# The Nazi bargains: Paperclip and the recruitment of the enemy

The deals by which the victors of 1945 took the losers' talent and buried their crimes: Operation Paperclip and von Braun's road from the V-2 to the Apollo Moon rocket, the Soviet Osoaviakhim, the immunity granted to Unit 731's biowarfare doctors, Hitler's spymaster Gehlen rebuilt as a Cold War asset, and the ratlines to safety.

*This story led to: NASA and the space age*
*This story parallel: Covert operations, coups, and blowback*
*This story part of: The Cold War*
*This story part of: Infrastructure and logistics*
*The space race: rivalry, rendezvous, and spying parallel this story*
*Swiss neutrality: the vault and the wartime record parallel this story*
*Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination continues this story*
*How the West supported the Nazis: finance, appeasement, and Cold War bargains continues this story*

## 1944 — Operation Alsos seizes the German atomic program

As the Allies advance, the secret Alsos Mission races to capture German nuclear scientists, documents, and uranium before the Soviets can. It set the pattern for the scramble to seize Nazi science that followed the war.

## September 1944 — Von Braun's V-2, the first ballistic missile

Wernher von Braun's V-2 rocket strikes London and Antwerp, the first long-range ballistic missile and the ancestor of every space rocket. It was built at the Mittelwerk using concentration-camp slave labor, a fact often glossed over in the space story.

## 1945 — Operation Paperclip brings the Nazi rocketeers to America

The United States secretly recruits von Braun and hundreds of German scientists, whitewashing their Nazi records, to win the coming missile and space race. The man who bombed London for Hitler would soon build America's path to the Moon.

*Source: Project Paperclip and American Rocketry after World War II*

## 1946 — Hitler's spymaster goes to work for the CIA

Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi army's chief of intelligence on the Eastern Front, is put in charge of a US-funded spy network against the Soviets, which becomes West Germany's intelligence service. The West rebuilt its Cold War espionage on a Nazi foundation.

*Source: Organization of Soviet Intelligence Work Against the West German Intelligence Target in the Early Post-War Years*

## 1946 — The US grants immunity to Unit 731's biowarfare scientists

The United States secretly grants immunity to the Japanese doctors of Unit 731, who had conducted lethal human experiments, in exchange for their biological-warfare data. One of the darkest bargains of the postwar science grab, hidden for decades.

## October 1946 — Operation Osoaviakhim: the Soviets seize German experts

In a single night the Soviet Union forcibly deports thousands of German scientists and their families east to work on Soviet weapons and rockets. It was Moscow's mass answer to America's Operation Paperclip.

## 1947 — Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, works for US intelligence

The US Army Counter Intelligence Corps employs and protects Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief responsible for torture and murder in Lyon, then helps him escape to Bolivia. The government later apologized, a documented case of a war criminal shielded for Cold War use.

## c. 1948 — The ratlines smuggle Nazis to safety

Escape routes known as ratlines, run in part through Vatican and Red Cross channels, spirit Nazi war criminals like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele to South America. Some fugitives were shielded or used by Western intelligence.

## January 1958 — Von Braun launches America's first satellite

After the shock of Sputnik, von Braun's team puts Explorer 1, the first American satellite, into orbit. The former V-2 engineer became the public face of the US space effort.

## 1967 — Von Braun builds the Saturn V Moon rocket

As director of NASA's Marshall Center, von Braun leads the design of the Saturn V, the giant rocket that would carry astronauts to the Moon. The line ran unbroken from Hitler's vengeance weapon to the Apollo program.

*Source: Project Paperclip and American Rocketry after World War II*

## 20 July 1969 — The Nazi rocketeer's rocket reaches the Moon

Apollo 11 lands on the Moon atop von Braun's Saturn V, the culmination of a career that began with Hitler's missiles. One of the twentieth century's greatest achievements rested on one of its darkest bargains.

*Source: Project Paperclip and American Rocketry after World War II*