“As comprehensive as it is critical, this latest exposé from Jacobsen is perhaps her most important work to date….Jacobsen persuasively shows that it in fact happened and aptly frames the dilemma….Rife with hypocrisy, lies, and deceit, Jacobsen’s story explores a conveniently overlooked bit of history.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review.
“This is an engrossing and deeply disturbing expose that poses ultimate questions of means versus ends.” —Booklist, starred review
The story of how perpetrators of World War II were treated as spoils of war, brought to light with new information in this diligent report. Throughout, the author delivers harrowing passages of immorality, duplicity, and deception, as well as some decency and lots of high drama. How Dr. Strangelove came to America and thrived, told in graphic detail.” —Kirkus Reviews
Annie Jacobsen exploded onto the scene three years ago with her bestseller AREA 51, about America’s top-secret military testing site (now being developed by AMC as a scripted television series). At last, she returns with an even more electrifying exposé in OPERATION PAPERCLIP: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little Brown; February 11, 2014; 978-0-316-22105-4. Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, has just acquired the film and TV rights to Jacobsen’s equally cinematic new book.
We all know that the government can hide unpleasant facts from the public in the name of national security, but the magnitude of secrecy—just how disturbing these truths are and how much we are kept in the dark—is more frightening than we could have imagined. As Jacobsen succinctly writes in her prologue:
“This is a book about Nazi scientists and American government secrets. It is about how dark truths can be hidden from the public by U.S. officials in the name of national security, and it is about the unpredictable, often fortuitous, circumstances through which truth gets revealed. Operation Paperclip was a postwar U.S. intelligence program that brought German scientists to America under secret military contracts. The program had a benign public face and a classified body of secrets and lies. `I’m mad on technology,’ Adolf Hitler told his inner circle at a dinner party in 1942, and in the aftermath of the German surrender more than sixteen hundred of Hitler’s technologists would become America’s own.”
Annie Jacobsen, an investigative reporter and former contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, puts a spotlight on twenty-one of these men as she tells how American military leadership schemed to hire Hitler’s scientists in the chaos following World War II. The U.S. government secretly debated whether the value of their knowledge outweighed their crimes. In May of 1945, the U.S. government began a covert operation code-named Operation Paperclip to bring these scientists and their families to the United States, often putting science before justice. The age of weapons of mass destruction had matured and the underlying justification for hiring Nazis was that if America didn’t get these men, the Soviets surely would.
Eight of the twenty-one men profiled by Jacobsen in OPERATION PAPERCLIP worked, at some point, side by side with Third Reich leadership, including Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, and even Adolf Hitler. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich’s ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at 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 secrets of the twentieth century.
Many of these men were accused of war crimes. Others stood trial at Nuremberg. Yet they had also pioneered major advances in the science of warfare. Here in America they continued their weapons-related work for the U.S. government, developing rockets, chemical and biological weapons, and aviation and space medicine. Many of them won top military and civilian awards here—one had a government building named after him, and as of 2013, two have prestigious national science prizes given annually in their names. One invented the ear thermometer and others helped with NASA’s first mission to the moon.
Annie Jacobsen provides a masterful narrative grounded in solid research and facts. She asks the hard questions:
—How did this happen and what does this mean now? —What role did former Nazis play in the creation of the American “military-industrial complex”? —Do scientific accomplishments mitigate moral crimes? —Should government pursue science at any cost?
There are no easy answers in this dark and complicated tale.