific infrastructure long before the Bolshevik Revolution even. And so in terms of like basic science, they were way ahead of, in some ways, than even the United States was. So they didn't have to play as much catch up as we did in the field of rocketry especially. So we talk a lot about the rocket team. That's where most of the research is.

[00:44:50] But what other types of scientists do you know that we recruited, I guess is the best way? There were people who were involved in chemical weapons research and biological bioweapons research. Some of them were the types that we sent to Argentina because they had been, by necessity, they involved themselves in those notorious concentration camp experiments that were conducted on inmates.

[00:45:16] Some of those people we had in the country briefly and we either relocated or covered up some of their past. Aerospace medicine is a field that really depended on research that is, of course, unethical now. The cold water experiments and the high pressure experiments that were subject to the Nuremberg trials.

[00:45:37] Some of those, maybe not the scientists themselves, but the people who oversaw them or organized them, wound up working for the U.S. Air Force. Oh. At Randolph Air Force Base as kind of the home of aerospace medicine. And that was research that was used for our space program. And it came from unethical science. And that's been acknowledged. And the kind of the ethical dilemma is, well, if we know this is how the research was done, do we still use it?

[00:46:07] We can't get results otherwise. But if it's already been done, what do you do? And we decided to use it. But not just the research, but some of the people who at least had their names on papers that allowed and oversaw it. So that's one group. Did we? We also took then the research from the Japanese on the cold water experiments. Yes. And their own biological weapons program, the Unit 731.

[00:46:33] We famously protected some of those key figures from prosecution at the Tokyo trials, which was the equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Yay us. Yeah. But I mentioned some of the businesses that benefited. Dow Chemical, a lot of aeronautics groups.

[00:46:51] Walter Dornberger, who was a Wehrmacht general and the one who helped bring Wernhermann Brown into the military early on, was a vice president at Bell Labs. You know, he's a very well-compensated executive working in the United States, wearing a suit and tie well into the 1970s and 80s. And so he had some very, very odd figures running around. He had a lot of people become professors of science in different fields.

[00:47:20] University of Minnesota had a well-known one. And they were, by all accounts, good, decent people who definitely qualified as that Category 4 type of Nazi, meaning they were part of the fraternity. They joined the party to get their job. Those people kind of just existed and contributed in their own way. No one really thought much about them. So those stories of integration, I think, are still yet to be told.

[00:47:47] I know people, some scholars would probably find some rich sources there. What happened to the drones that stayed in America? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there something that you'd like to talk about that wasn't touched on? To me, it's the popular imagination. The popular cultural representation, I think, of Paperclip is really interesting because so many people do know about it.

[00:48:10] But they're getting their perspective on it from cultural representations like The Right Stuff or even – and we talk about conspiracy. Whenever you get into the dark, weird world of UFOlogy, Paperclip always comes up because people assume that the Germans that we brought over were involved in re-engineering alien technology. Really? This comes up. Yeah, this is like – yeah, go search it on Reddit and stuff. I don't want to, no.

[00:48:37] No, you don't want to because Von Braun is larger than life. There was a series on Amazon that ran for two seasons called Hunters. It was a fictional series where Nazi hunters living in the United States were uncovering plots and it's like an alternate history type of series. And Von Braun is there. But that Apple show that's really popular, that's an alternate history of the space program. The new one is called Star City. But anyway, let's talk about popular culture representation.

[00:49:05] It's based on the idea of Paperclip as being this grand conspiracy. And as we just talked about, there's nothing conspiratorial about it at all. And so a lot of times I find myself, when I am asked to speak about it, having to demystify Paperclip as something that wasn't in the shadows or dealt with super secret technology.

[00:49:27] It was really just a policy to exploit knowledge that saved the United States probably a few years in time in terms of developing the equivalent of the V2. Now we could just dissect it and rebuild it and go forward. And Orvan Brown himself as being this mad genius. He was a great administrator is what he was. Anyone who gets their PhD in physics at age 21 is probably an impressive person.

[00:49:55] But what he managed to do was basically take something that was on a blueprint and turn it into a working prototype and figure out how to mass produce it. That is something that made him extraordinarily valuable to us. It wasn't his unique knowledge about the technology. It was his skill at taking a blueprint and creating an object out of it. That's the value he gave us. It's the value he gave the Third Reich.

[00:50:23] The issue was that the V2 had no strategic value. It was a terrible weapon for a war. I mean, what they needed to build was 100,000 planes like the United States did, not a few hundred errant missiles that kill civilians. And that's kind of the reality of the V2. But for him, I'm fascinated by him because he was just a guy who could get things done.

[00:50:50] And honestly, that's what you needed in this phase of the late 1940s when you're experimenting with new technologies. How can you turn this blueprint into something that actually works? He had proven his value there. But he wouldn't have been good, say, in the Manhattan Project. I don't think so. Because there you don't have blueprints. You have to make everything up. Yes.

[00:51:12] And plus he was, I mean, my reason other people in the Manhattan Project had their own personality conflicts, but he would have been, I don't think his ego would have clashed with many others. He was basically given a little island to do what he wanted, literally an island in Penamunda to do what he wanted. And he made the most of it. Oh, OK. Well, thank you so much for coming on and at such a short time period. And yeah, absolutely. I appreciate it.

[00:51:44] The show Brian mentions is For All Mankind, which ran for five seasons on Apple TV. Thank you for listening. And to support our show, please rate and review wherever you are listening. Until next time, I'm Shelly Lesher. And this has been My Nuclear Life.