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Happy Saturday.

81 years ago today, on June 20th, 1945,

the U.S. Secretary of State approved Werner von Braun

and other German rocket scientists to enter the United States

under a program called Operation Paperclip.

This was a secret program to bring German scientists, engineers, and other specialists to the United

States to live and work, including ones who had deep ties to the Nazi party and war crimes.

Our episode on Operation Paperclip came out on May 24th, 2021,

and it is today's Saturday classic.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,

a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk about Operation Paperclip, which is also known as Project Paperclip. And this was the U.S. effort to bring German scientists to the United States after World War II.

And to be clear, the U.S. was definitely not the only allied nation doing this.

As examples, the U.K. and France and the Soviet Union all had their own programs to try to exploit German scientific and engineering knowledge after the war.

But in most cases, those other programs involved specialists and researchers who were either working in occupied Germany or they were sent back to Germany after a few years of supervised

work in another country.

But for the United States program, a lot of the people who were part of it ultimately became

permanent residents or citizens of the U.S., and this included people who were ardent Nazis or

who had committed war crimes.

A lot of the time, the rocket scientists are the ones who get the most discussion around this

...