Rudolph, on the other hand, was found to have placed orders for new workers when he knew his were sick and dying, and received daily strength reports on the status of his prisoners. He was even thought to have conceived and implemented the program, himself, after seeing prisoners used for slave labor in other German factories.

Von Braun anticipated the U.S. actions of Operation Paperclip and carefully plotted his escape from Nazi supervision to surrender himself and his team to American soldiers. Upon telling U.S. intelligence about his work and how it related to the American rocketry program under Robert Goddard, the U.S. quickly recruited him. He became one of the most important members of Paperclip and was given top security clearance throughout the 50s.

During this time, he was involved in many of the elite inner circles in Washington. And although von Braun, who was an SS officer, claims to have only worn his uniform once and didn’t ascribe to Nazi ideology, his development of the V-2 led to a tragic number of deaths.

Nazi Influence on Chemical and Biological Weapons

A more disturbing aspect of Operation Paperclip comes from developments made by the Army Chemical Corps. Nowadays, the Chemical Corps’ duty is to research biological and chemical weapons to protect against, but originally, it’s goal was to develop their use. The Nazi scientists who were recruited to work on these projects were typically those who had committed depraved experiments on live subjects.

One of these scientists, Kurt Blome, was the Deputy Surgeon General in the Third Reich and headed its biological warfare program. Under the guise of “cancer research,” Blome conducted experiments involving spreading disease through insects like mosquitos and lice. He also ran tests that involved dropping nerve gas and insecticides from planes as well as attempts at creating weaponized bubonic plague. It is likely that the work of Blome and his colleague Dr. Fritz Hoffmann helped the Army Chemical Corps. develop Agent Orange, the herbicide and defoliant that was so devastating in the Vietnam War.

Experiments under the guidance of Blome also included testing psychedelics like LSD for mind control and behavior modification. The experiments were run to develop LSD as a truth serum and were often conducted in countries, like Germany, where testing on humans wasn’t entirely condemned. This program was given the name Operation ARTICHOKE which inevitably became the infamous Project MKULTRA.

There is a long list of other Nazi scientists who were recruited in the program and went on to lead comfortable, undisturbed lives, despite having committed horrendous war crimes. And despite efforts by the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations to prosecute some of these former Nazis, many politicians claimed their scientific contributions exculpated them of previous atrocities. Some were given lifetime achievement awards, while others were even thought to be deserving of Nobel prizes.

Some view the negative consequences of their actions as being difficult to weigh against the positive. Would we have developed the horrific chemical weapons that were later used in Vietnam, requiring billions of dollars to clean up? Would we have landed on the moon and developed such an advanced space program? And which other government-funded projects in our society were the product of Nazi scientists who went on to lead exonerated lives?