Between 1945 and 1959, the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps and the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency secretly transported more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians from defeated Nazi Germany to the United States — together with files that had been quietly stripped of references to Nazi Party membership, SS rank, and slave-labour exploitation. The clip on the folder was where the program got its name. The most prominent of the imported men was Wernher von Braun, designer of the V-2 ballistic missile, who twenty-four years later watched the Saturn V — a rocket built by his Huntsville team — lift Apollo 11 toward the Moon.
State & Intelligence Operations
1945-1959
