INTRO
(SFX: THE ROAR OF A NASA ROCKET AS IT LIFTS OFF)
CARTER: “’Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department’ says Wernher von Braun.”
MOLLY: Though, Doctor Wernher von Braun didn’t actually say that. Those are lyrics by Tom Lehrer, an American mathematician-turned-musician who wrote the song for the 1960s satirical television show, That Was the Week that Was.
CARTER: Wernher von Braun might seem like an odd subject for satire. He was, and still is, considered one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century. He is credited as one of the prime architects of NASA’s advancements in the 20th century.
MOLLY: Why would Tom Lehrer, a fellow scientist, write a song publicly criticizing Wernher von Braun?
CARTER: The answer is in the numbers… One-Eight-Five-Zero-Six-Eight.
MOLLY: Wernher von Braun’s member number for Adolf Hitler’s SS.
(SFX – BOOTS STOMPING ON THE STREET AT A POLITICAL MARCH)
CARTER: Although he spent most of his life living in America, Wernher von Braun was born in Germany and developed weapons for the Nazis during World War Two.
MOLLY: So how did a Nazi scientist end up working for NASA to design rockets for the Apollo program?
CARTER: The answer is what is now one of the most controversial CIA operations in America’s history: Operation Paperclip, the secret CIA mission to recruit Nazi Germany’s top scientists and put them to work on America’s most vital scientific missions.
MOLLY: For seventy years, the American public only knew small details of Operation Paperclip. And today, we still don’t know the full story.
CARTER: But, thanks to recently declassified documents, we can comb through seventy years of history to uncover the secrets and conspiracies of Operation Paperclip.
(THEME MUSIC UP)
CARTER: Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, the podcast where we dig into the complicated stories behind the world’s most controversial events and search for the truth.
MOLLY: If you want to listen to previous episodes, you can find them on your favorite podcast directory, or on our website Parcast.com. And if you enjoy the show, don’t forget to subscribe and leave a 5 star review. It seems simple, but it really helps us.
CARTER: I’m Carter Roy.
MOLLY: I’m Molly Brandenburg.
CARTER: And neither of us are conspiracy theorists.
MOLLY: But we are open-minded, skeptical, and curious. Don’t get us wrong, sometimes the official version is the truth.
CARTER: But sometimes, it’s not.
MOLLY: Today, we are talking about Operation Paperclip, a covert US operation that dates back to the end of the Second World War.
CARTER: The operation was never a complete secret. But we’ve only recently been given a glimpse at the extent to which US operatives worked with known Nazi scientists to export Germany’s best and brightest minds to the United States.
MOLLY: Today, the story of what we know about Operation Paperclip is overshadowed by the question: Who knew? How much did they know? And when did they know it?
CARTER: And most importantly: would they have done anything to stop it if they could?
MOLLY: This week we’re looking at the official story of Operation Paperclip. Next episode, we will cover the main conspiracies.
CARTER: How much influence did German Scientists with roots in Hitler’s Third Reich have over American scientific advancement?
MOLLY: Did American officials know or care that they had recruited former Nazis?
CARTER: And how did the CIA keep the identities of their captured Nazi scientists a secret from the American public?
ACT 1 – OPERATION OVERCAST AND THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
(SFX – THE RAT-TAT-TAT OF TYPEWRITER KEYS)
CARTER: To fully explore the impact of Operation Paperclip, it’s important to have a grasp of the historical context that led to it.
MOLLY: As a Cold War operation, Paperclip’s broad purpose was preventing the Soviet Union from gaining advancement over the US in key scientific fields.
CARTER: Aerospace being chief among them.
(SFX – A JET PLANE BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER)
MOLLY: Operation Paperclip’s long existence is directly tied to the space race between the United States and the USSR.
CARTER: But Paperclip – or, Operation Overcast, as it was originally called – had another, shorter term goal when it was initially established by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
MOLLY: Overcast was launched in part with the aim of using German scientific advancements to end the war in Japan.
CARTER: But where did the idea to recruit the best minds of Nazi Germany actually come from?
MOLLY: Ironically, it was the Nazis themselves who gave the Allied powers the idea.
CARTER: Throughout the war, Germany had tried and failed to effectively invade and conquer the USSR.
MOLLY: After a number of failed campaigns and millions of German casualties, the German high command realized that not only did it not have the manpower to launch another assualt on Russia; it also didn’t have adequate resources to defend iteslf against a likely Russian counter-invastion.
