military wasn’t the only country eyeing Nazi scientists-their one-time allies in the Soviet Union were doing the same thing. That is really where Paperclip began, which was suddenly the Pentagon realizing, ‘Wait a minute, we need these weapons for ourselves.’"īut just studying the weapons wasn't enough, and the U.S. “They had no idea that Hitler was working on a bubonic plague weapon. “One example was they had no idea that Hitler had created this whole arsenal of nerve agents,” Jacobsen says. Jacobson wrote about both the mission and the scientists in her book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America. They came across facets of the Nazi war machine that the top brass were shocked to see, writer Annie Jacobsen told NPR’s All Things Considered in 2014. In the days and weeks after Germany’s surrender, American troops combed the European countryside in search of hidden caches of weaponry to collect. So it came to pass that 71 years ago today, 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States and were promptly put to work for Uncle Sam. As the war came to a close in 1945, both American and Russian officials began scheming to get that technology for themselves. From nerve and disease agents to the feared and coveted V-1 and V-2 rockets, Nazi scientists worked on an impressive arsenal. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have put an end to World War II, but they weren’t the only destructive weaponry developed during the war.
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