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.
As advertised, the story of the program that brought the Paperclip scientists to America (and the story behind the Paperclip name). Not all that much is revealed about the projects the scientists worked on for the US, apart from what’s come to light with NASA, and mostly because not all that much of the full picture is known. Files remain classified, or become declassified but “lost.” The hall of mirrors still exists.
But how it came about, that we now know. Or enough of a glimpse at least. Also interesting is how the Paperclips are almost constantly referenced in Area 51 and yet the Nevada Test Site ranks maybe a paragraph here, barely a footnote in five hundred pages. The scope of the project was so much larger than that. And since the chapter on Project Artichoke and Bluebird and MKUltra is where things start to get interesting, you can tell which book aligned more with my interests. What happened after Strughold established the School of Aviation Medicine, or after Knemeyer, Putt, and co. came to Wright Field, that I’d like to know. And we may never know.
Oddly, though, it’s an example of how there are very few dividing lines. Ideology, nationality. We’re led to believe those are unconquerable things but often, I don’t think that’s the case. Self-preservation wins all, or greed or the all-important consolidation of power. Politics does not stand in the way of doing business. Neither does morality, justice, honor.
It may be a book about inhumanities and atrocities, but it’s also a book about what makes us human. We will do what we have to, telling ourselves it’s all right if it’s the means to an end.
Reading updates
-
Started reading
-
7 January, 2015:
Finished reading
-
7 January, 2015:
Reviewed