(SFX – GUNSHOTS, SHOUTING, AIR RAIDS – SOUNDS OF WAR)
CARTER: They needed their best minds at work, designing new defense technologies that could hold off a potential attack from the Russians.
MOLLY: Hitler was known to be distrustful of intellectuals who didn’t share his rigid ideology. Though the Nazi regime employed a great number of scientists in developing weapons for the war or overseeing experimental research, an even greater number of scientific professionals were unable to find work during the war due to contradictory politics.
CARTER: As a result, many of Germany’s top scientists were assigned to menial duties during the first part of the war. Highly trained engineers found themselves driving supply trucks. Physicists were forced to take jobs as field medics on the front lines.
MOLLY: But as the war continued, and grew more dire for Germany, the high command realized that it would not survive with the scientists it currently had.
MOLLY: So, in 1943, they issued an order , reclling thousands of scientists and engineers from the front lines of the war back to Berlin to work on bolstering German defense capabilities.
CARTER: It was no small undertaking. A reported five thousand scientists were recalled, and even then, they had to be cleared for duty.
MOLLY: Hermann Goering, one of the most powerful leaders of Hitler’s Third Reich, appointed Werner Osenberg, a materials scientitst and a high-ranking member of the SS, to record the name of each German scientist that was summoned.
CARTER: You mean they actually wrote down the names of all of their best scientists on one list that anyone could read?
MOLLY: Any German scientists who had been deemed politically and ideologically acceptable to work for the Nazis was put on the list. Osenberg oversaw the approval process, and eventually produced a physical list of Germany’s best minds, which included more than a few Nazi officers.
CARTER: But the Osenberg list would ultimatley do more harm than good to Germany.
MOLLY: In 1945, British soldiers arrived at Bonn University, in Germany. There, they discovered professors burning reported “caseloads” of documents, trying to erase evidence that might implicate them in war crimes.
CARTER: There was so much to destroy that the professors didn’t have time to burn it all. They resorted to flushing some sensitive documents down the toilets. A lab technician who worked at the school discovered a document in one of the school toilets that had been unsuccessfully flushed.
MOLLY: He thought that the document seemed important, and so he turned it over to the British soldier who were there. That document was a copy of the Osenberg list.
(SFX – A TOILET FLUSHING – C’MON, YOU’RE LAUGHING)
CARTER: Can you imagine how the scientific history of the 20th century would have been different if that unknown person had succeeded in flushing the list?
MOLLY: Regardless of what might have happened, what did happen is Osenberg’s list made its way to MI6, the British secret intelligence service.
CARTER: From there, the list made its way to US officials, who suddenly had a list of Germany’s top scientists to target for capture, interrogation, and, if the opportunity arose, extraction back to the United States.
MOLLY: US intelligence obtained the Osenberg list in or shortly after March of 1945. In July of that same year, Operation Overcast was officially launched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
CARTER: And, in November, the Operation was renamed. US officials learned that the name of the operation had been compromised.
MOLLY: From the beginning, US officials aimed to keep the extent of the operation secret.
CARTER: America had been involved in World War Two for over three years at this point, and the military officers behind Overcast knew that the American public would not react favorably to the idea of America recruiting, and later employing, scientists that only weeks before had been designing German weapons for the purpose of killing American troops.
MOLLY: When Camp Overcast – a holding location for German scientists captured by American soldiers during the invasion of Germany was discovered by the press, the government renamed the enterprise.
CARTER: They called it Operation Paperclip, after the paperclips that US officials would use to mark the files of scientists they had targeted.
MOLLY: It seems like such a mundane origin for such an important operation.
CARTER: Perhaps even then the CIA knew that the an ordinary name for the operation might help hide the extradordinary things they were doing as a part of it.
(SFX – RUSTLING PAGES)
MOLLY: Now, it is likely that the US would have conducted an operation to recruit top German talent even if they hadn’t uncovered a list of potential targets.
CARTER: By 1945, Germany had more than proved itself as a force to be reckoned with in terms of military engineering, and the world had taken notice.
MOLLY: But the Osenberg list kickstarted the race with the USSR to recruit German scientists. In a sense, the list is the genesis of Operation Paperclip.
CARTER: US operatives in Germany had little time to consider the moral implications of recruiting scientists who had worked for the Nazis, because the Soviets were running an equally aggressive operation to capture German scientists and take them back to the USSR. One such mission – Operation Osoaviakhim – saw a reported two thousand German Scientists captured in a single night. The scientists were taken from their homes at gunpoint and forced into working for the Soviets.
