In all 1,000 German scientists were targeted, many of whom were ardent Nazis and were involved in crimes that led to the death of thousands of people, with over 500 moving to take up positions in the US, where they were mollycoddled and well paid. With the cold war set to start, some German scientists being captured and put to work by the Soviets, and German science being far in advance of US with regards to rockets and aviation, chemical weapons, underground construction, and military medicine, the US is left with a choice – prosecute scientists who had participated in crimes against humanity in which people were murdered, or give them clemency and hire them to work on military science projects and for the US military-industrial complex.Īs Annie Jacobsen details in great depth and detail, the US military chose the latter through Project Paperclip, often duping other branches of the armed forces, the State Department and the President’s Office, by hiding the criminal pasts of their new hires. In many cases, these two groups overlapped, such as military doctors who performed experiments on people at concentration camps, or rocket scientists who oversaw and relied on the manufacturing and assembling of parts in camps where workers were worked to death, or chemists and biologists who created and tested chemical weapons. As the Second World War in Europe drew to a close the Allies started to hunt down Nazi war criminals and top German scientists.
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