Project Paperclip: German Scientists, American Policy, and the Cold War

Abstract

The American program to bring German scientists and technicians to the United States after World War II (Project Paperclip) was but one aspect of a larger postwar program designed to exploit German scientific and technical know-how for the benefit of the military and industrial establishments in the United States. That larger postwar program, which the American military and industrial establishments helped to promote and implement, had its roots in the war and was inspired or influenced at every stage of its conception and development by prior British initiatives. Project Paperclip itself was in part an attempt to deny the benefits of German expertise to all nations except Great Britain, with whom the United States (at the suggestion of the British) worked out an allocation formula and a procedure to share the German scientists and technicians. The project was not conceived primarily as a weapon in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, nor was its primary purpose in practice to deny scientific and technical talent to that country alone.

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