MOLLY: So, to call it a race would be an understatement.
CARTER: In 1945, the war was reaching a conclusion, and the Americans and the Soviets knew that every German scientist was one more mind that would help either country achieve scientific dominance in the post-war-world
MOLLY: And every German Scientist that the US didn’t recruit was one more that would end up working for the Soviets.
CARTER: As World War Two came to a close, the Operation Paperclip was born out of a new kind of war. The Cold War.
MOLLY: And in their race for scientific and military dominance, both sides would seem to forget the atrocities that the Nazi Army committed against their countries in the years before.
CARTER: Here’s Eli Rosenbaum, a U.S. Justice Department investigator who was tasked with hunting down and prosecuting Nazis for their crimes in the late 20th century.
(AP SOUNDCLIP #1 – ROSENBAUM)
(MUSIC – DARK, PATRIOTIC, LIKE SOMETHING FROM MISSION IMPOSSIBLE)
AD BREAK
ACT 2 – SPOILS OF WAR
MOLLY: Operation Paperclip was a massive international undertaking, one that eventually saw nearly two thousand German scientists relocated to the United States with their families.
CARTER: Beyond the initial effort of tracking down and moving the scientists, the Operation extended decades beyond the Second World War as the recruited Germans lived out their lives on American soil.
MOLLY: But the original plan for Operation Paperclip was never so complicated.
CARTER: When the Osenberg list first made it into the hands of US officials in 1945, it fell to Major Robert Staver to compile the list of German scientists to target for capture and interrogation.
MOLLY: Wernher Von Braun was high on Staver’s list.
(MUSIC – PULSING, CEREBRAL)
CARTER: Staver’s original mission for Operation Paperclip was just to capture and interrogate Germany’s top scientists.
MOLLY: But when he learned the extent of Germany’s scientific advancement, and that Germany had shared much of its research with Japan, with which America was still at war, Staver sent a report to the Pentagon urging “the evacuation of German scientists and their families.”
CARTER: Major Staver’s argument was based on two main points. The first was his realization that the scientific expertise of the Nazi scientists would make them invaluable assets in the ongoing war with Germany and Japan, as well as in .
MOLLY: The second was fueled by the knowledge that the Soviet Union was rapidly staking a claim in the allied conquered Western Europe.
CARTER: After the German surrender, in 1945, Berlin was sectioned into occupation zones, with quarters of the city divided between the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.
(SOUND FX – ARMY JEEPS PASSING BY)
MOLLY: The occupation was intended to assert the Allied Powers’ conquest of Germany, but also to aid Berlin’s citizens.
CARTER: Berlin had been heavily bombed throughout the war, and, with the fall of the Hitler’s regime, it fell to the conquering Allies to prevent Berlin’s citizens from starvation.
MOLLY: To the world at large, America and the Soviet Union seemed like they were working together on reconstructing Berlin. But as the unrest of the Cold War grew, Berlin became a battleground.
CARTER: These tensions would eventually lead to the construction of the Berlin Wall, which blocked off Soviet-controlled Berlin from the rest of the city.
MOLLY: And, more importantly, sealed everyone on the eastern side of the wall in Soviet territory.
CARTER: In the early 1950s, over a decade before the wall was constructed, Major Staver saw that Soviet Russia would spread its influence over as much of the war-ravaged Europe as it could.
MOLLY: And, in the process, capture any German scientists it could find, or even kidnap German scientists already recruited by America.
CARTER: If the United States wanted to keep its German scientists away from the Russians, it would need significant geography between them.
MOLLY: And that meant exporting those scientists to America.
CARTER: The German states of Saxony and Thuringia were both set to fall in the Soviet Occupation zone in July of 1945.
MOLLY: Fearing they would lose access to the scientists residing in those states, the US instigated an evacuation, ordering the scientists and their families to report to US officials and prepare for transport to the west.
(SFX – THE HORNS OF A SHIP LEAVING HARBOR)
CARTER: Transporting so many German men, women, and children was more than just a logistical challenge; it was also a legal one.
MOLLY: This was because President Truman had instructed immigration officials to forbid Nazis from emigrating to America.
CARTER: But if Nazi presence in America was strictly forbidden by the President himself, then how did over a thousand German scientists come to immigrate to and settle in the United States?
