US Nazism and the Cold War

World War II ended in 1945. That same year, the U.S. and Soviet Union launched a Cold War for global supremacy. And that same year, the U.S. began Operation Paperclip, a fourteen-year secret mission designed to help the US win the Cold War by receiving and employing over 1,600 Nazi German engineers, scientists, and technicians.

Yes, that’s right—the US began employing Nazis immediately after WWII. There work developed in two main stages. As historian and race scholar Imani Perry writes, “First the scientists built ballistic missiles and other weapons. Later they worked on establishing NASA.”

Perry has a haunting paragraph of Operation Paperclip’s lead Nazi scientist, Wernher von Braun. Reflecting on von Braun’s presence in her native Alabama, Perry writes:

[von Braun] was a master of rocket technology in Germany and was brought to Alabama to do the same. Although von Braun claimed that his Nazi party membership was solely utilitarian, concentration camp victims remembered that he selected prison laborers for his laboratories. And he worked mere steps away from torture facilities and walked among the corpses. It is bad enough that Nazi Germany adopted racist ideologies from the United States, but it seems worse still that after they committed genocide, their scientists were invited to Jim Crow Alabama, to plot their way to the sky.

As James Q. Whitman explains, Hitler and other Nazi leaders drew extensively upon the U.S.’s racist imperial practices and apartheid laws to construct Nazi Germany. U.S. government and intelligence officials knew this. And they knew that scientists such as von Braun worked within and perpetuated Nazi Germany’s legalized racism and death camps. But none of this knowledge kept the U.S. from housing and employing 1,600 Nazi’s in U.S’s Cold War campaign. As Perry writes, this recruiting and retention practice reveals that “anything, absolutely anything, could be justified for empire.”

Pax Americana indeed.