The US secretly brought Nazi scientists to America after WWII

A rule against 'ardent Nazis', and a workaround for it

This is not a case that rests on suspicion or a leaked rumor. It rests on the government's own paperwork, and the paperwork is damning enough that it does not need embellishment. In 1946, as Paperclip expanded from an emergency scramble into a formal program, the War Department set out its condition in writing. A State Department memorandum recorded the policy plainly: no one would be brought to the United States who was found “to have been a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism.” The public framing, repeated for decades afterward, was that the US was recruiting talented professionals swept up by circumstance, not committed Nazis.

The problem, as the JIOA's own files acknowledge, was that this described almost none of the men it wanted. A 1995 US government staff memorandum prepared for the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (itself a presidential body, drawing directly on National Archives and Department of Defense records) quotes the JIOA director, Navy Captain Bosquet N. Wev, conceding the point to his superiors in an April 1948 memo: “Security investigations conducted by the military have disclosed the fact that the majority of German scientists were members of either the Nazi Party or one or more of its affiliates.” Wev argued this should not matter anymore. In a March 1948 letter to the State Department, quoted in the same government memo, he wrote that continuing to treat Nazi Party membership as disqualifying had been “aptly phrased as ‘beating a dead Nazi horse.’ ”

That was the argument made openly, inside the building. What happened to individual files went further. Drawing on archival research first done by the historian Linda Hunt and later examined in detail by journalist Annie Jacobsen using declassified records, a security officer's evaluation of von Braun that described him as a Nazi Party member, a junior SS officer, and a potential security threat was, in the version that reached State Department reviewers, softened: his SS role recast as something he “may have” held, his politics described as merely “inward.” The JIOA was not silently overlooking inconvenient facts. On the documented cases, it was rewriting them.

Von Braun, the Mittelwerk, and what 'nominal' didn't cover

It is worth stating the strongest, most sympathetic version of what the JIOA argued, because parts of it were true: the vast majority of adult Germans under Hitler had some entanglement with the party or its institutions, participation was frequently coerced or careerist rather than ideological, and a blanket ban would have excluded scientists whose personal conduct was genuinely unremarkable. Von Braun himself later told the FBI, and his defenders have argued since, that he joined the party in 1937 largely to protect his research position, not out of conviction.

But “more than a nominal participant” (the government's own stated bar) was written to separate that ordinary entanglement from something worse, and on von Braun's own documented record, he was on the wrong side of that line. NASA's own official biography of him does not soften this: it states that he “joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and became a junior SS officer in 1940,” and that after V-2 production moved into the underground Mittelwerk facility (which ran on enslaved labor from the attached Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp), von Braun traveled there roughly fifteen times between late 1943 and February 1945. In NASA's own words, he “was well aware of the terrible conditions and was involved in decision-making about the use of slave labor.” A West German court later had him testify, under subpoena, in the trial of former SS men from the camp; he acknowledged seeing horrific underground conditions while denying he had seen corpses or ordered punishments.

The recruiting agency's own director called continued scrutiny of Nazi Party membership “beating a dead Nazi horse.” The men being screened had run a rocket factory worked by concentration-camp prisoners.

Von Braun's subordinate Arthur Rudolph, brought over in the same program, had a still starker record: as Mittelwerk's production manager, he had endorsed using camp prisoners as early as 1943 and was later implicated in reporting alleged “saboteurs” among them for punishment. A surviving memo dated 15 August 1944 shows the two men acting on this together: von Braun describes a trip he and Rudolph made to the Buchenwald concentration camp itself (the camp that supplied Mittelwerk's forced laborers) to select prisoners with useful skills for transfer to the rocket plant, and the two men request that the SS provide still more. Neither man was charged at Nuremberg or in any other war-crimes tribunal; both built long, honored American careers. Rudolph's record eventually caught up with him in the 1980s: after the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) opened a formal inquiry in 1982, he signed an agreement on 28 November 1983 to leave the United States and renounce his citizenship rather than contest a denaturalization case, departing for West Germany in March 1984 and formally renouncing his US citizenship at the American consulate in Hamburg that May. Von Braun died in 1977, a celebrated NASA figure, before any comparable reckoning was attempted against him.

Why a proven case still unsettles people

Operation Paperclip occupies an odd place in the American imagination, because it is not a story that was ever really hidden by the standards of most conspiracy theories; it is a story the government eventually told on itself, in its own declassified files and its own agency histories. What keeps it circulating is not doubt about whether it happened, but discomfort with what it means that it did: a rocket program the nation celebrated at the Moon landing was built, in part, by a man who personally selected slave laborers from a concentration camp, and the government that later employed and honored him at the highest levels of its space program knew enough about his past to have kept him out.

That discomfort pulls people in two directions, both understandable and both worth naming honestly. One is to minimize it, to treat “joined the party to protect his career” as the whole story, when the documented record includes fifteen trips to a slave-labor plant and a direct role in decisions about its workforce. The other is to inflate it, to treat one proven, bounded case of institutional deception as license to assume a hidden Nazi hand behind unrelated later events, a leap the declassified record does not support and does not need. The honest position sits between those two impulses: the deception was real, it was significant, and it is also fully documented, closed, and answered by the government's own records rather than by speculation filling a gap.

The rare conspiracy theory that the government not only confirmed but published a fifty-years-later report about, in its own name.