ACT III – COVERING THEIR TRACKS
MOLLY: From 1945 to at least 1947, and most likely several years after that, German scientists were transported to the United States and put to work on various scientific projects.
CARTER: As the Cold War entered its first decade, there was no shortage of uses for trained scientists.
MOLLY: Expat Germans were sent to Alabama, Ohio, Virginia, and California.
CARTER: Several, including Wernher von Braun and his team, ended up in Huntsville, Alabama, which would soon host a whole German community of scientists and their families.
MOLLY: It was an odd pairing: German intellectuals devoted to exploratory space research living among residents of a rural Alabama community.
CARTER: How did the Germans keep their identity and activities a secret from their American neighbors in Huntsville?
MOLLY: They didn’t. Residents of Huntsville were well aware that the new German immigrants were fleeing Nazi Germany. At the time, it was no secret that jews and other persecuited groups had fled Germany with the hope of establishing safe lives in America.
CARTER: The German scientists were just another collective of refuegees fleeing a war-ravaged country.
MOLLY: the Hunstivlle natives were wary of their new neighbors at first, but von Braun succeeded in assimilating himself and his team into the community.
CARTER: The missile tests and research that von Braun and his team were undertaking had need of laborers. For the residents of Huntsville, the arrival of the Germans signaled the arrival of thousands of jobs.
MOLLY: With the rise of NASA and the success of the Apollo missions, Wernher von Braun helped rebrand Huntsville in the national eye from a small rural town to the home of the people who put a man on the moon.
CARTER: With all that fame and positive influence, it’s no wonder that the darker implications of the Germans’ presence in America were overlooked for so long.
MOLLY: Interestingly, not all of the German scientists were brought directly from war-torn Europe to the United States.
CARTER: Some of the scientists were first sent to Mexico where, through the US consulate in Ciudad, they filled out immigration documents and thus legally entered the United States through Mexico.
(SFX – THE THUMPS OF CUSTOMS STAMPS HITTING A PASSPORT)
MOLLY: What an odd move to make, given that many of the scientists were directly transported from Europe to America.
CARTER: It’s not so odd when you consider that the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which coordinated Operation Paperclip, were well invested in keeping it as secret as possible.
MOLLY: This was because, though German scientists began arriving and working in the United States as early as 1945, President Truman did not officially approved the operation until 1946.
CARTER: He had actually rejected it when the proposal first crossed his desk in 1944. He argued that allowing German Scientists to take refuge in the United States would inevitably lead Nazis to take advantage of American need in order to escape punishment for their crimes.
MOLLY: He wasn’t wrong there. Not only did scientists who had worked directly with the Nazis use Operation Paperclip to escape to America and avoid prosecution for their actions; US officials charged with overseeing the extraction seemed to be aware of at least some of the horrific backgrounds of the men they were taking to live in America.
CATER: Despite Truman’s rejection of the operation, leaders in the military had already set in motion the capture aand extradition of German scientists.
MOLLY: They felt that the value these men represented to the future of scientific and military supremacy across the globe was too great a cause for one presidential administration to reject.
CARTER: Still, though they were complicit in bringing the scientists to America, many top leaders in America’s government and military operations sector struggled with the very idea of Paperclip.
MOLLY: The men who, at that same time, were reading frontline reports of what had occurred at the Nazi concentration camps were now considering opening America up to those same Nazis.
CARTER In the end, it was not a military decision that led Truman to allow Paperclip to go forward, but an economic one.
MOLLY During Truman’s presidency, Henry Wallace was Secretary of Commerce.
CARTER: In 1945, America was coming out of World War Two, but it was also still recovering from Great Depression which had lasted during the 1930s.
MOLLY: Wallace was the man who was tasked with ensuring that the United States maintained a robust economy after the war ended.
CARTER: When he read the earliest briefs on the Joint Chiefs’ plan to bring over German Scientists, he saw the opportunity he’d been looking for.
MOLLY: Wallace urged President Truman to allow the operation to go forward. His reasoning was that the scientific fields that would develop with the help of the Germans would create millions of jobs for Americans seeking work. At the time, Wallace may have not KNOWN that the very scientists he was advocating for had ties to the Nazis.
CARTER: That was enough to clear Truman’s conscience, and the conscience of the Joint Chiefs.
MOLLY: Truman approved Operation Paperclip to recruit one thousand Germans in a limited capacity, but he stipulated that the US could not recruit Nazis.
