Summary of Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 Operation Alsos was a top secret mission that was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project. It was tasked with tracking down and capturing German scientists who were believed to be working on atomic, biological, or chemical warfare.

#2 Goudsmit and his team read the documents, and found out that the University of Strasbourg had been doubling as a biological warfare research base for the Third Reich. They also found out that the Nazis were conducting human medical experiments.

#3 In December 1944, a party was under way at a medieval showpiece called Varlar Castle in Germany. The castle was being readied for a celebration. On this night, the banquet hall was decorated in full Nazi Party regalia.

#4 The V-2 rocket was the most advanced flying weapon ever created. It was 46 feet long, and could travel a distance of 190 miles at speeds up to five times the speed of sound. Its earlier version, the V-1 flying bomb, had been raining terror down on cities across northern Europe since the first one hit London in 1944.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669385820

IRB Media

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Insights on Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Operation Alsos was a top secret mission that was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project. It was tasked with tracking down and capturing German scientists who were believed to be working on atomic, biological, or chemical warfare.

#2

Goudsmit and his team read the documents, and found out that the University of Strasbourg had been doubling as a biological warfare research base for the Third Reich. They also found out that the Nazis were conducting human medical experiments.

#3

In December 1944, a party was under way at a medieval showpiece called Varlar Castle in Germany. The castle was being readied for a celebration. On this night, the banquet hall was decorated in full Nazi Party regalia.

#4

The V-2 rocket was the most advanced flying weapon ever created. It was 46 feet long, and could travel a distance of 190 miles at speeds up to five times the speed of sound. Its earlier version, the V-1 flying bomb, had been raining terror down on cities across northern Europe since the first one hit London in 1944.

#5

The man behind the V-2 rocket was Wernher von Braun, a thirty-two-year-old aristocrat and wunderkind physicist. He was at Castle Varlar to receive one of Hitler’s highest and most prestigious noncombat decorations, the Knight’s Cross of the War Service Cross.

#6

The Castle Varlar celebration was a crowning moment for General Dornberger. The pomp and power thrilled him, and he later recalled, It was a scene. The excitement focus alternated between a rocket launch and award decoration, then back to a rocket launch again.

#7

The Americans were planning to capture the V-2 rockets and everything related to them, and bring them back to the United States. The prisoners who were building the rockets were being worked to death, but this was not seen as a problem by the Nazis.

#8

The underground factory at Nordhausen was built to produce V-weapons. It was run by the SS, and its director was Arthur Rudolph, a rocket engine assembly specialist who had worked under von Braun since 1934. The prisoners worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, and were starved and beaten to death if they were slow on the production lines.

#9

The Third Reich used slave labor to build the V-2 rocket, and it was a classified weapons project. The less Allied intelligence knew about it, the better for the Reich.

#10

In the spring of 1944, V-2 production had accelerated to the point where the SS provided Mittelwerk managers with their own concentration camp, Dora, which in turn grew to include thirty subcamps. The man in charge of personnel at the Mittelwerk, its general manager, was a forty-six-year-old engineer named Georg Rickhey.

#11

On December 31, Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, decided to flee from the danger zone. He and his aide climbed into a private car and hurried east, headed for the comforts of Schloss Kransberg, a mountaintop castle outside Frankfurt.

#12

In January 1945, Adolf Hitler left the Eagle’s Nest and moved to Berlin, where he would spend the rest of his life living underground in the Führerbunker.

#13

After Germany, what will become of me. The guillotine. Will I be torn apart by a yowling mob. Speer wrote a memo to Hitler outlining the huge losses in Silesia. The war is lost, he wrote.

#14

At Auschwitz, the SS was trying to destroy any evidence of the camp. The Red Army was only a few miles away, and many of the SS officers were trying to flee on horseback.

#15

On January 18, 1945, the last day at Auschwitz, 9,000 emaciated inmates from Buna were lined up and sent on a death march to the German interior. Only random prisoners remained in the