In early May 1945, a young German on a bicycle pedalled down an Austrian mountainside looking for the American army. His name was Magnus von Braun, and he had been sent by his older brother Wernher to negotiate the surrender of the most valuable engineering team in the world: the men who had built the V-2, the first ballistic missile ever fired in anger. Wernher von Braun arrived shortly after, his arm in an enormous cast from a car crash, grinning for photographs like a man arriving at a job interview. In a sense, he was.
The V-2 was a terror weapon — over a thousand of them had slammed into London, and thousands more into Antwerp — but to American eyes it was also a miracle. Nothing in the Allied arsenal came close to a rocket that climbed to the edge of space and fell on its target faster than sound. As the Third Reich collapsed, American, British and Soviet teams raced each other across Germany to grab hardware, blueprints and, above all, brains. The Americans got the biggest prize: von Braun and roughly a hundred of his core team from the Peenemünde rocket programme, plus enough captured V-2 parts to fill hundreds of rail cars.
The paperclips
The programme that brought them to America began under the name Operation Overcast and was soon rechristened Operation Paperclip, after the humble paperclips that officials attached to the dossiers of the scientists they wanted. There was a problem, though. President Truman's directive authorising the programme in 1946 explicitly excluded active Nazis and militarists — and many of the most desirable recruits were exactly that. Von Braun had been a member of the Nazi Party and an officer in the SS. The solution adopted by the military bureaucracy was simple and cynical: files were rewritten, memberships downplayed, and inconvenient details sanded away until the dossiers passed inspection. Over the following years, hundreds of German scientists and engineers — in rocketry, aviation medicine, chemistry and electronics — were quietly settled in the United States, eventually numbering around 1,600.
The moral cost was real and largely unexamined at the time. The V-2 was mass-produced in the Mittelwerk, an underground factory in the Harz mountains fed by slave labour from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where prisoners died by the thousands from starvation, disease and execution. Historians often note a grim inversion: more people died building the V-2 than were killed by it as a weapon. Decades later the reckoning arrived for at least one Paperclip man. Arthur Rudolph, who had been production manager at the Mittelwerk and later rose to direct the Saturn V rocket project for NASA, left the United States in 1984 and renounced his citizenship rather than contest allegations about his wartime role.
From Fort Bliss to the Moon
The Germans' American career began modestly. Von Braun's team was parked at Fort Bliss, Texas, launching refurbished V-2s from the White Sands range in New Mexico and teaching rocketry to their former enemies. In 1950 they moved to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, a sleepy cotton town that they would transform into 'Rocket City.' When the Soviet Union stunned the world with Sputnik in 1957, it was von Braun's team that answered, putting America's first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit in January 1958 atop a Juno I rocket derived from their Redstone missile.
The Soviets, incidentally, had run their own version of the talent grab. In October 1946, in a single coordinated night known as Operation Osoaviakhim, they rounded up more than two thousand German specialists and shipped them east with their families and furniture. But Moscow kept its Germans at arm's length and eventually sent them home; Washington put its Germans in charge. When NASA was created, von Braun became the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, and fellow Peenemünde veteran Kurt Debus became the first director of what is now the Kennedy Space Center. The colossal Saturn V — still the rocket that carried every human who has walked on the Moon — was developed under von Braun's leadership. When Apollo 11 lifted off in July 1969, the machine beneath it was, in engineering lineage, the V-2's giant descendant.
Operation Paperclip's legacy resists a tidy verdict. It shortened the road to the Moon and seeded American aerospace, and its recruits included men whose hands were far from clean. Hubertus Strughold, celebrated in the US as a pioneer of space medicine, was later dogged by questions about Luftwaffe-era human experiments. The programme was a bet that expertise could be separated from the regime that produced it — a bet made in secret, hedged with whitewashed paperwork, and paid off, in full public view, on the Sea of Tranquility.
Quiz nuggets
- Operation Paperclip was named after the paperclips attached to the dossiers of German scientists selected for recruitment; its original name was Operation Overcast.
- Wernher von Braun, chief designer of the Nazi V-2 missile, later led development of NASA's Saturn V, the rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
- More people died building the V-2 — slave labourers at the Mittelbau-Dora camp — than were killed by the missile as a weapon.
- The Soviet counterpart was Operation Osoaviakhim, which relocated over 2,000 German specialists to the USSR in a single night in October 1946.
- Saturn V project director Arthur Rudolph left the US and gave up his citizenship in 1984 over his wartime role at the V-2 slave-labour factory.