Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America Author: Annie Jacobsen | Language: English | ISBN:
B00BAXFBI2 | Format: PDF
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America Description
The explosive story of America's secret post-WWII science programs, from the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51
In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich's scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis' once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler's scientists and their families to the United States.
Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?
Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich's ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century.
In this definitive, controversial look at one of America's most strategic, and disturbing, government programs, Jacobsen shows just how dark government can get in the name of national security.
- File Size: 4004 KB
- Print Length: 563 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 031622104X
- Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (February 11, 2014)
- Sold by: Hachette Book Group
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00BAXFBI2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,331 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Intelligence & Espionage - #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military > World War II - #8
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After Nazi Germany's surrender to the Allies, sixty of the world's most evil human beings gathered as prisoners at Kransberg Castle twenty miles north of Frankfurt. This building was the former headquarters of Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe. It was here that American military intelligence officers began the process of deciding their fates. Send them to trial at risk of the gallows. Or spirit them away to war department laboratories in America. (Or do both, and then commute their sentences as if justice did not matter.)
Jacobsen's book tell this story. It's a big one, and she has conducted a massive amount of research and made it readable with a lively narrative style. Some of those scientists did go to face trial at Nuremberg. But others were brought into the U.S. and put quietly back to work.
The newly formed Joint Intelligence Objective Agency, or JOIA, had decided that these scientists were too valuable to the U.S. to allow to fall into Soviet hands. The initiative started by JOIA, Operation Paperclip, was a covert American operation that was one of the most guarded U.S. government secrets of the 20th century. Some of the scientists who were part of it were well known -- Albert Einstein for one. But others had much darker pasts:
* Otto Ambros was a Third Reich chemist who served as director of the German corporation that produced the gas used in the death camps. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty of mass murder, and sentenced to eight years. While he was serving time in prison, Operation Paperclip officials arranged for his sentence to be commuted. In 1951, Ambros was hired to work at a clandestine facility north of Frankfurt called Camp King.
Operation Paperclip is about the connection between Nazi scientists and American government secrets. Under this program, more than a thousand of Nazi scientists were brought to America immediately after the end of World War Two. Those scientists helped develop rockets, the NASA program, chemical and biological weapons, aviation and space medicine and many other weapons of mass destruction.They came to America at the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some officials believed that by endorsing the Paperclip program they were accepting the lesser of two evils-that if America didn't recruit theses men, the Soviet Communists would.
The book comes in five parts and each part is about another chronoligical era . Most men that were brought to America were accused of war crimes. Most of them were found guilty of war crimes by the various post-war trials at Nuremberg. Yet the USA wanted them on American soil to work for the American people despite their horrible past.
Opposition to Operation Paperclip gained momentum with America's scientific elite and many scientists were outraged when the details of the secret project came out. Albert Einstein was the most esteemed figure to publicly denouce this operation and wrote directly to President Truman on behalf of his FAS colleagues:"We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous...Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions".
Another famous scientists, Hans Bethe, who fled the Nazis, asked: "Do we want science at any price?"
Among the various and many scientists and their respective projects they were working on, Ms. Jacobsen mentions Dr.
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