Journalist and author Annie Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, US national security and government secrecy. Her bestseller, "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base" is being made into an AMC scripted television series. She discussed her latest research on Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler's scientists and their families to the United States after WWII ended. The US govt. concluded that it was more important to take advantage of the expertise and knowledge of these scientists during the Cold War than prosecute them for their war crimes. The Nazis had extremely advanced war technology, particularly with rocketry, and chemical and biological weapons, but the reason Hitler didn't pursue atomic bombs was that he characterized it as "Jewish science," she uncovered.
To learn about Paperclip, Jacobsen researched German archival documents, lost dossiers discovered in various archives, and interviewed family members of the now deceased scientists. Among the recruited scientists were Otto Ambros, who invented artificial rubber for the Nazis, and was tried and convicted at Nuremberg for his involvement in the death camps. Yet, he was released from prison by John McCloy, the US High Commissioner for Germany, and ended up working for the US Dept. of Energy, she revealed. Arthur Rudolph, a Nazi rocket scientist, and Dr. Kurt Blome, who developed Nazi germ warfare, were two other recruits who ended up working on substantial projects for America, she reported.
Wernher von Braun, considered one of the 'fathers of rocket science,' was instrumental in NASA's Apollo program. Yet, he'd previously been a Nazi and member of the SS, and hand-picked slaves from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp and used them for slave-labor at his rocket production facility, she detailed. Jacobsen was surprised by journal entries of high ranking American military officers that depicted how in their efforts to beat the Soviets, they easily got along with and respected the former Nazi scientists.
Project Blue Book Now Online
First hour guest, John Greenewald of the Black Vault and Government Secrets websites, announced that he's now incorporated the declassified Project Blue Book files into his Black Vault archive. Project Blue Book was the US Air Force's record of UFO cases spanning over 30 years. Greenewald converted over 130,000 pages into 10,000 PDF files, and people can search through cases by decade-- the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (check out some of the most interesting UFO images here). He noted that the Project was essentially a PR campaign to calm public hysteria about UFOs (which reached a fever pitch in 1952 when unidentified craft buzzed over Washington DC), by issuing prosaic explanations for the vast majority of the sightings.
News segment guests: John Curtis, Christian Wilde