Setting the Stage to Bring in the “Highly Skilled”
Project Paperclip and the Recruitment of German Specialists after World War II
Electrical engineer Kurt Heinrich Debus and patent attorney Herbert Felix Axster were two of hundreds of German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and technical experts brought to the United States under “Project Overcast” after World War II. The secret military operation, better known under its later name, “Project Paperclip,” imported experts in strategic fields such as aerodynamics, rocketry, chemical weapons, and medicine. Unlike most of their colleagues, neither Debus nor Axster were allowed to pursue US citizenship in 1948, as both had been deemed “ardent Nazis.” Their situation changed, however, with the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (Public Law 414), also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. In a memorandum ordering that Debus’s and Axster’s applications for authorization of pre-examination be granted, the assistant commissioner of the Inspections and Examinations Division of the Immigration and Naturalization Service explained that their “past membership in organizations which were affiliated with the Nazi party” no longer constituted grounds for inadmissibility. As the central considerations for this decision he offered “that the subjects are engaged in scientific projects deemed essential to the public security” and that they “appear to be otherwise admissible.”1 Their visa applications could finally move forward. While Axster did not take advantage of the new circumstances and instead returned to Germany in 1953, Debus stayed and became a US citizen. In 1962 he became the first director of what would later be known as NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.2
Scholars and investigative journalists have explored Project Paperclip mainly as a military undertaking, as a story of knowledge and technology transfer, and for its Machiavellian logic.3 But the program is also important as part of immigration history because it helped set the future agenda, even for current immigration debates and policies.
Paperclip extended favorable treatment to northern Europeans with questionable pasts at the same time that others were severely disadvantaged by the nation’s immigration system. The involved government departments went to great lengths to create and then expedite the process that would turn the German and Austrian specialists, who entered the country as enemy aliens, into resident aliens with a path to citizenship. This process occurred when national policies rigorously restricted, and in some cases completely banned, immigrants from non-northern and western European countries.4 Even the thousands of victims of the Nazi regime who were still suffering in postwar Europe could not immigrate until the implementation of the first Displaced Persons Act in 1948. The decision to offer the scientists and technical professionals a path to citizenship also contrasted with the treatment of agricultural workers from Mexico, who had been brought into the United States since 1942 under the Bracero Program—a guest worker program that offered only temporary visas.
The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act was not designed specifically for Debus and Axster, but its allocation of 50 percent of visas to highly skilled professionals amplified a trend in immigration policy that had its roots in a longer history of preferential treatment of immigrants with desired skills. While immigration laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became increasingly restrictive based on an applicant’s national origin, they always included exceptions for those who could presumably further the nation’s interests. Earlier laws already provided exemptions for teachers, students, and merchants, then for skilled laborers, professionals, actors, ministers, professors, domestic servants, nurses, and agricultural workers.5 What was new after World War II was an emphasis on professionals with scientific or technical skills.
Immigration historians have only begun to investigate the history of immigrants with special skills.6 Those concerned with the McCarran-Walter Act have focused primarily on its effect on the contemporary immigration regime as well as efforts leading up to the bill to challenge the national-origins quota system.7 This chapter brings immigration history, military history, and the histories of science and technology in conversation with each other to explore how Project Paperclip foreshadowed and potentially stimulated the shift in national immigration policies to favor scientists and technical professionals. It lays out the competing interests of various constituencies and how the involved government departments worked out their conflicting agendas. As in most immigration quagmires, many issues were not resolved and linger on as contentious topics until today.8
World War II was profoundly affected by new inventions and applications of science and technology. All of the primary participating countries aimed to develop better technologies to gain an advantage over the enemy. At war’s end in the European theater, the Allies were therefore not only eager to gain control of Germany’s weapons, laboratories, equipment, factories, and documentation, they also wanted to take advantage of those who had developed these technologies. The United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union searched for and captured thousands of German and Austrian experts in aerodynamics, radar, rocketry, nuclear technology, chemical weapons, medicine, and other fields, even before the war officially ended. In addition to evidence of a German atomic bomb, the most prominent examples of sought-after technology were Hitler’s so-called “wonder” weapons, the jet-powered V-1 cruise missile and the rocket-powered V-2 ballistic missile.9 Herbert Axster and Kurt Debus were associated with the group that designed the V-2.
