Operation Paperclip

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Brought to you by Penguin.

In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich's scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis' once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler's scientists and their families to the United States.

Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?

Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich's ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century.

© Annie Jacobsen 2014 (P) Hachette Audio 2014

Critics Review

Important, superbly written. . . . Jacobsen’s book allows us to explore these questions with the ultimate tool: hard evidence. She confronts us with the full extent of Paperclip’s deal with the devil, and it’s difficult to look away.
USA Today
With Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip for the first time the enormity of the effort has been laid bare. The result is a book that is at once chilling and riveting, and one that raises substantial and difficult questions about national honor and security. . . .This book is a remarkable achievement of investigative reporting and historical writing, but it is a moral force as well as a literary tour de force.
Boston Globe
The most in-depth account yet of the lives of Paperclip recruits and their American counterparts. . . . Jacobsen deftly untangles the myriad German and American agencies and personnel involved. . . . More gripping and skillfully rendered are the stories of American and British officials who scoured defeated Germany for Nazi scientists and their research.
New York Times Book Review
Darkly picaresque. . . . Jacobsen persuasively argues that the mindset of the former Nazi scientists who ended up working for the American government may have exacerbated Cold War paranoia.
The New Yorker
Jacobsen uses newly released documents, court transcripts, and family-held archives to give the fullest accounting yet of this endeavor.
New York Post
The moral issues it raises are disturbing and even perhaps profound.
Wall Street Journal
Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip is a superb investigation, showing how the U.S. government recruited the Nazis’ best scientists to work for Uncle Sam on a stunning scale. Sobering and brilliantly researched.
Alex Kershaw, author of The Liberator

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