Operation Paperclip: bringing Nazis to the US after WWII.
About 1,600 German scientists were brought to America after the war. A president had ordered that no committed Nazis be admitted. A US agency forged their files so they could come anyway.
The scientists are only one thread. The same postwar instinct — usefulness over accountability — put a Nazi spymaster on the CIA payroll and ran a Gestapo torturer down an escape line to Bolivia. You do not have to take our word for any of it: the government has already admitted the core, in declassified files and in a written apology to France.
Klaus Barbie and the United States Government (the “Ryan Report”)
U.S. Department of Justice · Report to the Attorney General · August 1983
The US government's own 218-page report found that US Army intelligence used the Gestapo’s “Butcher of Lyon” as an asset, obstructed his extradition to France, and helped him escape to Bolivia — and the United States formally apologized to France for it.
View source →What this page is about
Between 1945 and 1959, Operation Paperclip brought roughly 1,600 German scientists and engineers to the United States. President Truman's 1946 authorization barred anyone who had been an ardent Nazi or a war criminal. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) got the high-value recruits in anyway by rewriting their security dossiers — a process its own memos called “expedient processing.”
Paperclip was one part of a wider pattern. US Army intelligence, and then the CIA, ran the Gehlen Organization — a spy network built by Hitler's eastern-front intelligence chief and staffed with former Nazis — and later handed it to West Germany as the BND. The same apparatus used the Gestapo chief of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, as a source and helped him flee prosecution. This page grades the documented core FACT, and grades the popular extensions (a clean line from Paperclip to MKUltra; Barbie's later narco-politics) lower and separately.
Usefulness over accountability, as policy.
The through-line is not that a few Nazis slipped through. It is that the United States made a deliberate choice, again and again, that a Nazi's usefulness against the Soviets outweighed what he had done. Rocket engineers who used slave labor became the architects of the Moon landing. A general who had run intelligence for the Wehrmacht on the eastern front became a CIA contractor and then the founding spymaster of America's closest Cold War ally. A man who tortured in Lyon became an asset. The scandal is not hidden — the government eventually documented and, in one case, apologized for it.
That makes Paperclip the missing hinge in a story this site already tells. Hub 16 traces the money that flowed into the Reich; the Dulles Blueprint traces the intelligence state that emerged in 1947. Paperclip is what moved between them: the human capital of the Reich, laundered out and into the American national-security establishment that Allen Dulles built.
From surrender to apology
- May 1945Wernher von Braun and his rocket team surrender to US forces. The Army begins gathering German specialists under Operation Overcast.
- Sept 1946President Truman authorizes Operation Paperclip — with an explicit bar on admitting ardent Nazis or war criminals.
- 1946US Army G-2 begins sponsoring Reinhard Gehlen's intelligence network of former German officers.
- 1949The CIA assumes control of the Gehlen Organization.
- 1951US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps runs Klaus Barbie down the “rat line” to Bolivia via the priest Krunoslav Draganovic; the Army pays for forged travel documents.
- 1956The Gehlen Org is handed to the West German government and becomes the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).
- 1983The DOJ's “Ryan Report” finds US intelligence obstructed Barbie's extradition; the United States apologizes to France. Barbie is expelled from Bolivia and later convicted in Lyon.
- 1984Arthur Rudolph, the V-2 production manager whose slave-labor role had been scrubbed from his file, leaves the US and renounces his citizenship under Office of Special Investigations pressure.
- 1998Congress passes the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, forcing out thousands of pages on the CIA's relationship with Gehlen and others.
- 2010The New York Times obtains a 600-page Office of Special Investigations report the DOJ had tried to keep secret, describing official “collaboration with persecutors.”
Who got kept
Developed the V-2 for the Reich using slave labor at Mittelbau-Dora. An OMGUS security report called him a security threat; the JIOA version softened it. In America he built the Saturn V and became the public face of NASA.
His file was cleansed of his role directing slave labor at the Mittelwerk. Decades later the Office of Special Investigations caught up; he left the country in 1984.
Ran Wehrmacht intelligence on the eastern front, then traded his files and network to the US. CIA-run from 1949; his Org became the West German BND in 1956.
The “Butcher of Lyon.” Employed postwar by US Army intelligence, then spirited to Bolivia. The US later apologized for it; France convicted him of crimes against humanity in 1987.
The record, claim by claim
A US agency falsified Nazi scientists' security files so they could enter the country against a presidential order.
FACTTruman's 1946 authorization barred ardent Nazis and war criminals. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency systematically rewrote or removed the disqualifying material — Nazi Party membership, SS rank, war-crimes findings — in the dossiers of high-value recruits. The practice is documented in declassified files and detailed in Annie Jacobsen's history.
