{"Before his official approval of the program, President Truman, for sixteen months, was indecisive on the program.[10] Years later in 1963, Truman recalled that he was not in the least reluctant to approve Paperclip; that because of relations with Russia "this had to be done and was done".[35]
Several of the Paperclip scientists were later investigated because of their links with the Nazi Party during the war. Only one Paperclip scientist (Georg Rickhey) was formally tried for any crime, and no Paperclip scientist was found guilty of any crime, in America or Germany."}
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America
Annie Jacobsen. (Little, Brown & Company, 2014) 575 pp., endnotes, bibliography, index.
Werner von Braun is well known to those who remember the Apollo moon landing. During the Ford administration, von Braun was almost awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—until one of Ford’s senior advisors, David Gergen, objected to his Nazi past.
Less well known is that another 120 fellow German scientists, engineers, and technicians developed the Saturn V launch vehicle, or that the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was headed by Kurt Debus, an ardent Nazi. The Vertical Assembly Building—bigger in volume than the Pentagon and almost as tall as the Washington Monument—was designed by Bernhard Tessmann, former facilities designer at the German missile launch facility at Peenemuende.
Other prominent Nazis hired under Operation Paperclip included:
- Dr. Hubertus Strughold, who played an important role in space medicine by developing space suits and other life-support systems. In June 1948, he put a rhesus monkey named Albert in the pressurized nosecone of a V-2 rocket in a pressurized nose cone, the first step in the effort to send humans to space.
- General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of Nazi intelligence operations against the Soviets, was hired by the US Army and later by the CIA to operate 600 ex-Nazi agents in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. In 1948, CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter assumed control of the so-called Gehlen Organization.
- German biologist Dr. Kurt Blome was hired to develop offensive and defensive capabilities to counter Soviet biological warfare activities.
It seems that out of necessity & desperation the USA had to acquire these WW2 German scientists, so a cover story was developed. The logic was, its better for the USA to have them rather than allow
all of them to end up becoming property of the USSR. You could say, Wv.B was always the same player, he just signed onto a larger team.
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