CARTER: It was a directive that didn’t seem to raise any issue, until the Dora Trial.
MOLLY: In 1947, the US army conducted the Dachau Dora Proceeding – a war crimes trial against Nazi leaders for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust.
CARTER: 15 men were tried at the Dora Proceeding, including Georg Rickhey.
MOLLY: Georg Rickhey was an engineer who served as the general director of the Mittelwerk plant during the war. He oversaw production of German Rockets.
CARTER: After the war, it was discovered that the plant had relied on slave labor from the nearby Mittelbaur-Dora concentration camp, and Rickhey was indicted for his role in overseeing the inhumane conditions for the prisoners and for taking part in Gestapo executions.
MOLLY: Rickhey was forced to stand trial for his part in what went on at the Mittlewerk plant, but first, he had to be extradited back to Germany… from America.
CARTER: Rickhey had been living in America since 1945, working at an Air Force Base in Ohio when he was indicted.
MOLLY: Rickhey did not return to the United States after he was acquitted at the Dora proceeding, but the publicity around the trial raised the questions: how did it come to be that a Nazi, accused of war crimes and forced to stand trial, needed to be extradited from Ohio? How did he even get there? And were there more Nazis on American soil?
CARTER: It was a question the US government had already taken steps to avoid confronting.
MOLLY: A few months before the Dora proceedings, the United States passed the National Security Act of 1947.
CARTER: It was a major overhaul of America’s intelligence and military organizations. And of all the changes it brought about, perhaps none was more influential on America’s global standing in the second half of the 20th century than the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency.
MOLLY: The CIA was the United States’ first peacetime intelligence agency. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it has no law enforcement mandate. It is authorized to carry out covert operations at the behest of the president.
CARTER: And, most importantly for Operation Paperclip, it was largely exempt from having to disclose any intelligence on current operations.
MOLLY: Meaning that, suddenly, any intel the government had on Operation Paperclip could be considered classified and was held back from the public.
CARTER: The publicity around Rickhey and the Dora trials had begun to focus on other known German scientists working for the American Government. Wernher von Braun was among those who was mentioned.
MOLLY: But then, with the establishment of the CIA, it became difficult to publicly access any records on Wernher von Braun. His work as a government employee allowed the US to classify anything they wanted about him.
CARTER: Who knows how the space race would have turned out if Wernher von Braun, its chief scientific contributor, was publicly put on trial for association with the Nazis? What we do know is that von Braun and many of his fellow Paperclip scientists contributed directly to the US mission to the moon.
MOLLY: But space technology wasn’t the only field where German science helped America advance.
CARTER: With the help of the Paperclip scientists, the CIA and the US government explored a range of scientific endeavors… some of which crossed the line of morality.
(MUSIC – CREEPY, CLANDESTINE)
AD BREAK
ACT 4 – THE SCIENTISTS GET TO WORK
MOLLY: As we’ve said, over a thousand scientists and their families were moved to America as a part of Operation Paperclip.
CARTER: And while we don’t have time to look into all of the advancements made with the help of those scientists, we can take a look at the most significant.
MOLLY: The most famous, and likely most influential, German scientist to be taken to the US after World War 2 was Wernher von Braun.
CARTER: After being transferred between a number of bases, von Braun and his team were settled in Huntsville, Alabama in 1950, and stayed there for twenty years.
MOLLY: He played an early role in the success of NASA, and developed the Saturn rockets that put American astronauts on the moon.
CARTER: Doctor von Braun left NASA in the 1970s to work for an Fairchild Industries, an aerospace company.
MOLLY: His contributions to the space race were well documented in popular culture. He was portrayed or referenced in everything from the Disneyland TV show of the 1950s to the titular character in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
(SFX: MILITARY DRUMLINE – SOMETHING LIKE THE DR. STRANGELOVE SOUNDTRACK)
MOLLY: Though his association with Nazi Germany was never a well-guarded secret, his extensive and well-documented contributions to American advancements in space travel always seemed to dominate the conversation when it came to Wernher von Braun.
CARTER: Though von Braun was the most famous name to come out of operation Paperclip, he was not the only famous name.
MOLLY: Siegfried Knemeyer was the head of technical development at the ministry of aviation under Hitler’s Third Reich. He was one of the scientists who merely served a part in the German Army during the war, and was never associated with Nazi War Crimes. After Paperclip, he worked for the Air Force and was later awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award. That’s the highest honor the US department of defense can give to a civilian.
