The Saturn V rocket carried Neil Armstrong to the moon. But before it ever flew, the men who designed it ran an underground factory in Nazi Germany where more than 20,000 prisoners died building rockets as slave laborers. After the war, the US government secretly brought those men to America, gave them new identities, and put them in charge of the space program. This is the story of how it happened, what the original government files actually said, and why a Saturn V engineer was forced to renounce his American citizenship in 1984.
Operation Paperclip recruited over 1,600 German scientists after World War II. President Truman explicitly ordered that no Nazi Party members or war crimes suspects be hired. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency systematically falsified the scientists' personnel files to circumvent that order.
Decades later, the original documents resurfaced.
SOURCES:
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (2014)
Michael Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip
National Archives, Arthur Rudolph Case File (opened December 1999)
National Archives, Records of the Secretary of Defense (RG 330), JIOA Personnel Dossiers
University of Alabama Huntsville, Dora and the V-2 Project
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Mittelbau-Dora entry
#OperationPaperclip #MoonLanding #SaturnV #DeclassifiedHistory #ColdWar #HiddenHistory 
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