C HAPTER 7
PROJECT PAPERCLIP AND THE SPACE RACE
O N M AY 19, 1945, J US T T W E LV E DAYS A F T E R G ER MANY’S UNCONDI tional surrender, Herbert Wagner, creator of the first Nazi guided missile used in combat, landed in Washington, D.C., in a U.S. military aircraft with blacked-out windows. Wagner was the first of a stream of Nazi scientists, technicians, and others to arrive in the United States in a program that came to be known as Project Paperclip. It began as Operation Overcast, a program author ized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to exploit the knowledge of Nazi scien tists. (Overcast was mentioned but not clearly explained in the 2006 film The Good German starring George Clooney.) This operation was renamed Paperclip and formally authorized in August 1945 by President Harry Truman, who was assured that no one with “Nazi or militaristic records” would be involved. By mid-November, more Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians were arriving in America, including Wernher von Braun and more than seven hundred other Nazi rocket scientists. By 1955, nearly a thousand German scientists had been granted citi zenship in the United States and given prominent positions in the Ameri can scientific community. Many had been longtime members of the Nazi