HistoryBrief — Issue 005

Operation Paperclip: The Nazis NASA Recruited

1945–1959

One historical event. One page. Every day.

In 1944, a V-2 rocket killed a woman named Ada Harrison in a shop on Staveley Road, Chiswick. She was buying vegetables.

Twenty-five years later, the man who designed that rocket — Wernher von Braun — stood in NASA's firing room and watched his Saturn V carry three astronauts toward the moon. His Nazi Party membership number was 5,738,692. His SS rank was Sturmbannführer — equivalent to major.

Operation Paperclip was a secret US government programme that recruited over 1,600 former Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians between 1945 and 1959. Many had been Nazi Party members. Some had used slave labour. A few had been personally investigated for war crimes. Their records were scrubbed, their pasts rewritten, and they were given new lives in America — because the US government decided their knowledge was more valuable than their accountability.

President Truman authorised the programme in September 1946 with a specific condition: no one who had been "an active supporter of Nazi militarism" could be admitted. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was tasked with vetting the scientists. What they did instead was forge new histories. When background checks flagged scientists as Nazi Party members or war crimes suspects, the JIOA didn't reject them — they created new files. Derogatory information was removed. Affiliations deleted. They systematically subverted the president's direct order.

Von Braun is the name everyone knows. But Arthur Rudolph managed production at the Mittelwerk underground factory where an estimated 20,000 slave labourers from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp died building V-2 rockets. More people died building the V-2 than were killed by it. Rudolph came to America, joined NASA, and became project manager of the Saturn V — the vehicle that launched every Apollo moon mission. In 1984, he renounced his US citizenship rather than face a war crimes investigation.

Hubertus Strughold, linked to freezing and low-pressure experiments on prisoners at Dachau, became the "Father of Space Medicine." The US Air Force named a library after him. It was quietly renamed in 2006.

The Soviets ran their own parallel operation — codenamed Osoaviakhim — forcibly relocating over 2,000 German specialists in a single night in October 1946. Both superpowers built their Cold War arsenals on the same foundation: Nazi rocket science.

Jean Michel, a French survivor of Mittelbau-Dora, wrote in his memoir: "To think that this man was living comfortably in America while I still had nightmares about the tunnels."

Von Braun died in 1977. His headstone in Alexandria, Virginia reads Psalm 19:1: "The heavens declare the glory of God." There is no mention of Peenemünde. No mention of the 20,000 who died building his vision.

🔑 Three Key Facts

1. More people died building the V-2 than were killed by it. V-2 combat deaths totalled approximately 9,000. Deaths at the Mittelbau-Dora slave labour facility: approximately 20,000.

2. The JIOA altered the majority of Paperclip recruits' files, according to journalist Linda Hunt's investigation using Freedom of Information Act documents — systematically removing evidence of Nazi affiliations and war crimes connections.

3. None of the 1,600+ Paperclip scientists were ever prosecuted for war crimes by the US government. Arthur Rudolph left voluntarily in 1984 rather than face investigation.

🤔 What If?

What if Truman's exclusion clause had been enforced? If the JIOA had actually rejected scientists with Nazi ties — as the president ordered — the US would have lost its rocket programme's architect and much of its scientific brain trust to the Soviets. Would America have reached the moon? Would the Cold War's balance of power have tipped? Or would American engineers have found their own path — slower, but without the moral compromise that the nation has never fully reckoned with?

📺 Watch the full story: Operation Paperclip — xDocs on YouTube

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Sources: xDocs Operation Paperclip script (2026-03-27); Annie Jacobsen, "Operation Paperclip" (2014); Linda Hunt, "Secret Agenda" (1991); Michael Neufeld, "Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War" (2007); US Holocaust Memorial Museum; National Archives.