Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HLPMFU0 | Format: EPUB
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America Description
The explosive, dark secrets behind America's post-WWII science programs from the author of the New York Times best seller Area 51.
In the chaos following WWII, some of the greatest spoils of Germany's resources were the Third Reich's scientific minds. The U.S. government secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis' knowledge outweighed their crimes and began a covert operation code-named Paperclip to allow them to work in the U.S. without the public's full knowledge. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including papers made available to her by direct descendants of the Third Reich's ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and lost dossiers discovered at the National Archives and Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into one of the most complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secrets of the 20th century.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 19 hours and 26 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: February 11, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HLPMFU0
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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