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Operation Paperclip

the Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America
Jul 07, 2016Lord_Vad3r rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
One thing I know for certain is that Indiana Jones did not spend all of that time fighting the nazis, throwing them out dirigibles, and melting their faces off just so that our government could bring them over here and use them to give ourselves a Cold War advantage. The organization of the information in this book seems to jump around a little too much. This makes it hard to follow the timeline for each of the individuals discussed. Also, there seem to be numerous diversions where the focus shifts to another historical personage related to the story line but not necessarily impacting it. These passages add to the distraction. As the Allies began to push further and further into German-controlled territory, it became clear that the Germans were much more technologically advanced. The only exception being with respect to atomic power. As the Allies closed in on Berlin, the nazis began scrambling around trying to destroy evidence, hide things they deemed valuable, and sought the bargaining chips that would spare their lives. The US, England, Russia, and France all seemingly arranged special military teams with two goals: identifying what the nazis were working on and identifying who the key scientists were. When WWII ended it seems that the US and Soviet Russia moved right into the Cold War. It wasn’t long before certain factions within the military industrial complex and the intelligence communities were advocating that the US better find and employ the best of these scientists before the communists did. Would we have gone straight to war with the USSR after the end of WWII? Who knows. Was Russia as active in recruiting nazi brainpower as we apparently were? I don’t know enough about the subject to say. Perhaps somebody with a greater knowledge of Russian politics can contribute to this review and let us know. According to Jacobsen, the good old US recruited and hired some 1,600 nazi scientists and technicians. The government whitewashed these men’s war records and brought them over to the US to live and work among us. And if they couldn’t make them appear squeaky clean then they would put them under contract at US bases in Europe. A number of these men ran labor camps and factories where thousands were worked to death. There were doctors who purposefully gave people gangrene or bubonic plague. They froze people to see if they could resurrect them. I’m not saying that all of them were bad but there were several that should have been hanged of given significant prison time. The US, the Soviets, and the Germans were all concerned with what is called ABC warfare (which stands for Atomic-Biological-Chemical). This is the stuff that should keep us all up at night. In the back of my mind I know that this stuff exists and that there are specialized groups within every major government dedicated solely to figuring out how to spread disease among the enemy’s livestock or how to develop a nerve agent capable of killing someone in 10 minutes through skin contact. Maybe we really do carry the seeds of our own destruction. It won’t be an asteroid that takes humanity out. It’ll be some pathogen we created in a lab. I first heard about Operation Paperclip on the X Files and now kind of wish I had a time machine so I could send Fox Mulder back in time to finish those nazis before they ever built the V2. As for the book it was okay. But it’s impact will not extend far beyond raising your general paranoia level and making you generally angry.