The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America

By Annie Jacobsen

Illustrated. 575 pp. Little, Brown & Company.

(Disponible à la bibliothèque de Westmount)

imagesPrésentation de l’éditeur: 

In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich’s scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis’ once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler’s scientists and their families to the United States.
Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?
Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich’s ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century.
In this definitive, controversial look at one of America’s most strategic, and disturbing, government programs, Jacobsen shows just how dark government can get in the name of national security.

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Critique du New York Times

Among the trophies of the Second World War captured by Allied intelligence agents were Nazi scientists and their research on biological and chemical weapons. In a classified memorandum titled “Exploitation of German Scientists in Science and Technology in the United States,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff described these men as “chosen, rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.” Such intellectual spoils were not to fall into Soviet hands. In 1945, Operation Overcast (renamed Operation Paperclip for the paper clips attached to the dossiers of the most “troublesome cases”) began. More than 1,600 Germans were secretly recruited to develop armaments “at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War.”

Although some of these men had been Nazi Party members, SS officers and war criminals, they were valued as vital to American national security.

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Critique du Boston Globe

They used slave labor. They experimented on humans. They worked in concentration camps. They were involved in tens of thousands of deaths. And when World War II ended, they were recruited to come to the United States and continued their scientific work in the service of American interests in the Cold War.

These were the Nazi scientists — and in a number of cases high-ranking officers, many of them close to Hitler or those in his inner circle — of Operation Paperclip, the secret effort to keep German military-technology and expertise out of the hands of America’s new Soviet rivals.