The US undertaking was considered a form of “intellectual reparations”—a scientific and technical exploitation program to transfer people, know-how, and matériel from Germany to the United States. For this purpose, American scientists and industry specialists joined military intelligence units in Germany in search for items and people often previously identified. Initially, the utilization of German and Austrian specialists was limited to temporary exploitation to fight Japan in the Pacific arena and aid in postwar military research, after which the military would return them to Europe.10 The military offered them short-term contracts, and most were brought to New York, where they were separated and sent to different destinations around the country. The specialists were classified as “enemy aliens temporarily in the United States as civilian employees of the War Department.”11 In an effort to keep the project secret and under tight control, the War Department was supposed to segregate the specialists from unauthorized persons, require them to have an escort whenever moving off base, limit their access to classified information, and censor their mail.
It did not take long, however, for circumstances to call for a major shift in the program’s goals and thus the treatment of the specialists from Germany. Designed for temporary settlement and exploitation at first, the program would eventually parallel more general immigration policies that encourage permanent settlement and employment. The process of revising the program vividly illustrates the varied priorities of the different government agencies involved.
When the war with Japan ended, denying other countries’ access to the specialists’ expertise became the main goal. Reports from Germany indicated that French and Russian agents were using attractive offers to entice Germans with desirable skills to work for their respective nations. Many Germans also openly made plans to emigrate to Latin American countries. Stateside, a number of the already captured specialists refused to renew their short-term War Department contracts unless they had a better sense of their long-term futures and knew that their families could join them in the United States. Compounding these concerns, the British government threatened to withhold experts it had captured unless the United States adopted a long-term exploitation policy.12 Sending the specialists back to Europe seemed to be a bigger security risk than keeping them in the United States permanently. The US government felt pressed to act swiftly and provide more attractive incentives to entice the specialists to move to and then stay in the country.13
Meantime, President Truman gave the Executive Order 9604 on August 1945 “to provide for ‘prompt, public, free, and general’ dissemination of all unclassified ‘scientific, industrial, and technical processes, inventions, methods, devices, improvements, and advances’ acquired by American missions in Germany,” in the hope that this would help the postwar economy by “creating new methods, new products, and greater employment opportunities.” The Commerce Department therefore already collected, declassified, and distributed scientific and technical information gathered in Germany to American industry.14 Unsurprisingly, it was also very interested in taking advantage of the experts from Germany and Austria for American industry.
A newly created Technical Industrial Intelligence Committee in Washington worked with the armed services, private industry, trade associations, and universities to identify people and items for field teams to look for in Germany. Experts joined the field teams as temporary technical consultants to help locate, detain, and interrogate thousands of German scientists and technicians. When the American experts returned, they reported back to their trade, industry, and professional organizations, which used the information to make recommendations for additional investigations and an extension of the wartime program into the postwar period. They also explicitly called for the recruitment of German scientists and technicians, arguing that the British, French, or Russians might get to them first, which would give those countries not only a military but also an industrial advantage.15
Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace and the head of the Commerce Department’s Office of Declassification and Technical Services, John C. Green, proposed a policy as early as December 1945 for the “transfer of outstanding German scientists to this country for the advancement of our science and industry” in order to fulfill Truman’s directive more comprehensively.16 But bringing the specialists to the United States before they were vetted as eligible to become US citizens meant that the War Department would have to organize the transportation, surveillance, screening, and administration of the specialists, while the Commerce Department reaped the benefits.17 They agreed instead that the War Department would determine whether specialists whom the Commerce Department had identified were eligible for recruitment for reasons of “national security.” As a result, in the early stages only twenty-one Germans entered the United States to work in industry.
