The Nazi cold warriors of postwar America

By Lichtblau’s reckoning, as many as 10,000 former Nazis and collaborators settled in the US. These included 1,600 physicists, chemists, engineers and doctors transplanted as part of Operation Paperclip, the audacious project designed to put top Nazi scientists to work for the US.

The most famous of these was Wernher von Braun, chief designer of both the V2 rocket, which rained terror on London, and the Saturn V, which lifted American astronauts to the moon. Another renowned Paperclip scientist was Hubertus Strughold, “the living sage of space medicine”, who had overseen horrific experiments on concentration-camp inmates.

However unsavoury their pasts, these scientists were welcomed and feted by the US – provided they could help develop ballistic missiles and high-altitude bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union.

US spy agencies made equally generous use of Nazis, recruiting perhaps 1,000 former acolytes of Hitler to help gather intelligence on the Soviets. These included small fish, such as Soobzokov, but also such prominences as the SS general Karl Wolff, Himmler’s former chief of staff, and Otto von Bolschwing, an SS officer who had worked closely with Adolf Eichmann on the Nazis’ “Jewish policies”.

In the cool reckoning of Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, and in the hysterical imaginings of J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, even the most tainted Nazi could be enlisted in the fight against the red menace.

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-nazi-cold-warriors-of-postwar-america-1.2040775