Operation Paperclip at Fort Bliss

In September of nineteen forty-five, the first group of German rocket scientists arrived in the United States under a program the government called Operation Paperclip. The name came from the paper clips used to attach biographical summaries to the scientists' dossiers, a mundane detail for a program that was anything but. By February of nineteen forty-six, more than one hundred eighteen German specialists had arrived at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, where they were given housing, laboratories, and access to the captured V-two rockets that had been shipped from Germany in three hundred freight-car loads.

The most prominent among them was Wernher von Braun, who had led the team that designed the V-two for the Third Reich. The V-two was the first operational ballistic missile, capable of striking targets hundreds of miles away. It was deployed against London, Antwerp, and other Allied cities beginning in September of nineteen forty-four. Roughly three thousand V-twos struck civilian targets in Europe, killing an estimated nine thousand people. The warheads were manufactured at an underground facility called Mittelwerk, inside a tunnel complex in the Harz Mountains, using forced labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Historians estimate that more people died producing the V-two than were killed by it as a weapon.

Von Braun had been a member of the Nazi Party and held an honorary rank in the SS. He knew about the conditions at Mittelwerk, though the extent of his direct involvement in the use of forced labor has been disputed by historians. The American government, focused on the strategic value of his knowledge and on getting it before the Soviets could, classified the information about his past and gave him and his team security clearances.

At Fort Bliss and White Sands, the German team assembled and test-fired captured V-twos, worked on early American ballistic missile designs, and trained a generation of American rocket engineers. They were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama in nineteen fifty to continue their work, and von Braun eventually became the lead engineer of the Saturn Five rocket that carried the Apollo missions to the moon.

The Fort Bliss years are almost never mentioned in the Apollo-era accounts. The story was presented as an American triumph. The engineers who made it possible had, less than a decade earlier, been producing weapons of terror for the Nazi regime.