Despite not being able to bring in many specialists directly at first, the efforts of the Commerce Department and industry paid off in the long run. The department was still heavily involved in Project Paperclip by arranging the transfer of specialists from military agencies to private industry and universities after they had fulfilled their military obligations. Private companies could interview individual specialists or borrow them for limited times from the various military services, and in some cases they would even request that specific specialists be recruited through Project Paperclip, in order to “borrow” them for their needs. With the passing of the Displaced Persons Acts in 1948 and the resumption of normal consular services in Austria and the American, French, and British zones of Germany, the department finally won approval for a streamlined procedure to acquire specialists in the “national interest.”18
Turning Enemy Aliens into Immigrants
The change in goals from exploitation to denial provided an almost irrefutable argument for a more permanent and long-term solution. When the project’s name was compromised in November 1945, it was changed from Overcast to Paperclip. This was followed almost immediately by a new directive in March 1946, which included the possibility for the specialists to attain citizenship as well as receive long-term contracts, if the administering officials deemed that to be “in the interest of national security.”19 The directive also stipulated that the military could bring a total of 350 German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States under the project’s auspices, that some of the initial security measures would be loosened, and that in coordination with the Commerce Department, civilian industries and laboratories could now also employ the specialists. With these prospects, the specialists’ dependents began to join them in the United States within one or two years. In September 1946, another directive raised to one thousand the limit for how many specialists could be brought to the United States.20
It was one thing to bring people who had worked for the Nazi war machine to the United States for temporary exploitation, but quite another to put them on a path to citizenship. The War Department had been able to evade close scrutiny of the State and Justice Departments for temporary exploitation, but now it had to convince these entities that the procedures for immigration would ensure that neither war criminals nor so-called “ardent Nazis” could become US citizens. It would take almost two years, several revisions, and multiple compromises in the name of “the national interest” before the War, State, and Justice Departments finalized a procedure under which the German and Austrian specialists and their families could become official immigrants. The three departments struggled mainly over what type of information was needed for the pre-examination process and how to evaluate the data. The State Department in particular needed convincing. But since Hitler’s regime was defeated and the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union was becoming more important in international and domestic politics, fears that the Germans might spread Nazi ideology in the United States were waning at the same time that anticommunism was gaining greater momentum. The focus eventually shifted from looking at what the specialists had done in the past under Hitler’s regime to what they would do in and for the United States in the future.
The State Department protested the importation of the specialists on several grounds. One argument was that Project Paperclip would allow them to conduct the kind of research they were prohibited from pursuing in postwar Germany. Another, maybe more important, argument was that it violated inter-American agreements “to reduce Axis ‘centers of influence’ in the Western Hemisphere.” The State Department therefore required thorough investigations of each individual, the nature and extent of which generated significant delays in processing the specialists’ applications. The War Department considered this unacceptable, especially since the delays meant that the military had to continue keeping a costly close eye on the specialists, who were growing restless.21
It seems ironic that the State Department appeared to be more concerned than the War Department about security issues, but with the Nazi regime destroyed, many areas of government no longer viewed Nazism, but rather the USSR and Communism, as a major threat. The director of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) wondered out loud at one point whether the State Department officials were deliberately sabotaging the program by “beating a dead Nazi horse.”22
The United States had already been privileging Germans with desirable skills when other national interests took precedence. Immediately following the war, it circumvented its own denazification program that was designed to remove Nazis from positions of influence and power. For example, the US Army’s agency—Field Information Agency, Technical (FIAT)—that administered the postwar scientific and technical exploitation program in Germany, routinely hired Germans with needed linguistic and technical skills to support its mission, even though they were not eligible based on their denazification records.23 A more egregious example, perhaps, is that American intelligence agencies began to employ former German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis—all potential war criminals—for intelligence gathering against a growing Communist threat.24 In short, the desire to capture German know-how took precedence over other concerns from the start. In the case of Paperclip, the then-common belief that science and technology was apolitical and value-neutral additionally allowed officials to interpret the specialists’ membership in Nazi organizations as motivated by career objectives, not active and enthusiastic ideological support.
The involved parties eventually agreed on immigration directives. As long as the specialists appeared to embrace American democracy and did not promote Nazi ideology, they were considered assets for the nation. The government also considered it imperative for national security and defense that they should not fall into the hands of other nations, and it viewed their immigration to be in the national interest because of the expected long-term benefits for national security and industry.25 The shift in focus produced revised security reports, which would later lead investigative reporters to question the morality of the entire project. In the context of the emerging Cold War in the late 1940s, however, the circumstances seemed to mandate the compromises.
Implementing the new directives required further modifications to satisfy all involved parties. Before the policy for Project Paperclip changed to include the specialists’ potential immigration, the Intelligence Division of the War Department had supplied the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with photos, fingerprints, and biographical and professional sketches for each of the specialists. This would not suffice to evaluate their suitability for immigration. The dossier now had to also include a denazification record, medical certificate, basic personnel record, questionnaire, monthly statements about the specialist’s surveillance, and investigation reports.26 Both the denazification record and investigation reports were sources of contention among the War, State, and Justice Departments.
The fact that the military brought the scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States without executing the mandatory denazification procedures, which in Germany were required by the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism, was one of the major stumbling blocks for speedy processing.27 To satisfy State and Justice requirements for denazification, the War Department proposed a special procedure: instead of shipping the specialists back to Germany for denazification trials, the specialists would fill out the questionnaire (Meldebogen/Fragebogen) required for the denazification process, which would then be forwarded to the US Military Government in Germany and Austria for trials in absentia by a special tribunal created for this purpose.28 General Lucius D. Clay, head of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) in Germany, strongly opposed this idea, as it would have resulted in a public display of special procedures for the German specialists already in the United States. He anticipated that this would not only affect German sentiments toward the US occupiers but would also draw unwanted attention to Project Paperclip. In the end, the government departments agreed that, instead of sending the completed forms to Europe, the JIOA would collect them and base further recommendations on them—a very different procedure from those performed in Germany for denazification, where some of the specialists would have been punished with fines, jail terms, employment restrictions, and forfeiture of civic rights.