CARTER: Kurt Debus, the first director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, was a German scientist brought over through Paperclip. Unlike Knemeyer, Kurt Debus was a registered member of the Nazi Party and a part of Heinrich Himmler’s SS. Despite those associations, he was never publicly implicated in the crimes committed in the Holocaust… beyond his membership to the Party. Perhaps this is why he was able to advance so far, and so publicly, in the US scientific community without serious scrutiny.
MOLLY: And then there was Hubertus Strughold. He had a vital role in developing the space suits used by the astronauts on future space missions. His was the mission that put the first monkey into space in 1948.
CARTER: As a Nazi scientist, Strughold was director of the Research Center for Aviation Medicine, a German think tank. As early as 1942, there is evidence to show that the think tank’s research was aided by inhuman experiments conducted on the prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp.
MOLLY: Strughold, when presented with this evidence in the buildup to the Nuremberg trials, claimed to have no knowledge of the atrocities that had helped his research. After nearly a decade of work helping NASA advances its measures of protecting the astronauts it sent into space, Strughold was granted American citizenship.
CARTER: Why would there not be more public outcry over a man associated with concentration camp experiments working for NASA?
MOLLY: To the public, the verdict of the War Crimes trials that followed the war were proof enough, and Strughold was only implicated, never tried. Strughold was also investigated by the American Justice Department a number of times during his time working for NASA. No conclusive evidence was found.
CARTER: After his death, declassified government documents brought the public focus back to Strughold’s connection to the concentration camps. Public outcry led to Strughold being posthumously stripped of a number of honors and awards bestowed upon him for his service to American aviation.
MOLLY: In 2004, eighteen years after Strughold’s death and forty eight years after he was granted American citizenship, an investigation into Strughold’s time as the center for aviation medicine uncovered evidence that he had, in fact, overseen experiments on the effects of oxygen deprivations.
CARTER: Some of these experiments were performed on children. A number of them did not survive the procedure. What would lead the American government to look for such evidence, after over fifty years of finding nothing conclusive on Strughold’s activities?
MOLLY: Well, the investigation that finally linked him to human experimentation wasn’t performed by an American operation. It was conducted by the Historical Committee for German Air and Space Science – a German operation.
CARTER: Strughold’s case begs the question, what else did the American government not know? And, as German science made America a leader of 20th century industry, how hard were they trying to monitor the backgrounds the scientists they employed?
MOLLY Beyond field of aerospace and the publicity surrounding NASA’s achievements, other German scientists in America were embarking on more clandestine operations. The newly formed CIA quickly put the scientists it recruited to work.
CARTER: Behind the closed doors of Langley, Virginia, as well as a number of covert facilities throughout the United States, American and German scientists alike conducted experiments that they hoped would define the future of warfare.
MOLLY: Though much of the CIA’s scientific research is still heavily classified, we do know of a few operations in which German scientists definitely participated.
CARTER: One being Project ARTICHOKE.
MOLLY: Project ARTICHOKE was a spinoff of project MK-ULTRA, one of the most notorious CIA operations of the 20th century.
CARTER: Project MK-ULTRA was an attempt at developing actual mind control that the CIA started in the 1950s.
MOLLY: Using a number of substances, chief among them LSD, the CIA experimented on ways to alter the minds of subjects.
CARTER: MK-ULTRA is now viewed has a horrendous violation of the personal rights of the Americans it affected. It seems like no small coincidence that some of the worst human experiments ever committed by American scientists happened after the country imported Nazi scientists known for horrific human experiments.
(SOUND FX – DRIP DRIP DRIP – A CHEMICAL BEING MADE IN A LAB)
MOLLY: MK-ULTRA was a broad experiment, with a number of more specific operations occurring under its mandate. We don’t know the extent of German scientist activity in regards to many of these operations. But we do know that German scientists were definitely involved in Operation ARTICHOKE.
CARTER: Operation ARTICHOKE was an experiment on specialized interrogation methods, with an emphasis and finding out if it was possible to control an enemy soldier through hypnosis. Subjects underwent psychological torture. They were forced to become addicted to morphine, and took LSD while the scientists observed the results.
MOLLY: As the agency used German research to explore the extent to which they could use chemicals to alter a subject’s brain activity, MK-ULTRA, Project ARTICHOKE, and the other programs began to look into whether the research could be used as part of a secret assassination program.
