Operation Paperclip is the historical inspiration behind Hunters, a television series on Amazon Prime, depicting a ragtag band of Nazi hunters operating in New York in 1977, who discover that hundreds of Nazi war criminals are conspiring to establish a Fourth Reich in the United States. Significantly, the real-world events underpinning Operation Paperclip have fueled conspiracy theories regarding CIA corruption, espionage, and government smokescreens for decades, and continue to influence neo-Nazi recruitment to this day.
Throughout the Second World War, Nazi Germany maintained a particular technological superiority over its adversaries in the creation of chemical weapons and reaction technology, medicine, and aerodynamics and rocketry (the V-1 and V-2). As the Allied forces advanced into Germany during the final stages of World War II, the race was on between the United States and the Soviet Union to seize as many German scientists as possible in anticipation of the Cold War. Through the efforts of a newly formed and highly secretive government organisation, The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), Operation Overcast (later renamed Paperclip) was launched; its objective – to recruit and smuggle into the United States 1,600 German engineers and scientists, many of whom had worked for the Third Reich and had been leaders of the Nazi regime.
Notably, President Truman had publicly forbidden the recruitment of anyone who was a member of the Nazi party or was more than a nominal participant in its activities, thus rendering many of the scientists ineligible. To circumvent this restriction, the files of such recruits were altered by the government, and the only evidence of their Nazi past was in the form of the paperclip that had attached their original files to those being whitewashed. (more...)
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