After WWII, the U.S. secretly imported over 1,600 Nazi scientists — scrubbing their war records clean — because the men who built Hitler's rockets were also the only ones who could reach the Moon.
In the chaotic final weeks of World War II, U.S. Army intelligence officers fanned out across Germany with a mission almost as strange as anything the war had produced: recruit Nazi scientists before the Soviets could get to them. The operation was initially called 'Overcast,' renamed 'Paperclip' in November 1945 when officers began attaching paperclips to folders containing the names of rocket specialists they most wanted to hire.
The most valuable prize was Wernher von Braun, the brilliant rocket engineer who had designed the V-2 ballistic missile — the weapon that had rained terror on London and Antwerp. Von Braun had been a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer, and his V-2s had been built using slave labor from concentration camps. More than 10,000 forced laborers died making the weapons he designed.
U.S. authorities knew exactly who they were recruiting. When von Braun's security file came back flagging his Nazi Party membership and SS rank, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency simply altered it. Dozens of similar files were sanitized. President Truman had explicitly stated that the program should not include 'ardent Nazis,' but those doing the recruiting quietly ignored the directive.
Over 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were ultimately brought to the United States between 1945 and 1959 under Operation Paperclip. The Soviets ran their own parallel program — Operation Osoaviakhim — seizing German scientists by force in a single night in 1946, deporting thousands of specialists along with their families to work in the Soviet space and weapons programs.
The scientists were initially housed at Fort Bliss in Texas and White Sands in New Mexico, working on early U.S. rocket programs. Von Braun and his team later moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where they became the nucleus of what would become NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center — the engine of the American space program.
The ethical bargain embedded in Operation Paperclip rippled through the following decades. The same men who had built weapons designed to kill civilians were celebrated as heroes of the space age. Von Braun appeared on the cover of Time magazine, collaborated with Walt Disney on a series of space exploration films, and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Kennedy.
Without the Paperclip scientists, the Apollo program might not have succeeded on Kennedy's timeline — if at all. Von Braun's team designed the Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the Moon. It has never failed a launch. The moral complexity of that achievement — human civilization's greatest adventure, powered by men who had worked for Hitler — has never been fully resolved.