CARTER: So German scientists, some of whom were linked to Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners, ended up conducting similar research on American soil. I can’t imagine the public was thrilled.
MOLLY: And in many cases, the CIA was conducting this research on American citizens, without those citizens’ consent.
CARTER: In 1953, Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the US army, jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor of a hotel after being unknowingly given LSD as a part of MK-ULTRA.
MOLLY: It would take over twenty years for Olson’s family to receive compensation from the government for their part in Frank Olson’s death.
CARTER: Many other victims of MK-ULTRA were not so lucky. Though the US government did issue private settlements to those affected by the experiments of MK-ULTRA, its key concern was keeping these experiments secret.
CARTER: The government used the Feres Doctrine as its defense when it was taken to court. The Feres Doctrine held that members of the armed forces could not sue the government for damages that were inflicted as part of their service.
MOLLY: Even if they were performing a service by unknowingly acting as test subjects for army scientists.
CARTER: So, members of the American armed forces were experimented on against their will by their own government, and their service record to that same government is what in many cases prevented them from getting any kind of compensation.
MOLLY: MK-ULTRA was shut down in the 1980s. However, given that the CIA destroyed most of its records on the program prior to it being revealed to the public, we may never know how many people were unwittingly experimented on.
CARTER: Or how many deaths occurred due to the research conducted by former Nazi Scientists.
(MUSIC – PONDERING, MELODIC)
ACT V: EPILOGUE
MOLLY: So what was the real fallout from Operation Paperclip?
CARTER: In the years that followed World War two, a number of German scientists living in the United States saw their past association with Nazi activities catch up with them.
MOLLY: Like Georg Rickhey?
CARTER: Rickhey was one of the only captured scientists to actually stand trial for crimes related to Nazi activities.
MOLLY: As the years went on, and German scientists gained recognition for their advancement, their own controversial pasts became public.
CARTER: What was the reaction?
MOLLY: Well, consider Tscherim Soobzokov. He was a Russian who worked for the CIA in the 50s and 60s as an agent and informant. Despite being listed in the New York Times as a Nazi living in America, the CIA and the FBI reported to find no evidence linking Soobzokov to Nazi war crimes.
CARTER: Two of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world couldn’t corroborate a news report about one of their own employees?
MOLLY: The Agencies’ denials didn’t help Soobzokov. He was killed in a bombing by Jewish radicals who sought him out in 1985. Twenty years later, declassified documents confirmed that the CIA had known about Soobzokov’s involvement with Nazi executions on the Russian front. And they had helped Soobzokov hide this information when he applied for American citizenship.
(MUSIC – INTENSE, FOREBODING)
CARTER: Given Operation Paperclip’s expansive impact on American history—
MOLLY: Not to mention the fact that it predates the Central Intelligence Agency itself –
CARTER: It’s no wonder there’s a number of conspiracies surrounding it.
MOLLY: Thanks to decades of CIA-classification, there’s so much we don’t know about the motivations behind Paperclip.
CARTER: The key conspiracy that covers the entire operation is that US officials were well aware that they were hiring current and former Nazis to come work in America, and in fact sought out Nazi scientists due to the expertise they gained conducting heinous experiments during the Holocaust.
MOLLY: This is one of the easier to propose, and more difficult to prove theories. Another theory surrounds Wernher von Braun, the man who you know is responsible for much of America’s gains in rocket science during the 20th century.
CARTER: Was Wernher von Braun guilty of Nazi war crimes? And if he was, was the moon landing, arguably the peak of American scientific advancement, conducted on the foundation of inhumane Nazi research?
MOLLY: And finally, the most out there, and disturbing theory to come out of Paperclip. The Space Race was never a competition between the warring superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead, it was a global effort, orchestrated by a cabal of prominent, influential leaders, to guide mankind’s scientific progress in a specific direction.
CARTER: That’s a lot to unpack. And we’ll discuss all these theories, and more, in the next episode.
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CARTER: Thanks for tuning in to Conspiracy Theories. If you want to hear more conspiracy theories, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, GooglePlay, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast directory. If you like what you hear, leave a 5 star review. It seems simple, but it really helps our show.
MOLLY: Tell us your favorite conspiracy theories on Facebook and Instagram @parcast, and on Twitter @parcastnetwork.
CARTER: Join us next week as we continue our second look at Operation Paperclip.
MOLLY: Until then, remember, the truth isn’t always the best story.
CARTER: And the official story isn’t always the truth.