There’s a popular viral listing of conspiracy theories and Operation Paperclip is listed as an example of a “true” conspiracy theory, but I object because I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. Just because it was kept secret doesn’t mean it’s a conspiracy theory, that’s like saying the Manhatten Project was a conspiracy theory because it was a government secret project. According to Wikipedia it was public knowledge by 1947 so it doesn’t seem like it should count as a conspiracy theory.
I don’t know much about it. Was it something the public speculated was going on and the government denied it?
If not I don’t think it counts as a conspiracy theory. Someone has to have a “theory” of what’s going on before it’s proven or disproven.
The operation itself certainly wasn’t a CT.
Were there CTs wrapped around it by nutbags claiming the captured German scientists were working on mind control, or time travel or … and the fact we don’t have publicly acknowledged mind control or time travel today proves that they succeeded and the info has been suppressed by THEM? Perhaps; I don’t know and can’t be arsed to check.
In a more benign scenario, while Op Paperclip was still super secret, did some press types get wind of it and ask officialdom for confirmation, only to be told by Washington officials that no such project existed? If so, you have the essential elements: there’s something believed by laymen to be going on that is being formally hidden by officialdom acting in a conspiracy of lies and silence which hide the truth that the project really does exist.
That amounts to moving the goal posts so that any classified fact can be said to be hidden by a conspiracy, and therefore any laymen belief in any rumors about that fact is a CT. A CT that is later found to be true once that fact does eventually become public.
But the problem is that all of those can also apply to the Manhatten Project which nobody claims is a conspiracy theory.
You underestimate the idiocy of the world.
This, I think, is the right starting point. Absent any evidence or confirmation, you’re basically starting with something like, “American intelligence agencies and military authorities have gone to great lengths to secretly move Nazis out of Germany and shield them from consequences of their wartime acts in order to work with them in American laboratories! They are protecting Nazis!” Which, boiled down, sure sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory in the classic sense. If you didn’t know anything else and you heard that at the time, it would be pretty easy to dismiss.
But then the operation gets confirmed (with a lot of nuanced adjustment to the bluntly simplistic version above), and it’s no longer a conspiracy, it’s a legit intelligence action — murky and ethically problematic, but still legit. Nevertheless, the original core of it still qualifies as a “CT” as generally understood.
To clarify what others above are getting at, this is a conflation of two things: Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories ™
Conspiracies happen all the time. Any time two or more people agree to do something illicit, that’s a “Conspiracy to Commit X” where X can be murder, or treason, etc.
There are also government conspiracies like the Manhattan Project or the development of any advanced weapons systems, or the stealing of soviet submarine K129 from the ocean floor.
A Conspiracy Theory™ technically just means somebody has a theory that there’s a government conspiracy going on. Very rarely do these theories turn out to be right. More colloquially, the phrase Conspiracy Theory™ generally refers to an outlandish theory that is wildly unlikely or impossible.
Project Azorian (the submarine project) was a huge secret with many people in on it, but it managed to be kept secret for almost 6 years. Even then it only worked because the government convinced several journalists to keep the story under wraps by reading them into the program and showing them it was important. Big government secrets generally don’t last very long.
It’s really only a “Conspiracy Theory that turned out to be true” if some crackpot with no special knowledge read the tea leaves and figured out what was happening and nobody believed him because it sounded crazy.
The typical conspiracy theory regarding Operation Paperclip contends that because von Braun was brought over via OP, and later collaborated with Walt Disney as a science consultant on a couple of television series about space exploration, then clearly Walt Disney (the man) was involved in Operation Paperclip, and therefore the Earth is flat.
That’s an actual argument I’ve seen multiple times on NASA Facebook comment sections. Every minor association or connection belies a deep sinister plot of deception and lies to these people.
Conspiracy theorists only get credit for conspiracy theories they uncover. The true number of significant conspiracies unraveled by amateurs on the Internet is close to zero.
