Operation Paperclip of World War II

The Allied Control Council, Arthur Rudolph, and the Great Brain Drain 

By Lukas Moller 

Lukas Moller is a 2023 graduate of Albany Law School. He grew up in Altamont, NY. He received his Bachelor of Arts, Summa Cum Laude, in Honors History from SUNY Albany. While at Albany Law School, Lukas interned for the Albany County District Attorney’s Office, Goldman Sachs Ayco Personal Wealth  Management, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York.Lukas will be joining Goldman Sachs Ayco Personal Wealth Management, focusing on tax, trust and estates and securities matters. Lukas wrote this paper for Professor Bonventre’s International Law of War and Crime Seminar.

A night out in Huntsville, Alabama may involve a Huntsville Havoc hockey game, a concert, or a rodeo at the Von Braun Center, a multi-purpose facility located in the middle of downtown Huntsville. [See Best Places to Live in the U.S. in 2023–2024, U.S. NEWS, https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/best-places-to-live.] The Von Braun Center is named after Wernher Von Braun, a German rocket scientist who spearheaded the NASA space program that sent astronauts to the Moon in 1969. [See National Aviation Hall of Fame, Wernher Von Braun, https://nationalaviation.org/enshrinee/wernher-von-braun/.]

Although his name is enshrined in a popular event destination, Wernher Von Braun had a very checkered past as a member of the Allgemine-SS branch of the Nazi party throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the summer of 1945, the United States Army transferred Von Braun and his associates to America and commissioned them to work in the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Von Braun was not alone, and the covert operations to resettle German scientists in the wake of World War II is now known as Operation Paperclip.

Not only was the operation covert from the American public, but it was covert from the Legislature (and the Judiciary) to keep government agencies and even President Truman from delaying or canceling the program. This essay will address the possible international law implications if the operation was made public prior to 1984, and if the “interest of national security” outweighed the harboring of possible war criminals.

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To read the paper, open HERE.