Today, Operation Paperclip (hiring Nazi scientists to work for the USA) is well known. Was it known at the time? Was there any opposition, particularly within NASA?

by WaitForItTheMongols

I'm an aerospace engineer, and I've always been interested in the history of my field, far beyond what I need to know to do my job.

Today, I came across this humorous post online imagining Jewish NASA employees running into these Nazi scientists and imagining that the confrontation would be awkward in some way: https://reddit.com/r/shitposting/comments/zw7phl/hello_there/

I'm curious about the reality of this situation. There are a few sub-questions that I think would particularly lead to a fully fleshed-out response to what I'm hoping to learn.

  1. Today, the general public knows this happened. In the 50s and 60s, would the average American be aware that we had hired Nazis rather than punishing them?

(Also, I'm not looking for discussion of the separate question of "Were these Germans actually Nazis and did they believe in Nazi principles, or were they just hired by the Nazis and required to go along with things?". This is a question that I believe has been brought up separately and is out of scope for this discussion. For the sake of this conversation, we'll be assuming that the rocket scientists hired from Nazi Germany were indeed Nazis.)

  1. If the general public was not aware of this happening, were the American rocket scientists aware of it? I imagine they'd have to be - if one day Gottfried shows up and he's speaking with a thick German accent, presumably you'd put two and two together. But do we have any information regarding NASA employees being briefed about the new coworkers they're soon going to have? We're the Nazi engineers sprinkled around NASA wherever their personal expertise would be useful, or were they more in their own little segmented department?

  2. Did NASA have a large population of Jewish American employees? I assume they would, but it would be nice to have some kind of number on this, even if it's an estimate.

  3. Was there any opposition to hiring these Nazi scientists? Just a bit ago, they were the enemy! And now they're building our rockets. Did Operation Paperclip involve any steps with acclimation people, telling them the new hirees were German Non-Nazis? I'm particularly curious if any Jewish employees would have expressed discomfort working with Nazis.

Any information on the contemporary situation surrounding the hiring of these people would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time!

junction_squid

My optics professor at the U of Dayton in 1964 or 1965 was one of the former nazi scientists recruited for the Air Force Research Lab near Dayton. One day in class he briefly discussed his work developing radar absorbing materials for the nazis. The presence of former nazis in town was fairly well known at the time.