Audiobook. ( )

Operation Paperclip is the more interesting, better written, and eventually, more optimistic sister-history to The Devil's Chessboard in that it is also a cold-war history about drugs, and the CIA, and Nazis, oh my! and the narrative is mostly nested within that latter book. But Paperclip is as much a triumphant story about the eventual cleansing power of sunlight as it is about the atrocious history of the various intelligence services recruiting Nazis into various American services, morality-be-damned.

As with The Devil's Chessboard, both delightful and appalling historical details abound, and even dedicated students of history are sure to learn bunches.

Minor caveat: the main conclusion, which is that there is never an excuse for hiring these highly immoral men is more or less contradicted by the entire narrative of the 1/3 of the book. In the cases of the chemical and biological weaponry, this is clearly true. But as for the rocketry, it is apparent that both the Soviet and American rocket programs were built nearly entirely on the backs of the German scientists spirited out of Nazi Germany and that if there was a German Rocketeer who wasn't a Nazi, they weren't mentioned in this history. ( )

The Holocaust meets the Cold War. In *Operation Paperclip*, journalist-historian Annie Jacobsen describes the United States government’s program, starting immediately after Allied victory in Europe, to recruit German scientists and engineers who had developed Nazi Germany’s advanced military technology, especially ballistic missiles, aviation medicine, and chemical and biological weapons, to work for the U.S. military and to prevent such experts from becoming assets of the Soviet Union. Jacobsen clearly believes that the evil tolerated in Operation Paperclip outweighed the advantages the United States gained from it in the Cold War.

Jacobsen presents a rambling but often powerful story of atrocities committed by medical doctors and mass death among slave laborers. Of the 60,000 in chemical factories at Auschwitz, an estimated 30,000 died on the job (416). In central Germany “at least twenty thousand laborers were beaten, tortured, starved, hanged, or worked to death while being forced to build V-2 rockets” (259). Jacobsen captures the smugness, “devilish friendliness” (151) and shiftiness of several perpetrators, including the celebrated rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. (The former director of NASA, James E. Webb, helped cover up for von Braun (399), one more reason why NASA’s spectacular new space telescope may be inappropriately named.)

Jacobsen describes the exploits of U.S. investigators who uncovered the Nazis’ crimes: Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch-American physicist (developer of the concept of electron spin) who knew leading German scientists in several fields. Dr. (U.S. Army Major) Leopold Alexander, who had studied medicine in Vienna and Berlin, who interrogated German doctors and later testified at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Jacobsen sketches Alexander’s extraordinary life on pages 114 to 118. Goudsmit and Alexander were both Jews who had emigrated to the United States. They were keen to pursue justice and were conscious of Nazism’s corrupting impact on the sciences (5, 121). Hugh Iltis, a 19-year-old Czech-born American soldier plucked off the battlefield to translate documents, discovered the papers of SS leader Heinrich Himmler (126). John Dolibois, a Luxembourg-born Army lieutenant, interrogated the highest-ranking Nazis, encountering Herman Göring on his first day at a secret site in Luxembourg (137-139). And Army Air Corps/Air Force Major Eugene Smith investigated Germans who came under suspicion of war crimes after being relocated to the United States (257, 427).

Powerful Americans like Secretary of War Robert Patterson and High Commissioner for Germany John McCloy promoted the Nazi scientist program, and others like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover facilitated it. Beginning in 1946, Patterson shifted from being skeptical of the recruitment of Nazi scientists to being “a champion of the program,” and Secretary of State James Byrnes softened his opposition, because “if we don’t get them, the Russians will” (225, 226). Growing Soviet hostility soon convinced President Truman to expand Operation Paperclip “to include one thousand German scientists and technicians and allow for their eventual immigration to the United States” (229). Exploiting certain persons’ expertise seemed more in the national interest than trying them for war crimes (243). McCloy granted clemency to many Nazi war criminals.

Principled opponents of the Nazi scientist program, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and the columnist Drew Pearson, were disregarded in the rush to beef up against the growing Soviet threat. At the working level, Paperclip’s most effective opponent may have been the State Department’s Samuel Klaus, who “argued that the Germans at issue were not brilliant scientists who had been unwittingly caught in a maelstrom of evil but rather that they were amoral opportunists of mediocre talent” (194). For his efforts Klaus was reassigned within State and detractors accused him of leaking secrets to the press (287).

Jacobsen exposes the naivety of U.S. officials who recommended giving German scientists and their families “whatever it was they were asking for” (224). A Department of Commerce official (194) hoped Nazi scientists would share their knowledge with the American business community (200). Even Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace, the former vice president of the United States known for strong anti-Nazi views, “encourage[ed] President Truman to endorse the German scientist program in the name of economic prosperity” (202).