The other major contention among the US government departments concerned the evaluation of the investigation reports, also referred to as security reports. These had to include the results from surveillance of the specialists in the United States but also reports based on investigations by OMGUS in Europe. In addition, the specialists and their dependents had to submit a typewritten, sworn statement explaining their membership in the NSDAP (Nazi party) and affiliated organizations. Here, they had to describe in detail the degree of their participation and reasons for joining.29 The investigations in Europe adhered to a lengthy process that frequently created extended delays in the pre-examination of visa applicants. The requirement for local investigations was therefore later limited to applicants whose records “indicate that the specialist was a leader or organizer in the NSDAP or its affiliates or … no official records can be found and other sources indicate the possibility of political incrimination.”30 The investigators in Europe used the same criteria that were used for other Germans, however, and found many of the specialists to be “potential security threats” and even “ardent Nazis,” which prompted a review of the procedures in the United States.
Since the initial reports from Europe would have had a similarly limiting effect as the State Department’s initial requirements, the government changed the policy for how to evaluate the information regarding the specialists’ former affiliation with Nazi regime, so that more of the much-desired specialists could receive visas. In September 1946 the State, War, and Navy Departments, as well as President Truman, granted approval for a policy that clarified that while an individual who had been an active member in the Nazi regime could not be brought to the United States, “any honors or positions awarded a specialist by the Nazi Party because of his scientific or technical ability were not to be considered sufficient evidence to disqualify his entry into the United States.”31 This was a major policy shift that suddenly allowed specialists who had previously been classified as ardent Nazis or at a minimum “a potential security threat” to enter the country and eventually apply for citizenship.32
The question of how to evaluate the specialists remained a controversial issue, however, and led to another shift in the assessment of the specialists’ past behavior. In November 1947 the chief of the Exploitation Branch of the Intelligence Division wrote in protest of security reports that OMGUS had submitted, which would have excluded some of the specialists “based solely on the fact that these specialists have not undergone denazification proceedings and appear to be presumptive class 2 offenders by reason of early membership in the Nazi Party.” The chief considered this approach unrealistic and declared that security evaluations should state if a full investigation is not possible and that “where Party membership without rank, activity or Party honors is indicated, a saving clause should be inserted to allow for a change in security evaluation if subject is later denazified or demonstrates his fitness for permanent residence in the United States by his attitude and actions while under supervision for a minimum of six months in the United States.”33 In other words, when in doubt over a specialist’s level of involvement with the Nazi regime, the evaluator should assume less rather than more involvement.
In many cases, information was simply not available because the specialist came from a region of Germany that was now occupied by Soviet forces. Since the information would be missing on the security reports for these specialists, the JIOA director ordered in 1948 that the security report should omit the paragraph that refers to local investigations and renumber the following paragraphs because “the appearance of an incomplete report is undesirable.”34
One of the War Department inquiries on how to speed up the pre-examination process revealed that, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was conducting additional extensive investigations of each applicant before recommending approval to the Justice Department. The director of intelligence therefore met with Hoover and convinced him that the investigations of the military services were thorough enough and that the FBI should expedite the approval process in order to “relieve the War Department of its custodial responsibilities.”35
The government charged the JIOA with the coordination of the finally agreed-upon process. Since many of the specialists were already working on high-priority research-development programs, the potential danger of their capture by an enemy nation if sent back to Europe to obtain visas made that option impractical. Instead, they would undergo a pre-examination procedure in the United States, after which they could obtain a visa at a consulate either in Canada or Mexico, depending on which border was closest. Immigration procedures for individual specialists began only after they had been under observation in the United States for a minimum of six months. In order to begin the process, the secretary of war had to submit a completed dossier for each specialist, certifying that the specialist’s entry was “in the national interest, that his permanent residence in this country would aid in furthering national security requirements, and that such entry would not be prejudicial to the interests of the United States.” The dossier went to the secretary of state and the attorney general, and if they determined that a visa could be granted, they informed the consul, before whom the specialist was to appear, of the decision. In the meantime, the Justice Department made a final check concerning national security and national interest and informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the results.36
The government agencies coordinated the procedures for obtaining visas with the respective consuls in Canada and Mexico. In April 1948, the American consul in Niagara Falls, Canada, issued the first visa to a specialist who had arrived under Project Paperclip.37 The largest cohesive group of specialists who arrived under Paperclip was the team that had developed the V-2 rocket and whose rockets later put the first American satellite into orbit and humans on the Moon. That team was stationed at Ft. Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands, New Mexico, so the army sent the individual members across the Mexican border to obtain their visas. Accompanied by a military escort in civilian clothes, the specialist would appear in front of the consul in Ciudad Juárez with the required documentation. After receiving his visa, the specialist returned to the United States and received resident alien status under US immigration laws. He was no longer in military custody, which meant that his military employers no longer had authority over him. He could now also submit the required forms to initiate the immigration of his dependents.38
