workingclasshistory:

On this day, 3 September 1945, US president Harry Truman officially approved and expanded Operation Paperclip, a secret plan to bring Nazi scientists to US.
Originally called Operation Overcast, the US was keen to make use of German technology in order to rival the Soviet Union. Eventually, 1,600 Nazi technicians were brought to the US, where they largely avoided prosecution for war crimes. Instead they were given jobs developing chemical and biological weapons, experimenting with “mind-control” in the notorious MKUltra scheme, and working on the space program.
Wernher von Braun was made a senior director on the space programme, which was later absorbed by NASA. He was just one of the officials who was intimately involved in the Holocaust, as he selected enslaved labourers from concentration camps to be worked to death building rockets. Chief Nazi medical officer Walter Schreiber was involved in human experiments on prisoners of concentration camps, including supervising experiments where victims were injected with typhus, men were sterilised, prisoners were submerged in freezing water and locked into low pressure chambers, destroying their lungs. Schreiber was later exposed by the Boston Globe, so the US military flew him to safety in Argentina where he was sheltered by the government of Juan Perón, which harboured many other Nazi war criminals.
Another Nazi doctor, Hubertus Strughold, also reportedly had knowledge of these same experiments, and was listed as “wanted” for war crimes by the US Army. But rather than face trial he was employed by the Air Force, described as “the father of aerospace medicine”, had a library named after him at the Brooks Air Force Base, which was only eventually renamed in 1995, and was honoured with a portrait in a mural of “medical heroes” at Ohio State University.
Pictured: German scientists in the US
*
We only post highlights on here, for all our anniversaries follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wrkclasshistory https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2073747076143765/?type=3