Medical experiments conducted by Luftwaffe doctors in a secluded barracks known as Experimental Cell Block Five used prisoners as unwilling human subjects to test the limits of physical endurance for aviation purposes. The research was intended to solve practical military problems, such as determining how to rescue pilots suffering from extreme cold after being shot down at sea or from the effects of high-altitude ejections. Prisoners were submerged in ice water until they died or subjected to explosive decompression in low-pressure chambers, all while Nazi doctors recorded the data. Jacobsen links this “science without conscience” (64) directly to doctors who would later be sought by the US Army Air Forces, including Dr. Hubertus Strughold. The data obtained through these lethal experiments was considered highly valuable and formed a significant part of the aviation medicine knowledge that the United States eagerly sought to exploit, forming a connection between the recruitment of Nazi doctors and the act of medical murder.

The Mittelwerk, also referred to as Nordhausen or Dora, was a sprawling underground factory where the V-2 rocket was mass-produced using concentration camp prisoners as enslaved laborers. For Jacobsen, this subterranean facility is a symbol of the moral compromise at the heart of Operation Paperclip. It represents the nexus of German technological brilliance and human atrocity. The factory was moved underground from Peenemünde to shield it from Allied bombing and its tunnels were initially dug by prisoners with their bare hands. Jacobsen details the grotesque conditions, where thousands of malnourished laborers worked twelve-hour shifts without adequate food, sanitation, or air. Many died from exhaustion, disease, and brutal punishment.

This system of state-sponsored enslavement was a joint venture between Heinrich Himmler’s SS, which supplied the prisoners, and Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments. Jacobsen decisively implicates key Paperclip recruits in this enterprise, including Wernher von Braun, operations director Arthur Rudolph, and general manager Georg Rickhey. She provides evidence of their direct involvement in overseeing the factory and even personally procuring prisoners. Von Braun, for instance, wrote a letter detailing his trip to the Buchenwald camp to “seek out more qualified detainees” (16) for the work. Ultimately, the Mittelwerk illustrates as the moral baggage attached to the rocket science America so eagerly acquired.

Operation Alsos was a top-secret Allied intelligence mission tasked with capturing German scientific research and personnel during the final stages of World War II. Jacobsen uses the mission as a narrative device to chronicle the Allied hunt for the Third Reich’s knowledge of atomic, biological, and chemical weapons. Functioning as an offshoot of the Manhattan Project, Alsos was led by scientific director Samuel Goudsmit, whose expertise and command of German made him uniquely suited for interrogating scientists and analyzing captured documents on the front lines. Key discoveries made by Alsos agents, such as the papers in Dr. Eugen Haagen’s Strasbourg apartment, drive the book’s narrative and expose the depravity of many Nazi research programs. The intelligence gathered by Alsos was critical in identifying the scientists and technologies that would become primary targets for recruitment under Operation Paperclip.

Operation Paperclip was the secret postwar US intelligence program that brought over 1,600 German scientists and technicians to America to exploit their military and industrial knowledge. Jacobsen defines the program as an egregious moral compromise made in the name of national security, driven by the fear that the Soviet Union would otherwise gain a decisive technological advantage in the emerging Cold War. She emphasizes that the program had a “benign public face and a classified body of secrets and lies” (xiii), which served to hide the troubling Nazi pasts of many of its most prized recruits. These were not just “nominal Nazis” (xiv), but often dedicated party members and SS officers who had been deeply complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich.

The program was governed by the Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), giving it official, high-level military sanction. The primary justification offered by American officials was that of the lesser of two evils: If the US did not acquire these scientists, the Soviets would. This rationale allowed the government to sanitize the histories of men connected to forced labor, medical torture, and mass murder. Jacobsen frames the entire operation as a foundational moral compromise that fueled the Cold War and left a complicated legacy, forcing America to confront difficult questions about whether the ends of national security can ever justify such means and whether scientific accomplishment can cancel out past crimes.