The program lasted well into the late 1960s under various names, which makes it difficult to determine exactly how many scientists and engineers were eventually brought to the United States under its auspices. The estimated total number in the 1945–1952 period, during which about 90 percent of the German and Austrian specialists were recruited, vary between 518 and 642.39 According to Clarence Lasby, whose 1971 monograph is still the most reliable comprehensive source (even though he did not have access to many now declassified files), “the Department of Army imported 210 specialists, of whom 29 returned to Europe prior to immigration. … The United States Air Force sponsored 260, of whom 36 returned to Germany and 1 re-emigrated to Argentina,” and “the Navy selected … 111 Paperclip specialists” between 1945 and 1952.40
A more comprehensive study for the entire program is still needed, but at least among the rocket team several members experienced delays in the issuance of their visas due to “derogatory background information” and delayed security reports. That said, the army did not send any of them back to Germany due to their early membership in the Nazi Party or for being an “ardent Nazi,” even though OMGUS had initially classified several of them as potential threats to the security of the United States.41 A few left voluntarily, and the army sent one of them back because he had disobeyed orders not to cross the border into Mexico, and another one because he presumably suffered from mental illness. Several others were sent back because their skills were not deemed necessary after all. Most of the remaining members of the rocket team who arrived in the immediate postwar period attained US citizenship by the mid-1950s.
Very few of those who arrived under Project Paperclip were later challenged based on their work for Hitler’s regime. The leader of the rocket team, Wernher von Braun, was the best-known recruit under Project Paperclip. His morality was frequently questioned over the years, but he never faced charges in a court of law. Another prominent recruit, Hubertus Strughold, sometimes referred to as “the father of space medicine,” came under greater scrutiny for his work under the Nazi regime only after his death in 1986. In 1984 another prominent member of the rocket team, Arthur Rudolph, returned to Germany after signing an affidavit, according to which he “participated … in the persecution of unarmed civilians because of their race, religion, national origin, or political opinion” as the production manager for the V-2 rocket.42
Project Paperclip and the McCarran-Walter Act
There was evidently good reason to deny Axster and Debus, who were mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, the privilege of pursuing US citizenship. The secretary of war received a letter on April 14, 1947, from the president of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, to remind him of the goals of World War II, but primarily to alert him of a dispatch from Berlin published in the New York Times on January 4, 1947. It discussed Mr. and Mrs. Axster’s activities in Nazi Germany and claimed that, under German denazification laws, Mrs. Axster would be considered a major offender.43 The army launched a reinvestigation of the Axsters in Europe, and the European Command sent a cable stating: “H. Axster not politically active … Ilse Axster—was highly active in Nazi Party, was not a war criminal but was a party member since 1937, an ardent Nazi and fanatical representative of Nazi ideology. Definitely a security threat.”44 These allegations were based on statements from former neighbors who reported on her activities as the head of the local NS Frauenschaft (Nazi women’s organization) and their observations that she had mistreated foreign laborers who worked on the Axsters’ farm during the war.45 Despite these assessments, agencies within the War Department made several appeals to the State Department and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on their behalf. One of the reasons his employers did not want to see Axster and his wife deported was the fact that he “had access to highly classified information in many fields of guided missile development” and therefore had information that made him “a definite potential security threat to the United States if he [were] deported.”46 Even his wife had presumably “acquired a sufficient technical orientation to be of intelligence value to the Russians or other power” thanks to her mental capabilities and her close association with the project.47
Kurt Debus had been considered an “ardent” Nazi because he had applied for membership in the notorious SS (Protection Squadron) in 1940 and had denounced a colleague to Nazi authorities as a traitor in 1942 based on a conversation they had about the causes of the war with Britain.48 The attorney of the person whom Debus had accused requested that his sentence of two years’ imprisonment and payment of court costs be postponed until after the war. Ironically, he argued that the accused was considered an indispensable asset for the German war effort. In 1950 the secretary of the army made a similar argument on Debus’s behalf. His letter to the secretary of state in 1950 summarizes the then-prevailing attitude among US government and military officials toward the Nazi pasts of the German and Austrian specialists: “Although he [Debus] was classified as an ardent Nazi by the United States High Commissioner for Germany, surveillance in the United States for a period of four and one-half years has given every evidence that he has embraced democracy and the American way of life. His value to this country, because of his technical qualifications and knowledge of present and future plans in his field, outweighs the consideration of his Nazi activity.”49 Debus was allowed to stay in the country, but he could not apply for citizenship as his colleagues had. This changed with the congressional approval of a new Immigration Act in 1952.
