Student Capstone Project

Jewish Studies minors work on a capstone project in their last semester that combines their major area of study with a topic in Jewish Studies. Here, Morgan Knight ’22 writes about her capstone project on the subject of Operation Paperclip.

BY MORGAN KNIGHT

The facts of the Operation Paperclip and the relocation of Nazi scientists are readily available, but not widely known. Operation Paperclip was a United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 high-profile Nazi scientists, doctors, and engineers (and their families) were brought to the United States for government employment. The program ran from 1945 to 1959, and its stated goal was to harness Germany’s intellectual power and technology.

I learned about Operation Paperclip from a TV show. My roommates and I clicked on an Amazon Original about fictional Nazi hunters, starring our childhood crush, and passively took in a story I could vaguely resonate with; the main character’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors who sought vengeance after being liberated from the camps. (My Zaide [grandpa] was a partisan fighter, and I always thought his story would make a great script.) I’ve known about the events of the Holocaust in great detail for my entire life. Between my Hebrew-school upbringing and personal interest in studying genocide, I had compiled a trove of knowledge about the events leading up to and carried out during the 1940s. As we’re watching this show, I answered all my friends’ questions: “What does ‘kvetch’ mean?” “Where was Auschwitz located?” “Is Logan Lerman really Jewish?” But when a conversation about Operation Paperclip happened on screen, my non-Jewish roommates looked at me, blinking. “Um… is that real?” A quick Google search later, I became obsessed with compiling information about American weaponized complicity during and after WWII.

After 1945, the United States was desperate to harness Germany’s scientific and technological advancements in order to obtain a military advantage in the Cold War. An American intelligence group known as the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) began interrogating scientists and seizing documents as German research facilities were taken over by Allied forces. Mysteriously, they discovered a file known as the Osenberg list in a toilet at Bonn University in Germany. The list contained the names and occupations of thousands of engineers, scientists, and inventors who worked for the Third Reich. At the time, President Harry Truman forbade JIOA from actively recruiting any scientists who were Nazi members or supporters.

Officials within JIOA and the Office of Strategic Services (which later developed into the CIA) whitewashed the records of these Nazis, prioritizing their scientific knowledge over evidence of their involvement in war crimes. The relocation of Nazi scientists to the United States became known as Operation Paperclip (because the files of these scientists had been marked with a paperclip), and

officially began in May of 1945. Of the 1,600 men (and their families) relocated to the United States under Operation Paperclip, many were active Nazi supporters and/or high-ranking SS officials. These scientists and their families were relocated to the United States under “temporary, limited military custody,” but most stayed in the United States for the remainder of their lives. With their horrific actions erased from their records, many married,

A GROUP OF 104 ROCKET SCIENTISTS (AEROSPACE ENGINEERS) AT FORT BLISS, TEXAS

(continued on page 16)

Receiving the Ruderman Scholarship further empowered and affirmed my passion for Jewish Studies. The support of the Ruderman Family Foundation gave me the opportunity to confidently continue my research and studies. In the future, I hope to continue my education in Civil Rights law and/or policy.