WWII Science & Technology: The Race That Changed Everything - Part 4: Operation Paperclip: The Moral Calculus of Hiring Your Enemy's Monsters

The Moon and the Camps

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon. It was humanity’s greatest achievement. Watching from Mission Control was Wernher von Braun, the genius rocket engineer who had made it possible.

Two decades earlier, von Braun had worn an SS uniform and built rockets using slave labor from concentration camps.

America knew. And America decided it didn’t matter.

What Was Operation Paperclip?

In the final months of World War II, American intelligence officers fanned out across collapsing Nazi Germany with a secret mission: grab the scientists before the Soviets did.

The program was initially called “Operation Overcast,” then renamed “Operation Paperclip”—because personnel files of approved scientists were marked with paperclips.

The scientists recruited included:

• Rocket engineers from the V-2 program
• Aviation specialists from Luftwaffe research centers
• Chemical weapons experts from I.G. Farben
• Medical researchers who had conducted human experiments
• Nuclear physicists from the Uranverein

The program was supposed to exclude anyone with Nazi Party membership or war crimes involvement. This rule was… flexible.

The V-2: Terror Weapon and Space Pioneer

The V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2, “Vengeance Weapon 2”) was the world’s first long-range ballistic missile. It killed approximately 9,000 people in England and Belgium—mostly civilians.

But the V-2 was also a genuine marvel of engineering: the first human object to reach the edge of space, the prototype for every rocket that followed.

Von Braun had designed it. And he had done so using a workforce of concentration camp prisoners.

The underground factory at Mittelbau-Dora was one of the war’s greatest horrors. Prisoners worked 14-hour shifts in tunnels blasted from rock, sleeping in the tunnels, breathing toxic fumes. When they collapsed, they were replaced. The bodies were cremated in ovens that ran 24 hours a day.

More people died building the V-2 than were killed by it.

What Did Von Braun Know?

This is where the historical record becomes deliberately murky.

Von Braun’s postwar defense was that he was an engineer, not a Nazi—a dreamer of space travel who was forced to build weapons to pursue his vision. He claimed ignorance of the worst conditions at Mittelbau-Dora.

The evidence suggests otherwise.

Multiple witnesses placed von Braun at the underground factory. One survivor testified that he saw von Braun watching as prisoners too weak to work were hanged. Von Braun’s personal engineer, Arthur Rudolph, was intimately involved in production management.

Von Braun was also an SS officer—not a conscript, but a commissioned Sturmbannführer (Major). He claimed he joined only to advance his career and had no ideological commitment.

“I was so busy building rockets that I didn’t notice the slaves.”
— The implicit defense of every Paperclip scientist

The Cover-Up

President Truman explicitly ordered that no one with Nazi affiliations could be brought to America. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which ran Paperclip, had a simple solution: they rewrote the scientists’ records.

Incriminating documents were destroyed. Party memberships were hidden. War crimes investigations were quietly dropped. New dossiers were created, presenting the scientists as apolitical technicians caught up in history.

The deception wasn’t exposed until 1985, when journalists obtained documents showing systematic falsification of records. Even then, the full scope of the cover-up wasn’t revealed until the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 forced declassification.

The Soviet Alternative

The standard justification for Paperclip was strategic necessity: “If we don’t take them, the Soviets will.”

This was true. The Soviet Union ran its own program, Operation Osoaviakhim, grabbing over 2,000 German specialists in a single night in October 1946.

But the Soviet argument proves too much. The Soviets also would have taken Nazi death camp administrators. Would that justify American recruitment of concentration camp commanders?

The uncomfortable truth is that Paperclip wasn’t just about denying scientists to the Soviets—it was about using them. America wanted the rocket technology, wanted to win the emerging Cold War, and was willing to hire war criminals to do it.

The Results

Let’s be clear about what Paperclip accomplished:

Military applications:

• The Redstone missile (first American nuclear-armed ballistic missile)
• The Jupiter missile (deployed in Turkey, triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis)
• Guidance systems for ICBMs
• Chemical weapon delivery systems

Space exploration:

• The Mercury-Redstone rocket that launched the first Americans to space
• The Saturn I and Saturn V rockets
• The Moon landing itself

The same hands that signed orders sending prisoners to their deaths designed the machine that put humanity on another world.