Replacing all prior immigration and naturalization laws, the McCarran-Walter Act signified a remarkable alteration of US policy. It provided 50 percent of visas to immigrants whose services the attorney general determined to be urgently needed because of their higher education, technical training, specialized experience, or exceptional ability, and the belief that they would substantially benefit the national economy and cultural interest or welfare of the United States.50
The new law had a profound effect on the status for everyone who was recruited under Project Paperclip. It virtually assured citizenship and freed individuals to seek new opportunities outside of the military on their own accord, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff arranged for civil-service status for those who remained with the military.51 Since the new legislation did not contain any stipulations that precluded “ardent Nazis” from becoming citizens, it had removed the last restraint, allowing even Axster and Debus to join their colleagues in becoming American citizens.
Conclusion
The agencies involved in Paperclip went to extraordinary lengths to pave a way for former enemies to become US citizens in the name of “national security” for military uses or “national interest” for civilian exploitation, putting them ahead of displaced persons barely surviving in Europe. The government’s willingness to circumvent existing laws, take the risk of bringing potential Nazi ideologues and war criminals to the country, and ignore domestic and international criticism while spinning the importation of these specialists as a triumph indicates the value it placed on the expertise of these migrants. It also illustrates that, regardless of politics, individuals who are able to develop and wield certain forms of knowledge benefit from them.
The bargain seemed to pay off. Arguably, many US advancements in science and technology were the direct or indirect result of Project Paperclip. These include NASA’s Apollo Program that put humans on the moon and the development of long-range missiles, aerospace medicine, submarine technology, along with numerous other contributions to industry and academia.
By the time most of the German and Austrian specialists and their families who had arrived in the late 1940s became naturalized American citizens in the mid-1950s, the nation had moved on. The emerging Cold War shored up fears of Communism, which quickly outweighed any fears of Nazi infiltration. Changes to the existing immigration laws provided some refuge for displaced persons from Europe, and the war in Korea moved the public focus away from World War II and its aftereffects. Questions about the involvement of some of the specialists in war crimes under the Nazi regime did not become a larger public concern until decades later.
It was the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 that first included conscious labor preferences and job requirements for refugees entering from Europe, but the US government had already demonstrated its intense desire to attract immigrants who could contribute scientific and technological expertise to the nation. The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act further expanded the wartime military logic of Project Paperclip into the civilian realm, marking a significant shift in the admissions program and adding another layer of exclusion to the existing immigration regime that already “contributed,” as immigration historian Mae Ngai explained, “to the racialization of immigrant groups around notions of whiteness, permanent foreignness, and illegality.”52 Since then, every successive legal framework governing US immigration has included a quota for the highly skilled, thereby severely disadvantaging those without such skills.
Project Paperclip foreshadowed future immigration debates and policies in multiple ways. It illustrated that “skilled” individuals can accumulate and benefit from knowledge and experience in ways that those considered “unskilled” cannot. Paperclip was the first instance in which the federal government and private industry became involved in the “enticement and persuasion of foreign scientists to work, through contract, for the United States” with the prospect of future citizenship. Signaling the important role employers would play in future immigration debates and programs, the stipulations for Project Paperclip reverberate in current H-1B and similar temporary dual-intent work visas, which require sponsorship by an employer for a specific job offer and allow holders to apply for a green card, even though the visa is issued for a temporary stay.53
Notes
1. “In Re: Kurt Heinrich Debus and Herbert Felix Axster, From: Assistant Commissioner, Inspections and Examinations Division,” February 12, 1953, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file AXSTER, RG 330, box 5, National Archives, College Park, Md.
2. “Letter from G. W. Crabbe, Colonel, Director USAF, JIOA to James E. Riley, Immigration & Naturalization Service, Chief of Entry and Departure Branch,” October 22, 1954, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file AXSTER, RG 330, box 5, National Archives, College Park, Md.
3. Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany (London: M. Joseph, 1987); John Gimbel, “German Scientists, United States Denazification Policy, and the ‘Paperclip Conspiracy,’” International History Review 12 (1990): 441–65; Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 2014); Clarence G. Lasby, Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (New York: Atheneum, 1971); Michael J. Neufeld, “Overcast, Paperclip, Osoaviakhim: Looting and the Transfer of German Military Technology,” in The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990: A Handbook, ed. Detlef Junker, et al., Publications of the German Historical Institute (Cambridge, New York, Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press; German Historical Institute, 2004).
4. Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 67–92.
5. Philip Eric Wolgin, “Beyond National Origins: The Development of Modern Immigration Policymaking, 1948–1968,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011, 99.
6. Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History, American Encounters/Global Interactions (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Fleming, Donald, and Bernard Bailyn. The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 1969); Madeline Yuan-Yin Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015); Mae M. Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Larissa Schütze, William Dieterle und die deutschsprachige Emigration in Hollywood: Antifaschistische Filmarbeit bei Warner Bros. Pictures, 1930–1940, Transatlantische Historische Studien (Stuttgart, Ger.: Steiner, 2015).
7. Danielle Battisti, “The American Committee on Italian Migration, Anti-Communism, and Immigration Reform,” Journal of American Ethnic History 31, no. 2 (2012): 11–40; Marius Albert Dimmitt Sr., “The Enactment of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952,” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1970; Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924–1952, Civil Liberties in American History (New York: Da Capo, 1972); Maddalena Marinari, “Divided and Conquered: Immigration Reform Advocates and the Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act,” Journal of American Ethnic History 35, no. 3 (2016): 9–40; Philip Eric Wolgin, “Beyond National Origins: The Development of Modern Immigration Policymaking, 1948–1968.”
8. Some of those issues are outlined in my book, from which a few of the ideas presented in this chapter are taken: German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015).
9. Matthias Judt and Burghard Ciesla, Technology Transfer out of Germany after 1945, Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1996); Neufeld, “Overcast, Paperclip, Osoaviakhim”; John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).
10. Lasby, Project Paperclip, 9.
11. “The Paperclip Project: Its Concept, Implementation and Control,” no year available, but most likely 1959, Publication “P” Files, 1946–51, RG 319, box 2674, National Archives, College Park, Md., 35.
12. Lasby, Project Paperclip, 251.
13. “Memorandum for the Secretariat, State-War- Navy Coordinating Committee: Exploitation of German and Austrian Specialists in Science and Technology in the United States, From: Assistant Secretary of War,” August 1, 1946, Army Decimal File, 1941–48, RG 319, box 991, National Archives, College Park, Md., Appendix A: Facts bearing on the problem and discussion.
14. Lasby, Project Paperclip, 63, 129.
15. Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations, 23, 30.
16. As quoted in ibid., 37.
17. Gimbel, “German Scientists,” 454.
18. Lasby, Project Paperclip, 53–59 and 235.
19. “Paperclip Project,” Publication “P” Files, 1946–51, 5, 74.
20. Lasby, Project Paperclip, chapter on”Security and Control.”
21. Gimbel, “German Scientists,” 449–50.
22. As quoted in ibid., 450.
23. Ibid., 444–47.
24. Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, Tiffany Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, US Intelligence and the Nazis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7.
25. “Paperclip Project,” Publication “P” Files, 1946–51, 10.
26. Ibid., 46.
27. “HQ European Command: Staff Message Control, Ref. No. WX-83711,” August 7, 1947, IRR Impersonal Files, RG 319, box 19, National Archives, College Park, Md.
28. “HQ European Command: Staff Message Control, Ref. No. WX-83711,” IRR Impersonal Files, 444–45; Gimbel, “German Scientists,” 458.
29. “Memorandum, Subject: Information Required for Immigration of German Scientists, From: Joint Chiefs of Staff, JIOA,” April 14, 1947, ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File, 1941–48, RG 319, box 1002, National Archives, College Park, Md.
30. “OMGUS Security Reports for Paperclip Specialists and Dependents, To: Commander in Chief, European Command, From: JIOA,” April 14 1948, General Correspondence, 1946–1952, RG 330, box 14, National Archives, College Park, Md.
31. “Paperclip Project,” Publication “P” Files, 1946–51, 7.
32. Gimbel, “German Scientists,” 454.
33. “OMGUS Security Reports on Paperclip Personnel, Exploitation Section, Executive Office, ID,” November 28, 1947, ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File 1941–1948, RG 319, box 1005, National Archives, College Park, Md.
