Operation Paperclip was a secret U.S. intelligence program at the end of World War II that brought more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians—many of them committed Nazis, some directly complicit in war crimes—into the United States to work on military and space technology. Men like Wernher von Braun, who built the V-2 rockets that rained down on London using slave labor from concentration camps, were quietly whitewashed and repackaged as Cold War assets. The U.S. government knowingly buried their Nazi pasts, falsified immigration records, and overlooked horrific moral baggage in order to secure an edge against the Soviets in rocketry, chemical weapons, aviation, and intelligence. In short: America imported the Third Reich’s brain trust, cleaned up their résumés, and put them to work building the foundations of NASA, the military-industrial complex, and much of modern weapons research—choosing power over principle
