It's not exactly news that other lights of the Third Reich were succored on U.S. Indeed, he was the rock star of NASA's early days, celebrated by Walt Disney, and much honored. payroll.īut does time dull our capacity for outrage over Jacobsen's accounting? We've long known, after all, that a Nazi player such as Werner von Braun - so central to the sky-screaming V1 and V2 rockets, those Nazi "wonder weapons," or Wunderwaffe, that Hitler launched against Great Britain and northern Europe - was an indispensable factor in America's space program. With Operation Paperclip, Jacobsen shows how governmental secrecy and its blinkered morality veiled, for so long, the enormity of Nazi crimes perpetrated by the hundreds of technologists who were put on the U.S. As history, it certainly outdoes her best-selling exposé, Area 51, which sifted the truths and legends of the top-secret Nevada test site where spy planes were developed and to which rumors of UFO and alien capture will always cling. Operation Paperclip amounts to Jacobsen's J'Accuse, hurled at the hidden hive of America's postwar ambition. Such is the essence of Annie Jacobsen's important, superbly written yet grueling slog through mountains of documentation, much of it obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests and detailed here for the first time.
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