34. “OMGUS Security Reports for Paperclip Specialists and Dependents, To: Commander in Chief, European Command, From: JIOA,” General Correspondence, 1946–1952.
35. “Paperclip Project,” Publication “P” Files, 1946–51, 86; “Memorandum, Subject: Immigration of Paperclip Specialists, From: Director of Intelligence, Department of the Army General Staff, US Army, Washington, DC,” May 17, 1948, ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File, 1941–48, RG 319, box 1002, National Archives, College Park, Md.; “Memorandum for Director of Intelligence, Subject: Immigration of German Scientists and Technicians, WDGS, From: JIOA,” March 21, 1947, ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File, 1941–48, RG 319, box 1002, National Archives, College Park, Md.
36. “Memorandum for Director of Intelligence,” March 21, 1947, 79.
37. Gimbel, “German Scientists,” 462.
38. “Paperclip Project” Publication “P” Files, 1946–51, 75, 92–94; “Memorandum to Chief of Administrative and Liaison Group, ID, GSUSA, Subject: Status of Persons Brought to the United States under Paperclip Program, From: JIOA,” July 26, 1949, ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File, 1941–48, RG 319, box 1002, National Archives, College Park, Md.
39. Burghard Ciesla, “German High Velocity Aerodynamics and Their Significance for the US Air Force 1945–1952,” in Technology Transfer out of Germany after 1945, ed. Matthias Judt and Burghard Ciesla, Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1996); Lasby, Project Paperclip.
40. Lasby, Project Paperclip, 57, 64, 251.
41. “To: Officer-in- Charge, Ord Res & Dev Div Subo (Rkt), Ft. Bliss, Texas, Subject: Immigration Status of Paperclip Specialists, From: W. J. Durrenberger, War Department,” January 16, 1950, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file AXSTER, RG 330, box 5, National Archives, College Park, Md.; “Memorandum for Executive, ID, GSUSA, Subject: Exploitation of German Scientists, From: JIOA,” October 13, 1947, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file AXSTER, RG 330, box 5, National Archives, College Park, Md; “OMGUS Security Reports on Paperclip Personnel, Exploitation Section, Executive Office, ID,” ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File 1941–1948.
42. “Agreement between Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph and the United States Department of Justice,” Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations, 1983.
43. Delbert Clark, “Nazis Sent to US as Technicians,” New York Times, January 4, 1947; “Letter from Rabbi S. Wise to Secretary of War, Robert Patterson,” April 14, 1947, ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File, 1941–48, RG 319, entry 47B (NM-3), box 1002, National Archives, College Park, Md.
44. “Information upon which to Base an Investigation of Paperclip Activities at Fort Bliss, Texas and White Sands, New Mexico,” ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File, 1941– 48; “To: Commanding General, Fourth Army, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, From: Intelligence Division, General Staff, United States Army,” ACSI, G-2 (Intelligence) Decimal File, 1941–48. See also: “Subject: The Axster Couple (Formerly Usedom, Pomerania), From: USAF, Captain, Berlin,” March 25, 1948, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file AXSTER, RG 330, box 5, National Archives, College Park, Md.
45. “Subject: The Axster Couple (Formerly Usedom, Pomerania), From: USAF, Captain, Berlin,” Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file AXSTER, RG 330, box 5, National Archives, College Park, Md.
46. “Letter to Chief of Ordnance, Subject: Immigration of Paperclip Specialist Herbert Axster, From: James P. Hamill,” February 24, 1950, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file AXSTER, RG 330, box 5, National Archives, College Park, Md.
47. “Letter to Commanding General, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, Subject: Paperclip Personnel Herbert and Ilse Axster, From: Laurin L. Williams, GSC,” October 7, 1948, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file AXSTER, RG 330, box 5, National Archives, College Park, Md.
48. “Geheime Staatspolizei, Staatspolizeistelle Darmstadt,” December 18, 1942, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, and “Request from Dr. Jur. Erich Dickow,” April 27, 1943, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file DEBUS, RG 330, box 28, National Archives, College Park, Md.
49. “Letter to the Secretary of State, From: Secretary of the Army,” July 3, 1950, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–1958, file DEBUS, RG 330, box 28, National Archives, College Park, Md.
50. 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (Public Law 414), sec. 203 (a)(1).
51. Lasby, Project Paperclip, 265.
52. Ngai, Mae M. “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 92.
53. Lasby, Project Paperclip, 8 (emphasis by Lasby).