Description
Book SynopsisA gripping history of one of the United States' most controversial Cold War intelligence operations. Project Paperclip brought hundreds of German scientists and engineers, including aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, to the United States in the first decade after World War II. More than the freighters full of equipment or the documents recovered from caves and hastily abandoned warehouses, the German brains who designed and built the V-2 rocket and other wonder weapons for the Third Reich proved invaluable to America's emerging military-industrial complex. Whether they remained under military employment, transitioned to civilian agencies like NASA, or sought more lucrative careers with corporations flush with government contracts, German specialists recruited into the Paperclip program assumed enormously influential positions within the labyrinthine national security state. Drawing on recently declassified documents from intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, the FBI, a
Trade ReviewThrough participant vignettes, historian Crim provides insight into early Cold War decision-making in this well-documented, microhistorical, dissertation-like expose of Project Paperclip. Highly recommended.
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ChoiceA very fine account concerning the internal dynamics of the Paperclip program, providing a more nuanced evaluation than has hitherto been available.
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H-Net ReviewsAt a time when drones, cyberweapons, and other high technology continue to substitute for coherent foreign policy, Crim's book is a sober reminder of the moral hazards of a technocratic national security state.
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Journal of American HistoryWhat distinguishes
Our Germans is its emphasis on the role of the specialists in the emerging national security state of the early Cold War, where Project Paperclip 'exacerbated the growing rift between the State Department and an ascendant national security bureaucracy' (99). But most importantly,
Our Germans is a much-needed update and expansion of Clarence Lasby's 1971
Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War.
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American Historical ReviewIn the aftermath of the Second World War, the US government recruited hundreds of German scientists and engineers, including the designers of the V2 rocket, to staff American agencies and companies under the so-called Paperclip programme. Crim draws on recently declassified documents to reveal the history of the programme and the controversies it provoked.
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International Institute for Strategic StudiesTable of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Aristocracy of Evil
2. Implements of Progress
3. Conscientious Objectors
4. Their Germans
5. Paperclip Vindicated
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
