Operation Paperclip: America's Nazi Scientists
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Allied Powers sent research teams into the ruins of the Third Reich to cherry-pick the best German engineers and scientists. The goal was to integrate them into their own R&D programmes and exploit Nazi technology to beat the Soviets in the arms race. Operation Paperclip saw thousands of scientists relocated to the United States, even though many of them had been complicit in Nazi war crimes. So which technologies did they salvage from the wreckage of the Nazi regime? And what scientific breakthroughs did they contribute to after the war? Annie Jacobsen, an investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, joins Dan to answer these questions and more.
Produced by Mariana des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, welcome to Dance Know's History Hit. I once went to New Journey about 20 years |
| 0:05.0 | ago now with some veterans of World War II, British veterans of World War II, went up to |
| 0:08.8 | Hamburg. And they were all part of a team that were there to secure German scientists. |
| 0:14.6 | In particular, German radar and U-boat scientists, because Britain, historically, was most |
| 0:21.5 | interested in controlling the waters around these islands. It's naval supremacy in the |
| 0:29.4 | North East Atlantic Ocean. Important business if you're a British politician or military |
| 0:34.3 | strategist. And it was a great trip. We were welcome by German hosts who shook the |
| 0:38.3 | hands of these veterans and thanked them for liberating them and their forebears from |
| 0:44.3 | the Nazi tyranny. It was an extraordinary thing to be part of. But it sparked a fascination |
| 0:48.7 | in me for the removal of these scientists that allied desire to basically cherry pick the |
| 0:53.1 | best German military engineers and scientists to boost their programs back home. And that's |
| 0:59.5 | the Soviet Union, French, the British, and of course the Americans. The Americans launched |
| 1:04.7 | Operation Paperclip. And there was a top secret intelligence program to bring Nazi scientists |
| 1:09.7 | to America, most famous among them, of course, Verna von Braun, who was Hitler's rocket |
| 1:14.8 | scientist, who would then go and work at NASA and help design the rocket that would carry |
| 1:20.6 | the Apollo mission astronauts to the moon. It's a crazy thought, crazy thought, even though |
| 1:26.0 | he was utterly compromised, he was obviously complicit in many of the crimes against humanity |
| 1:32.3 | perpetrated by the Nazi German state. But he wasn't the only one. There were many of them. |
| 1:36.9 | Some like 1600 scientists were taken across to the US to work in all sorts of different |
| 1:41.8 | fields. It's been calculated. They contributed tens of billions of dollars to US R&D, economic |
| 1:47.7 | output, but it's impossible to come up with any real estimation of their impact. I talked |
| 1:53.2 | to Annie Jacobson. She's a journalist in the US. She's been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize |
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