The Utilitarian Case

Defenders of Paperclip make a utilitarian argument:

1. The scientists would have worked for someone. Their knowledge existed regardless of who employed them.
2. America put the knowledge to better use. Rockets that would have killed became rockets that explored.
3. The alternative was Soviet dominance. A Soviet-controlled space race might have led to worse outcomes.
4. The Moon landing inspired humanity. Whatever sins built the Saturn V, its achievements transcended them.

This argument has force. The Moon landing was genuinely inspiring. The scientific knowledge gained has benefited humanity.

But it requires accepting that achievements can redeem complicity—that if you do something great enough, your past can be erased.

The Deontological Objection

Others argue that some things are simply wrong, regardless of consequences:

1. Justice requires accountability. The victims of Mittelbau-Dora never saw their tormentors punished.
2. Redemption requires acknowledgment. Von Braun never fully admitted his complicity; America never required him to.
3. Incentives matter. Paperclip signaled that valuable skills could buy impunity—a message with dark implications.
4. The victims are erased. Every celebration of von Braun’s achievements implicitly accepts that 20,000 slave laborers’ deaths were… acceptable.

The 20,000 who died at Mittelbau-Dora have no monuments at NASA facilities. Their names appear in no histories of the space program. The moral trade was completed, and they were the price.

Arthur Rudolph: The Case Study

Von Braun’s story is complicated. His colleague Arthur Rudolph’s is simpler.

Rudolph was the production manager at Mittelbau-Dora. He personally selected which prisoners would work and which would be sent to their deaths. He implemented brutal labor quotas.

After the war, Rudolph came to America through Paperclip. He became a respected engineer at NASA, eventually managing the development of the Saturn V itself—the rocket that went to the Moon.

In 1982, the Office of Special Investigations finally caught up with him. Faced with evidence of war crimes, Rudolph agreed to renounce his American citizenship and return to Germany rather than face trial.

He was never punished. He died in Hamburg in 1996, a free man.

The Moral Calculus

So: was it worth it?

The honest answer is that there’s no honest answer. We’re left with incommensurable values:

On one side:

• 20,000 dead prisoners
• Thousands of V-2 victims
• A cover-up that made a mockery of Nuremberg
• War criminals who lived free and died honored

On the other side:

• The Moon landing
• Modern rocket science
• Satellite technology
• GPS, telecommunications, weather forecasting

Can you weigh these against each other? Is there an exchange rate between achievement and atrocity?

The Lesson

Operation Paperclip forces us to confront something we’d rather not admit: nations don’t have morals; nations have interests.

America’s founding principles would seem to prohibit hiring Nazi war criminals. But those principles bent when national interest demanded it—and then bent further to cover up the bending.

This isn’t unique to America. Every nation, in moments of perceived necessity, has compromised its stated values. The question isn’t whether it happens, but whether we acknowledge it—and what it means that we usually don’t.

The scientists of Paperclip are mostly dead now. The victims of Mittelbau-Dora are all dead. The moral reckoning has been deferred indefinitely.

Von Braun’s face was on magazine covers. The prisoners who built his rockets have no faces—just numbers.

The Unfinished Accounting

Today, the Mittelbau-Dora memorial site in Germany educates visitors about the connection between the V-2 program and the concentration camps. They do not mention, prominently, where the engineers ended up.

At NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, named after George C. Marshall, von Braun’s legacy is celebrated. The full story is not.

Every discussion of the Moon landing is, implicitly, a decision about what counts. If we mention von Braun, do we mention Mittelbau-Dora? If we celebrate the achievement, do we mourn the cost?

Operation Paperclip’s real legacy isn’t the rockets. It’s the precedent: that useful monsters can become heroes, if their utility is great enough and their crimes are buried deep enough.

The paperclip that gave the program its name was meant to mark files for approval. It ended up marking the boundary between memory and forgetting.

This post is part of the WWII Science series, exploring how wartime pressures transformed technology and ethics forever.