# The US secretly brought Nazi scientists to America after WWII

**Verdict: Proven.** Confirmed by declassified US government records: roughly 1,600 German specialists were recruited, and officials sanitized some of their Nazi/SS records to get them past a policy meant to bar them.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Cold War era · First circulated: 1946
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/operation-paperclip

## Summary
Not a rumor but a documented program: after WWII, US intelligence recruited around 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians (including rocket engineer Wernher von Braun) and in a number of cases rewrote their Nazi Party and SS histories to slip them past America's own immigration bar on 'ardent Nazis'.

## The claim
That the US government, through a program eventually called Operation Paperclip, secretly brought roughly 1,600 German scientists (many with Nazi Party or SS backgrounds) to America after World War II for military and space research, and that officials falsified or suppressed those scientists' records to get them past screening and a stated ban on recruiting committed Nazis.

## Origin and timeline
- 1945: As Germany collapses, US intelligence teams race Soviet forces to seize German rocket, aviation and chemical-weapons expertise; the War Department's Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) is created to run the effort, first under the codename 'Overcast'.
- Sep 1946: President Truman approves what becomes known as Operation Paperclip, expanding recruitment, on the explicit condition that no 'ardent Nazi' be brought into the country.
- 1945–1959: The JIOA compiles security dossiers on more than 1,500 German specialists and brings roughly 1,600 of them, plus dependents, to US military and research sites; some records are edited to remove or soften Nazi Party and SS history.
- 1970s–1980s: Journalists and Justice Department investigators expose specific cases (including engineer Arthur Rudolph's role at the slave-labor rocket plant Mittelwerk) leading to a deportation and renewed public scrutiny of the program.
- 1998–2007: The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act orders roughly 8.5 million pages declassified; the resulting Interagency Working Group's final report to Congress lays out the government's own accounting of the postwar recruitment of Nazi-linked scientists.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The US secretly recruited large numbers of German scientists after the war.
  Evidence: Confirmed and never seriously disputed. A 1995 US government staff memo prepared for the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, drawn from National Archives and Defense Department files, puts the figure at 'at least 1,600 scientists and their dependents' brought over by Paperclip and its successor projects. The National Archives holds personnel dossiers on more than 1,500 of them under Record Group 330.
- Claim: Officials rewrote or suppressed scientists' Nazi Party and SS records to get them into the country.
  Evidence: Confirmed in specific documented cases. Researcher Linda Hunt's archival work, and later documents examined by journalist Annie Jacobsen, show security evaluations for high-value recruits being softened between drafts: a security officer's report on Wernher von Braun describing him as 'a potential security threat' was reworded before reaching State Department reviewers. The JIOA's own director, Captain Bosquet Wev, argued in writing that continuing to weigh Nazi Party membership was 'beating a dead Nazi horse'.
- Claim: This violated the government's own declared policy.
  Evidence: Confirmed. The War Department's 1946 policy, recorded in a State Department memorandum, barred anyone found to be 'a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism.' The JIOA's own files acknowledge that 'the majority of German scientists were members of either the Nazi Party or one or more of its affiliates', the exact population the policy was meant to screen out.
- Claim: The most famous recruit, Wernher von Braun, had a substantive Nazi and slave-labor record, not a token one.
  Evidence: Confirmed by NASA's own official biography, which states von Braun 'joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and became a junior SS officer in 1940,' traveled to the underground Mittelwerk rocket factory roughly fifteen times as it ran on concentration-camp labor, and 'was well aware of the terrible conditions and was involved in decision-making about the use of slave labor.'

## Why people believe it
- Because the core of it is true and the government has now said so itself: declassified files, a NASA-published biography, and a congressionally mandated review all confirm scientists with real Nazi and SS records were recruited and that some records were softened to get them past the rules.
- The program really was kept from the public for decades, and the recruits really were given rewritten histories, so distrust of the 'official story' was, in this instance, earned rather than paranoid.
- The uncomfortable core fact (that a rocket the US celebrated at the Moon landing was built by a man who picked laborers from Buchenwald) is hard to sit with, which pushes people either toward minimizing it or toward folding it into a larger, vaguer story of hidden Nazi influence than the documents actually support.

## Open questions
- The National Archives holds security dossiers on more than 1,500 individual recruits under Record Group 330, and the documented cases of altered records (von Braun's among them) are confirmed by name. But no government review has gone through all roughly 1,600 case files one by one to say how many other recruits also had Nazi Party or SS histories quietly softened beyond the specific instances historians have already found; the declassification effort answered the question in general terms, not dossier by dossier.
- Formal accountability, once recruits were inside the US, was rare. Arthur Rudolph left the country and renounced his citizenship in 1984 after a Justice Department inquiry; Georg Rickhey was tried for war crimes and acquitted; most others whose records raised similar questions were never investigated with comparable scrutiny. How many recruits with undiscovered records of comparable seriousness simply lived out full, unexamined American careers is not something the surviving paper trail can settle.
- The 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act forced the declassification of roughly 8.5 million pages, and the Interagency Working Group's 2007 report to Congress is the government's own account of that effort. Neither that report nor outside historians claim every relevant file survived or was located: how much material on individual recruits was lost, destroyed, or remains withheld on other grounds isn't fully known even after the largest declassification effort of its kind.
- What the country actually gained, scientifically and militarily, by admitting scientists with obscured Nazi pasts rather than screening them out or prosecuting them (measured against the moral and diplomatic cost of having done so) is a judgment the documented record doesn't resolve by itself. It remains a live argument among historians, and was still being actively debated by the government's own reviewers decades after the program ended, not a question with a settled answer.

## Sources
- Record Group 330: Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Foreign Scientist Case Files ('Project Paperclip' personnel dossiers), U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (1998): https://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-330-defense-secretary
- TAB F-3: Background of Project Paperclip (staff memorandum to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, quoting JIOA Director Capt. Bosquet N. Wev's 1948 memoranda), U.S. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (1995): https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/16385196.pdf
- Wernher von Braun, official biography, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA): https://www.nasa.gov/people/wernher-von-braun/
- Wernher VonBraun (FBI file, released under FOIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation, The Vault: https://vault.fbi.gov/Wernher%20VonBraun
- War Department policy memorandum on exclusion of Nazi Party members from scientist recruitment (1946), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. V (Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State) (1946): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v05/d448
- Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, Annie Jacobsen (Little, Brown and Company) (2014)
- The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (internal history, written 2006; publicly released 2010 following a FOIA lawsuit), U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division (Judith Feigin, principal author) (2006): https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal/legacy/2011/03/14/12-2008osu-accountability.pdf
- Final Report of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, presented to Congress (2007): https://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.html
- Air Force Library to Change Name Due to Scientist's Nazi Past, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA): https://www.jta.org/archive/air-force-library-to-change-name-due-to-scientists-nazi-past

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