Operation Paperclip

In the chaos following WWII, many of Germany’s remaining resources were divvied up among allied forces. Some of the greatest spoils were the Third Reich’s scientific minds–the minds that made their programs in aerospace and rocketry the best in the world. The United States secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis’ forbidden knowledge outweighed their crimes, and the government formed a covert organization called Operation Paperclip to allow them to work without the knowledge of the American public.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, with access to German archival documents (including, notably, papers available only to direct descendants of the former Third Reich’s ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and lost dossiers she recently discovered at the National Archives, Annie Jacobsen will follow 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 20th century.