Operation Paperclip
“The most in-depth account yet of the lives of Paperclip recruits and their American counterparts…Jacobsen deftly untangles the myriad German and American agencies and personnel involved...Gripping and skillfully rendered are the stories of American and British officials who scoured defeated Germany for Nazi scientists and their research.”
New York Times Book Review
The explosive, dark secrets behind America's post–World War II science programs from the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51
In the chaos following World War II, some of the greatest spoils of Germany's resources were the Third Reich's scientific minds. The US government secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis' knowledge outweighed their crimes and began a covert operation code-named Paperclip to allow them to work in the United States without the public's full knowledge. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators and with access to German archival documents (including papers made available to her by direct descendants of the Third Reich's ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and lost dossiers discovered at the National Archives and Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into one of the most complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secrets of the twentieth century.
Praise