Begun as Project Overcast in 1945, a short-term advisory program for the Japan war, it became permanent immigration: 1,600-plus specialists by the early 1950s. Roughly half the early imports had been Nazi Party members; a minority were SS or SA with serious records. The sanitizing protocol: dossiers were paperclipped with clean cover sheets, Nazi past rewritten or omitted, hence the name. Wernher von Braun's V-2 program at Mittelwerk used concentration-camp labor; his US career ran Fort Bliss, Huntsville, NASA, and the Saturn V. The Cold War made the moral arithmetic easy: we needed them, or we needed to deny them to the Soviets.
The pattern Paperclip set: wartime enemies with useful knowledge laundered into assets, Japan's Unit 731 traded immunity for data in the same years, and the precedent reads backward and forward, through Operation Underworld's dock deal to the post-9/11 contractor economy. Truman's directive had explicitly excluded active Nazis; JIOA's paperclips worked around the President's signature. The program's defenders note the Saturn V flew; the record notes who built its prototype's prototype.
The claim: Paperclip reveals the true war aim of 1945 was not justice but inventory, the Third Reich's real legacy transfer was personnel, and the space race was two superpowers competing with the same German department in two languages. Verdict: both sides did it, the Soviets ran their own version, which confirms the reading. The archive files it as the founding proof that in modern statecraft, knowledge outranks accountability, and has ever since. The moon has an accent.
If the moon landing runs on Mittelwerk labor, what exactly did we win in 1945?