The year is 1944; the D-day invasion starts with the crossing of Normandy, which signaled the end of the war in Europe, and the United States thought to itself, you know what we’ve been missing in our lives, Nazis! They began to assemble what we all know today as Operation Paperclip, the secretive U.S. recruitment program for science and technology. 

So What Was Operation Paperclip?

World War II is a pretty bleak spot in the history of men doing ungodly things to each other in the fields of war in the name of a crazed leader. There’s always a winner and always a loser, and since the dawn of time, man has seized the assets of the defeated; sometimes, it’s not just gold or shoes, yes they took the shoes of the Jews after they murdered them, but they also stole intelligence of the losing party.

During the Second World War, the Germans created some of the most advanced weapons pushing the boundaries between reality and science fiction. The Wunderwaffe translated to “wonder weapon” as a super gun. The inventory had numerous terrifying weapons, some of which saw the battlefield, but most never made it out of conception. Most of these weapons were revolutionary in design and then became the fathers and grandfathers of our current weapon systems.

Towards the end of the war, the Allied Forces pushed into Germany, and they were accompanied by 3,000 scientific, technical experts and agents of the combined intelligence objectives sub-committee. This was a joint British American task force established in London during the summer of 1944 to investigate all things related to German science and advancements; however, another technological recovery operation known as the Alsos mission often collaborated and even competed with the CIOS to gain as much as it could from the defeated enemy. I know this is the part where we all start to fall asleep and wonder who these people were and what they were making. 

More Secret Operations

This group’s agents received a large pile of documents from a Polish lab technician at Bonn University containing a classified list of the Third Reich’s top scientists known as “The Osenberg List” — not quite like Schindler’s. Still, lists were one thing they were all good at back then, and it seems they meant bad news whenever one was made. This list contains names, addresses, and other key details of Reich scientists and was used to create a blacklist of names to be arrested during this time.

In February of 1945, the T-force was set up when a large number of German scientists began discovering in late April, a detention center was set up first in Paris and later in Kransberg Castle in Usingen, Hessen, Germany, outside Frankfurt JCS established the first secret recruitment program called Operation Overcast that turned into what we know today as Operation Paperclip. 

Insert The American Government

Now all those working parts that brought about Operation Paperclip managed to bring over more than 1,300 Nazi scientists into different American governmental and private sector jobs. Don’t worry about what they did before with the whole mass-murder thing; the U.S. decided it would just be easier to abolish the crimes, and the way this was all done was to get a leg up on post-war military and Cold War efforts. At the same time, the Soviets responded with Operation Osoaviakhim – Hoover Institution, which moved 2,200 German specialists and 6,000 families in one night on September 3, 1946.

So, the Soviet Union thought recycled Nazi scum was also a great idea. Could this be how we came to the great Space Race that lasted from 1963 to 1965 between the United States and the Soviet Union? Jeez, what a stellar idea. Let’s have “reformed” Nazi scientists make some of the most powerful rockets and shoot other humans into space. At least if anyone died in one of these rockets, no one would feel responsible. Can I get a big old laugh out loud on this one from everybody!? 

Nazi Scientists Who Changed The World

Here are the top three Nazi scientists who managed to get away scot-free. Let’s see if you recognize any of these names or their scientific accomplishments:

1. Wernher von Braun: von Braun designed the famous World War II V-2 rocket for his native Germany, but he also dreamed of developing vehicles that would propel artificial satellites and men into outer space. 

He became director of NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, where he and an expanded team would develop the Saturn rockets that launched men to the moon in 1969.

Von Braun also served as a technical advisor on three space-related television films that Disney produced in the 1950s. Well, a little more than that, he was in the 1955 film “Man in Space,” explaining how he designed a rocket ship. Jeez, thanks, Walt! 

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2. Kurt Blome: This was no ordinary Nazi; Blome was a high-ranking Nazi scientist before and during World War II that was arrested and put on trial in Nuremberg; fret not, he was acquitted. 

Blome was the Ambassador for cancer research. Whoa, whoa, now don’t even start to think, “Well, maybe he was a good Nazi?” Nope! Blome had an interest in militarizing the use of carcinogenic substances and cancer-causing viruses, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Now, what did he do for the USA, you ask? Under Project 63, Bloom worked on chemical warfare. 

After his acquittal in Nuremberg in 1947, he was able to continue to practice medicine in West Germany and even stayed active in politics. He finally died at the ripe old age of 75 in 1969.

3. Hugo Spatz: Spatz was a German neuropathologist who admittedly performed controversial “research” on the brains of executed prisoners. So, maybe he didn’t have much to do with the morbid demise of these poor souls, but he had no problem defiling their bodies once they departed. Again, another one that got to have a full life dying at the age of 81 in 1969.