The plan progressed so rapidly that the first group of German scientists and engineers arrived on American soil before President Truman became aware of the program’s existence. It began as Operation Overcast, an initiative focused on taking possession of Nazi scientific knowledge and technology for use in the war against Japan. However, after the Japanese surrender, the larger program was renamed Operation Paperclip and included many more former Third Reich engineers, technicians, and scientists. The code name arose from the Office of Strategic Services’ use of paperclips to mark the intelligence files of scientists and engineers selected for inclusion in the program.
Willy Ley assumed his unique knowledge of rocket science and his experience working with Hermann Oberth would help him obtain a financially secure job with either the United States government or an American corporation expanding into rocket development. But in the eyes of the American military, Ley was an outsider. He learned from contacts in the U.S. government that many of the German engineers who had designed the V-2 had survived the war and had been brought to the United States to work with the War Department. It was cruelly ironic. Ley had left Germany out of conscience, while those who had chosen to remain and build rockets for Hitler were accorded special attention and employed by the U.S. government. Many of Ley’s associates from the Verein für Raumschiffahrt who had worked on the V-2 would be among those leading the effort to make human space travel a reality. But Ley would not be among them.
From an American military officer, Ley learned that the Nazis’ director of the V-2 program had not been Hermann Oberth, as he had assumed. Its manager was Wernher von Braun, who as a bright eighteen-year-old aristocrat and part-time student had been personally introduced to Oberth and the Verein für Raumschiffahrt in 1930 by Ley. When recalling von Braun’s persuasion skills, Ley wrote his friend science-fiction author Robert Heinlein, “I only hope that the U.S. Army will not suddenly find him ‘charming’ in addition to being useful.”
In the waning days of the Third Reich, von Braun and his top associates had considered their options. Soviet forces were approaching from the east and the American Army from the west; their capture was inevitable. They knew their unique technical knowledge would give them leverage when negotiating terms of surrender. When von Braun polled his group, the consensus was to surrender to the Americans, and after hiding for a few days in a remote area of the Bavarian Alps, they made furtive contact with a U.S. infantry division. By the time the Soviet Army arrived at von Braun’s rocket development and testing area at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea, nearly every one of the top scientists and engineers had already surrendered to the American forces.
Von Braun and more than one hundred other members of his German rocket-development team arrived quietly in the United States a few months after the end of the war in Europe. For decades, significant details about how they and other German scientists were vetted and cleared for entry were shrouded in secrecy. But it is undeniable that the United States government concealed the fact that it gave preferential treatment to some German scientists and engineers who had been Nazi Party members or suspected of complicity in war crimes.
The first public news of Operation Paperclip came in an understated press release issued by the War Department on October 1, 1945. It announced that a carefully selected number of “outstanding German scientists” would be brought to the United States to impart technical knowledge vital to the nation’s security. The one-page release said that they would be in the United States on a temporary basis and all had made the journey voluntarily. Not long after, The New York Times revealed the “entire German staff at the [Peenemünde] rocket-weapon base, about ninety men,” had arrived in the United States. In actuality, during the war as many as twelve thousand had been employed at Peenemünde, but only the top echelon—around one hundred fifty rocket scientists and engineers—had traveled to the United States to work with von Braun.
THE WAR DEPARTMENT and the Office of Strategic Services considered the German scientists and engineers such valuable assets that it was deemed far more important that the United States government gain access to their expertise and knowledge than worry about the controversial—and highly classified—details contained in their wartime files. Stalin’s encroachment into Eastern Europe had already prompted fears of a protracted conflict with the Soviet Union. And during the immediate post-war years, Americans suspected of having communist sympathies were deemed a far greater threat to the nation than someone with a past association with the defeated Third Reich.
A few years earlier, David Lasser’s tenure as the president of the Workers Alliance of America had ended when members of the Communist Party asserted domination over its leadership. Lasser was a socialist but opposed communism, and he chose to resign from the alliance in protest. President Franklin Roosevelt subsequently asked him to form an organization that would train the unemployed so that they could transition into the workforce. But his nomination ran into trouble when reactionary members of Congress discovered Lasser’s name on a list of suspected leftists. While sitting in the gallery above the United States House of Representatives, Lasser listened as a Texas congressman with a reputation for grandstanding and publicly exposing the identities of political subversives attacked his reputation. He ridiculed the author of The Conquest of Space on the House floor as “a crackpot with mental delusions that we can travel to the Moon!” The House exploded in laughter and Lasser’s nomination died in the midst of the uproar.
Shortly after V-E Day, it appeared that Lasser’s fortunes in Washington might be improving, as memory of his ridicule in the House began to fade. The Truman administration asked him to assist with the rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Plan, offering him a position as a consultant to the secretary of commerce. Ironically, at nearly the same moment that American military and intelligence officers were quietly obscuring the past histories of former Nazi Party engineers, David Lasser’s political opponents began circulating false rumors about his alleged past association with subversive political organizations, in an effort to tarnish his reputation. They questioned his loyalty and argued that his “contrary views” posed a serious security risk.
Lasser was incredulous at the coordinated smear campaign. “I kept asking myself, what kind of government would do these things? What kind of people were we that this sort of thing happened?” Despite vigorous support from prominent politicians, the accusations and rumors effectively blacklisted Lasser from any further government employment. Far less renowned than the Hollywood Ten or writers like Howard Fast or Arthur Miller, David Lasser, one of the country’s first space advocates and the author of The Conquest of Space, became one of the first victims of the Red Scare.
© Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
The Conquest of Space author David Lasser (center) and a fellow labor organizer meet with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. Not long afterward, Lasser was ridiculed on the floor of the House of Representatives as “a crackpot with mental delusions that we can travel to the Moon!”
The War Department’s decision to bring scientists and engineers from Hitler’s Third Reich to work for the U.S. government did not go unopposed. Prominent physicists such as Albert Einstein and Hans Bethe as well as former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt criticized Operation Paperclip. But the larger looming reality of the Soviet Union’s brutal domination of Eastern Europe, legitimate fears of domestic espionage, and reports of a possible Russian nuclear-weapons program silenced most public resistance to the program. No congressmen delivered speeches questioning whether the German scientists posed a security risk or held contrary political views. Instead, the White House asked the Department of Commerce to issue reports that would explain to ordinary Americans how their daily lives would benefit from wondrous German technological breakthroughs in food preparation and the manufacture of cheaper, stronger clothing, such as run-free nylons and unlimited