- National Archives — records on Operation Paperclip / JIOA
- Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip (Little, Brown, 2014)
Wernher von Braun was an SS officer whose rockets were built with slave labor; his security assessment was softened to bring him to the US.
FACTThe V-2 was produced at the Mittelwerk using prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora, where thousands died. A US military-government report flagged von Braun as a security threat; the version that reached reviewers downgraded it. He went on to lead the Saturn V program at NASA.
- Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip (2014)
- National Archives — captured German records / OMGUS
The CIA ran a spy network built by a Nazi general — the Gehlen Organization — and it became West Germany's BND.
FACTReinhard Gehlen's network operated under US Army sponsorship from 1946, passed to the CIA in 1949, and was transferred to the West German government as the BND in 1956. It employed large numbers of former Nazis, including former SD and Gestapo officers. The relationship was opened to the public by the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
US Army intelligence used the Gestapo's Klaus Barbie as an asset, blocked his extradition, and helped him flee to Bolivia — and the US apologized for it.
FACTThis is not an allegation; it is a finding of the US government's own investigation. The 1983 DOJ 'Ryan Report' concluded that US Army officers obstructed France's extradition request and arranged Barbie's escape via the rat line. The United States formally apologized to France.
“The United States government apologized to France for the role US Army intelligence played in preventing Barbie's extradition and aiding his flight.”
These were not isolated errors but a pattern of US intelligence giving Nazis safe haven — documented in a report the DOJ tried to suppress.
FACTA 600-page Office of Special Investigations study, completed in 2006 and kept from the public until the New York Times obtained it in 2010, described the government's 'collaboration with persecutors' — treating Paperclip, Gehlen, and the ratlines as one policy rather than three anomalies.
- The New York Times, November 2010 (Eric Lichtblau) — on the suppressed OSI report
- Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door (Houghton Mifflin, 2014)
Paperclip's scientists were the pipeline into the CIA's MKUltra program.
SOME SMOKEThere is real overlap between imported German expertise (notably aviation and space medicine) and later US programs, and specific figures invite the comparison. But a clean, documented org-chart line from Paperclip into MKUltra is not established. We grade the linkage SOME SMOKE and keep it distinct from the FACT core; see our MKUltra investigation for what the record there actually supports.
- See: MKUltra (CIA Crimes hub) — /investigations/mkultra
Where the record stops
Paperclip attracts more mythology than almost any Cold War subject, and the mythology does real damage: it lets defenders wave the whole thing away as conspiracy. So we mark the lines.
- The numbers stay attached to the right program. Paperclip brought roughly 1,600 people. Gehlen's Org employed thousands — a separate count. Merging them inflates both.
- No “Nazi space tech” / UFO layer. The recovered-craft and secret-antigravity material that clusters around this topic is excluded on sight. It is not evidence; it is camouflage.
- Barbie's later career is graded separately. That he was a US asset and was ratlined is FACT (the government said so). His subsequent involvement in Bolivian narco-politics and repression is a further claim, graded on its own evidence — not folded into the apology.
The founding compromise
The American security state did not have an innocent childhood and then go wrong. At its founding it made a bargain — that expertise and utility could buy a clean record — and it made that bargain with the perpetrators of the worst crime of the century. Every later chapter this site documents, from MKUltra to the Cold War covert-action machine of the Dulles Blueprint, runs downstream of that first compromise.
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't recruiting enemy scientists just normal postwar practice?
Recruiting talent is one thing; a US agency forging security files to defeat a presidential order barring war criminals is another. The issue is not that Germans were hired — it is that the government laundered records to hide who they were.
Is the Barbie story actually confirmed, or is it a theory?
Confirmed by the US government itself. The 1983 DOJ Ryan Report laid out the Army's use of Barbie and its role in his escape, and the United States apologized to France. It is government record.
Does this connect Paperclip directly to MKUltra?
Not cleanly. There is thematic and some personnel overlap, but we grade a direct pipeline SOME SMOKE, not FACT, and keep it separate from the documented core.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
Primary and authoritative sources
- DOJ — Klaus Barbie and the United States Government (Ryan Report, 1983)
- National Security Archive — The CIA and Nazi War Criminals (Gehlen)
- National Archives — RG 263 / Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act records
- National Archives — Operation Paperclip records
- Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip (Little, Brown, 2014)
- Christopher Simpson, Blowback (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988)
- Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door (Houghton Mifflin, 2014); NYT reporting, 2010