Project Paperclip brought hundreds of German scientists and engineers, including aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, to the United States in the first decade after World War II. More than the freighters full of equipment or the documents recovered from caves and hastily abandoned warehouses, the German brains who designed and built the V-2 rocket and other "wonder weapons" for the Third Reich proved invaluable to America's emerging military-industrial complex. Whether they remained under military employment, transitioned to civilian agencies like NASA, or sought more lucrative careers with corporations flush with government contracts, German specialists recruited into the Paperclip program assumed enormously influential positions within the labyrinthine national security state.
Drawing on recently declassified documents from intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the State Department, Brian Crim's Our Germans examines the process of integrating German scientists into a national security state dominated by the armed services and defense industries. Crim explains how the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency enticed targeted scientists, whitewashed the records of Nazis and war criminals, and deceived government agencies about the content of security investigations. Exploring the vicious bureaucratic rivalries that erupted over the wisdom, efficacy, and morality of pursuing Paperclip, Our Germans reveals how some Paperclip proponents and scientists influenced the perception of the rival Soviet threat by volunteering inflated estimates of Russian intentions and technical capabilities.
As it describes the project's embattled legacy, Our Germans reflects on the myriad ways that Paperclip has been remembered in culture and national memory. As this engaging book demonstrates, whether characterized as an expedient Cold War program born from military necessity or a dishonorable episode, the project ultimately reflects American ambivalence about the military-industrial complex and the viability of an "ends justifies the means" solution to external threats.
"Through participant vignettes, historian Crim provides insight into early Cold War decision-making in this well-documented, microhistorical, dissertation-like expose of Project Paperclip. Highly recommended."--Choice
"A very fine account concerning the internal dynamics of the Paperclip program, providing a more nuanced evaluation than has hitherto been available."--H-Net Reviews
"At a time when drones, cyberweapons, and other high technology continue to substitute for coherent foreign policy, Crim's book is a sober reminder of the moral hazards of a technocratic national security state."--Journal of American History
"What distinguishes Our Germans is its emphasis on the role of the specialists in the emerging national security state of the early Cold War, where Project Paperclip 'exacerbated the growing rift between the State Department and an ascendant national security bureaucracy' (99). But most importantly, Our Germans is a much-needed update and expansion of Clarence Lasby's 1971 Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War."--American Historical Review