Some U.S. officials were brazen and reckless seeking to harness the talents of war criminals. One Chemical Corps brigadier general picked the brains of Nazi chemists at “round tables” on weekends at his Heidelberg home and transferred their nerve agent manufacturing knowhow to the United States, “a Cold War black program [that] did not officially exist” (314). One lieutenant colonel sheltered a wanted war criminal from capture and introduced him to a Dow Chemical Company official (150, 151, 158). The commandant of a U.S. intelligence site near Frankfurt kept a war criminal and suspected double agent employed as the post physician and hired the doctor’s daughter as his secretary (332, 333).

Jacobsen claims that notorious intelligence methods, chemical weapons, and drugs of later decades were direct outgrowths of Operation Paperclip: CIA black sites and extreme interrogation techniques (318, 321), LSD (301), and Agent Orange (387). Charles E. Loucks, the Chemical Corps general who learned nerve gas production from Nazi chemists, also traveled to Switzerland to learn about LSD’s potential for use on the battlefield (300, 301). German chemists also appear to have developed a precursor of thalidomide, the drug that produced deformed babies, in the course of nerve agent research (432). The consequences did not emerge until the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s.

*Operation Paperclip* leaves important questions unanswered. In particular:

Although Jacobsen seems to believe that ends do not justify means, one may still ask: When does the good derived from a person’s expertise outweigh the evil he did—and the evil of supporting him and covering up for him? (“Him.” All the German experts mentioned in *Operation Paperclip* were men.) Wernher von Braun employed slave labor to build his V-2 ballistic missiles, but without his expertise the United States might not have been able to deter the Soviet Union during the most dangerous years of the Cold War.

Why almost no mention of Nazi nuclear programs? On page 4, Jacobsen simply announces that Goudsmit’s team captured four top nuclear scientists—not named—“and had learned from them that the Nazis’ atomic bomb project had been a failure.” Was Operation Paperclip not interested in German atomic scientists? The answer may be no, it wasn’t—because the United States had built atomic bombs, used them against Japan, and had all the nuclear experts it needed. Although U.S. intelligence reported that two German physics institutes and the physicists themselves had been seized and taken to the Soviet Union (192), and warned (incorrectly) that German physicists were helping the Russians develop nuclear weapons (224), U.S. officials seemed to lack interest in bringing such scientists to the States.

Jacobsen might have mentioned that Nazism attracted relatively few physicists—in contrast to the seemingly large number of Nazis in the chemical industry and the medical profession. Many doctors who became Nazis were angry that “prior to Nazism, the Jews had crowded the medical schools and it had been nearly impossible for others to enroll” (275). But as to physics, the Nazis had denounced quantum mechanics and Relativity as “Jewish” and had harassed leading physicist Werner Heisenberg (an acquaintance of Goudsmit) before putting Heisenberg in charge of nuclear research. Recently revealed documents indicate that Heisenberg and his colleague Karl Friedrich von Weizsäcker “did obviously not use all power they commanded to provide the National Socialists with nuclear weapons.” (Wikipedia article on Weizsäcker)

*Operation Paperclip* badly needed a competent proofreader. There are misspellings and confusion: “humanitarian principals” when the word should be “principles” (229), “cubic square feet” (407) when there is no such thing. It is also odd that Jacobsen accepts the stereotype that spoken German is “guttural” (170) and calls a colonel and a major “commanding generals” (197, 198). Dwight Eisenhower is usually identified as “General Eisenhower,” consistent with his status in World War II and the early postwar years, but, in an account of a 1945 interrogation of rocket scientists, Eisenhower is called “President Eisenhower” (93). Other typos, inaccuracies and substandard constructions are too numerous to mention. ( )

This is an important, explosive book. It details the subterfuge and underhanded methods that the American government--and the British and Soviet governments as well, though in far less detail--used to invite many of the biggest monsters this world has ever known into their country and then how they gave these men--most of whom seem capable of spinning any story they could think of, as long as it tended to blame others or sell out their former comrades or consisted of complete fabrications--positions in strategic places throughout the government.

It's terrifying. And it's not just a few, it was hundreds. Many of the men directly responsible for the butchering, torturing, experimenting, and mutilation of German prisoners of war.

It's an awful story of a country of men willing to overlook the most horrific atrocities the human race has ever committed, all in the name of gains in the science of war. The means would justify the ends.

The question I'm left with, in the end, is, who were the biggest monsters? Those that committed the atrocities, or those that condoned them through willfully ignoring them in the name of progress? ( )

The Good:

- Very well done, thorough, and lays out the field as a detailed overview.

- I liked how it filled in some gaps in my gappy historical knowledge - I am always hearing of Operation Paperclip and now I have a good overview.

The not so good

- I wasn't really taken with it as a book

- Not much to do with the context within which this happened. Only a couple of mentions of the USSR's program and little attention to the environment within which the important decisions were made. I don't think anyone could decide on the extent of the 'wrong' (or, heavens forbid, the 'right') of this program only from this book

3 stars as I am trying to keep books that didn't really grab me as the 'average' experience that they were - while describing why I have given the rating that I have. ( )