The problem I recall reading, at the time, was federal law or similar prevented importing Nazis to the US. Imagine that. So certain people had to sign off on the paperwork, probably at State but I dunno. Basically, it was a kind of bureaucratic handwaving.
"Yeah, they were Nazis, but they weren’t, you know, really enthusiastic nazis. Barely an inconvenience to gain entry. And the official parlance at the time was “Not an Ardent Nazi” placed after their entry. LOL
I think at one time, essentially the top three guys at NASA were Nazis. Von Braun, Deebus, and somebody else whose name escapes me. Paperclip wasn’t simply rocket scientists, propaganda specialists, chemical warfare specialists, and many others were also part of the crew.
MkUltra was partly an extension of research into hallucinogenics by the nazis during the war. The expressed intent from what can be gleaned from remaining documents was a type of mind control, among other things. The way the programs were run are certainly reminiscent of nazis or communists. Several prisoners in one notorious “experiment” were kept dosed on L.S.D. for 77 days straight, and jolted with cattle prods when trying to sleep.
Operation Paper-clip with a hyphen appeared in public with headlines in September 13, 1946 papers using the term to describe a program announced by Truman the day before.
President Truman has approved a War Department plan to bring a large additional group of key German scientists to the United States to work on the development of new weapons.
The group was in addition to a group announced on March 29. In fact, as early as October 2, 1945, newspapers reported “Nazi Scientists Coming to U.S.”
These were brief announcements. Little more info was given until December. Wernher von Braun was introduced publicly on December 3, 1946 via a wire service photo. The caption was “German Scientists work for U.S.”
Huge articles about the program were finally released the next day, especially in the New York Daily News, with a big picture of a smiling “Werner” von Braun. The use of Nazi scientists was sugared with the information that they would save the U.S. at least $200,000,000 in aeronautical research costs and $750,000,000 in rocket research. Those were staggering numbers at the time.
We now know that the Germans had been brought over in 1945, so they were kept a secret for a while. So were many other aspects of the war. Waiting a bit for public sentiment to die down was surely a good idea. A bit. Two whole months after the end of the war.
Operation Paper-Clip may be the most publicly announced secret program that came out of the war. The government wanted to justify what it was doing in a big way, not hide it. Conspiracy, shmonspiracy.
Right - they wanted to deny their use by the Soviet Union, and they were considered part of “intellectual reparations” due to the costs of the war.
They were all routed through Mexico as port of entry, not in secret, but it was illegal under US law if they were considered war criminals. So a lot of record scrubbing ensued. Was Von Braun a war criminal? Depends on who you ask.
If I had to come up with a formal definition of Conspiracy Theory, it would look like this. But I think it’s fair to expand that definition a little bit for general interest stories (or graphics like the OP), to include conspiracies that would sound fake or crazy if you heard about it with no facts to back them up.
The Manhattan Project? It makes perfect sense that there would be a secret operation to build an atomic bomb, so it’s not a conspiracy theory.
Smuggling Nazis to the US to help our scientists? Drugging unwitting people with LSD and MDA in attempts to find and protect against “truth serums”? Those sound crazy, so I’m OK with calling them conspiracy theories even if no one hypothesized about them before they were generally known.
Ah, yes - the best kind of conspiracy theories are the ones no-one ever theorises about.
That’s just how brilliant the conspiracy really was. They announced it right in the open so you wouldn’t think to question the official story
One that would definitely qualify as conspiracy “theory”, if only tangentially related to Paperclip, is the contention that high level Nazis were also recruited for the newly formed CIA, including SD and security agents. The most “famous” theory would probably be Heinrich Mūller, head of the Gestapo. He was apparently killed in 1945, but rumors abounded over the years. along with Lord Kitchener, Amelia Earhart, the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, John Wilkes Booth and Elvis Presley, They did exhume Mūeller’s grave for testing. There is a journal available that is purported to be Mueller’s, where the author describes 1940s and 1950s Washington, DC politics and political figures. Whether genuine or not (doubtful) it is well written and entertaining.