Wernher von Braun, a German aerospace engineer who became the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, represents the Cold War transition of scientists from enemy combatants to indispensable assets. As the technical director of the Nazi V-2 rocket program, he was deeply embedded in the Third Reich, joining the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1940. During the war, von Braun directed the V-2 program using thousands of concentration camp inmates as enslaved laborers before surrendering to the US Army in 1945. Jacobsen uses his immediate recruitment to establish his immense value to the American military, which eagerly dismissed his associations with the Nazi regime to secure his expertise. Once in the United States, von Braun became the public face of the space program, partnering with Walt Disney and eventually leading NASA’s Apollo missions. This trajectory illustrates the staggering success of Operation Paperclip’s public relations facade.

To protect his status, von Braun maintained that he was an apolitical scientist coerced into joining the SS. He dismissed his ethical compromises and obfuscated his complicity in the Mittelwerk deaths, insisting that he and his associates “were interested solely in exploring outer space” (178). This highlights the active deception and mythmaking employed by both von Braun and his American handlers. Although he was celebrated as an American hero, von Braun’s standing was permanently complicated by revelations regarding his SS membership. Jacobsen utilizes his eventual exposure to underscore the central moral question of the text, challenging the idea that extraordinary scientific accomplishment can cancel out past crimes.

Otto Ambros was a German chemist and IG Farben executive who co-discovered sarin nerve gas and who operated at the nexus of the Nazi extermination machine and industrial war production. Convicted of mass murder and enslavement at Nuremberg but granted early clemency, his trajectory demonstrates the US government’s pursuit of chemical warfare intelligence at any ethical price. During the war, Ambros oversaw chemical weapons production at Dyhernfurth and managed the IG Auschwitz enslaved labor facility. Jacobsen portrays these actions to establish the severity of his war crimes and his elite status in Hitler’s inner circle. Despite his prominent position on Allied wanted lists, Ambros evaded initial capture with the active assistance of US Chemical Warfare Service officers who were desperate to obtain his proprietary nerve gas formulas. His evasion reveals the rogue, self-serving actions of American intelligence factions competing for Nazi secrets.

After serving a fraction of his sentence, Ambros received clemency from US High Commissioner John J. McCloy and subsequently secured lucrative contracts with American corporations and the Department of Energy. Jacobsen uses this rehabilitation to argue that the American military-industrial complex was fully complicit in rewarding mass murderers. Living a wealthy and highly respected life post-release, he maintained a callous lack of remorse, claiming that “[he and his] colleagues [were] the victims of the Third Reich” (417). Ambros was later linked to the thalidomide pharmaceutical tragedy, illustrating the enduring consequences of empowering amoral opportunists with vast scientific authority.

Hubertus Strughold was the wartime director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry. Brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip, he rose to become the chief scientist of the US Air Force’s aerospace medicine division. Because he supervised doctors who performed fatal freezing and high-altitude experiments on prisoners at Dachau, his postwar trajectory illustrates how American military institutions shielded prominent scientists to exploit their medical data.

Before his recruitment, Strughold directed top-tier Luftwaffe medical research. The ease with which he was hired by the US Army to establish the Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, Jacobsen suggests, demonstrates the swift integration of Nazi medical infrastructure into American military assets. In the United States, Strughold developed space capsules and high-altitude survival frameworks critical to the space race, highlighting the foundational contributions that made the military desperate to protect him.

To secure his position, Strughold cultivated a false myth of anti-Nazi resistance, denying any knowledge of the Dachau experiments despite his direct subordinates being tried and hanged for them. He audaciously claimed to journalists that regarding his institute’s political affiliations, “only the janitor and the man who took care of the animals” were members of the Nazi Party (410). Jacobsen exposes how the US military willingly accepted these fabrications to protect their valuable scientific investment. Strughold was honored extensively until the 1990s, when irrefutable evidence of his wartime actions led to the removal of his name from Air Force buildings. His downfall shows that the suppressed truths of Operation Paperclip eventually unraveled the fabricated reputations of its beneficiaries.

Walter Schreiber was a Major General who served as the Surgeon General of the Third Reich. He was a central figure in Nazi medical atrocities and the chaotic intelligence battles of the early Cold War. Captured by the Soviets, he testified at Nuremberg before defecting to the United States. Employed by the Air Force until public exposure forced him to flee to Argentina, his story exemplifies the US government’s willingness to recruit complicit high-ranking Nazis.

During the war, Schreiber worked as a top medical officer for the Nazis, allocating funds for concentration camp experiments involving lethal phenol injections. Jacobsen uses this context to establish his guilt and his deep integration into the Nazi hierarchy. After making a highly suspicious escape from Soviet custody, Schrieber was rushed to the United States as an invaluable intelligence asset due to his knowledge of bioweapons and Soviet interrogations. This, Jacobsen suggests, demonstrates how anti-communist panic consistently overrode basic vetting procedures and moral reservations.

Schreiber’s American career ended abruptly when he was exposed by Boston journalists and a survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Medical investigators publicly denounced him, warning that he was “involved as an accessory before and after the fact in the worst of the Medical War Crimes” (350). This scandal highlights the crucial role of a free press and Holocaust survivors in dismantling the Paperclip cover-up. Following the public outcry, Schreiber was secretly relocated to Argentina with US military assistance, underscoring the extreme lengths the government went to protect the program’s secrecy and avoid a Congressional inquiry.

Kurt Blome, the Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich, represents the extreme of the Nazi doctrine which considered certain people to be subhumans and thus disposable laboratory subjects. Following his controversial acquittal at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, the head of the Nazi biological weapons program was swiftly hired by the US Army Chemical Corps.

Under orders from Heinrich Himmler, Blome directed the Reich’s secret plague research facility at Posen, illustrating the scope of Nazi biological warfare ambitions. Shortly after his acquittal, Blome consulted with Camp Detrick scientists on plague weaponization and assassination poisons. Jacobsen argues that this proves that the United States actively sought to inherit and expand upon Nazi science. Ultimately, Blome was acquitted at Nuremberg only because prosecutors could not definitively prove he executed his plans to infect humans. As the tribunal noted, though Blome may have been associated with such experiments, “the record fails to disclose that fact, or that he ever actually conducted the experiments” (274). This highlights the legal loopholes exploited by Paperclip recruiters to hire possible war criminals.

Arthur Rudolph, the operations director at the Mittelwerk underground V-2 factory, highlights the delayed but inevitable collision between the mythmaking of Operation Paperclip and historical accountability. During the war, Rudolph managed the assembly lines at Mittelwerk, which utilized enslaved laborers; he actively requested more concentration camp inmates to meet production quotas. In the United States, Rudolph served as the project manager for the Saturn V rocket, showing NASA’s technological dependency upon former Nazi engineers. Jacobsen establishes this direct, operational link between the V-2 rockets and the Holocaust to contrast with Rudolph’s sanitized American persona.

Renewed Holocaust awareness in the 1980s finally led the Department of Justice to confront Rudolph with his past. Investigators concluded his actions demonstrated an “almost unbelievable callousness and disregard [for] human life” (428), forcing him to renounce his US citizenship and return to Germany in 1984 to avoid prosecution. His eventual expulsion illustrates the collapse of the Paperclip secrecy apparatus decades after the war.