After WWII, Nazi Party Scientists Were Given a New Life in the US

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After WWII, Nazi Party Scientists Were Given a New Life in the US

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https://www.gaia.com/article/operation-paperclip

After WWII, Nazi Party Scientists Were Given a New Life in the US
The end of WWII was exciting for the Allies and their efforts to defeat the Nazis, but the spillover into the Cold War led to some paranoid moves by the CIA and U.S. government that was ethically questionable and sometimes downright detestable. One example of this, in particular, was the pardoning of hundreds of high-ranking Nazi scientists for the exploitation of their knowledge; and it wasn’t just pardoning, but providing cushy jobs with not-so-modest salaries and a high standard of living.

Many of these scientists were quietly assimilated into American society, and some have even been commemorated with plaques, statues, and busts, in celebration of their contributions to science. The name of this project was Operation Paperclip, due to the CIA’s use of paperclips to indicate the most nefarious and malevolent Nazis when one would look through a dossier of their profiles. On one hand, their achievements led to NASA’s Apollo missions and the moon landing – on the other, some “achievements” led to the creation of our chemical weapons program and more notorious, clandestine operations like MKULTRA.

The impetus behind Operation Paperclip was to prevent advanced Nazi weapon technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union. The program, which brought in roughly 1600 scientists, was originally titled, Operation Overcast before the CIA realized it needed to gloss over the notoriously paperclipped Nazis. Many of these scientists were known to have committed horrendous war crimes, like experimenting on live humans with chemical and biological weapons, but few were prosecuted.

Mittelwork and the V2 Rocket
Toward the end of the war, when the Nazis were nearing defeat, they developed the V-2 rocket under the guidance of Wernher von Braun and Arthur L Rudolph. Both of these scientists eventually went on to develop the Saturn V rocket that was so critical to the success of the Apollo missions and bringing together mankind in the subsequent moon landings.

But the story was much different at the Mittelwork facility in Germany, where slave labor was used to develop the V-2, resulting in the death of roughly 20,000 people, and that doesn’t even include deaths from the use of the bomb itself.

The prisoners who were put to work at the factory were brought in from concentration camps, like Buchenwald, and forced to work 12-hour shifts under harsh conditions in underground factories. Many died from malnutrition, while others were hanged in front of their coworkers for not performing or sabotaging the rockets. Despite feigning shock when asked whether slave labor was used at his factories in Germany, Rudolph was eventually exposed and deported for his knowing involvement in Nazi war crimes.

But Rudolph was one of few who was actually persecuted for his crimes, and that persecution only resulted in deportation. In the case of von Braun, it is unclear whether he was sympathetic to the Nazi cause or if he simply abided by it for his own protection.
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