Operation Paperclip

The Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations produced a definitive account in the 1980s, and the underlying JIOA records have been released to the National Archives. The best-documented case is Arthur Rudolph, operations director for the V-2 at the Mittelwerk underground factory, where prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp died in the thousands during production. Rudolph later managed the Saturn V programme that put Apollo on the Moon. In 1984, facing an OSI investigation, he renounced his US citizenship and left for West Germany.

Wernher von Braun, the most famous Paperclip recruit and later director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, was a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer holding the rank of Sturmbannführer; his 1948 security report described him as a potential security threat, and it was superseded by a revised assessment. Hubertus Strughold, honoured as the father of space medicine, had directed aviation medicine research linked to lethal low-pressure and freezing experiments at Dachau; his name was removed from a Texas library and an aerospace medicine award in the 2000s and 2010s as the record became better known.

The operation is not disputed by the US government. What historians debate is the counterfactual — whether the Cold War strategic argument was sound — not whether the recruitment and the file-laundering occurred.