The Wehrmacht was destroyed by the Red Army. The order that replaced the Reich was built by three men the Reich had trained.
What the Red Army did and what came after
The Soviet Union absorbed roughly twenty-seven million dead between 1941 and 1945. Eighty per cent of Wehrmacht combat power was destroyed on the Eastern Front. The decisive defeats of the Reich, Stalingrad in February 1943, Kursk in July 1943, Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944, were Soviet operations. The Western Allies opened the second front in June 1944, almost three years after Barbarossa, and met Soviet troops at the Elbe in April 1945. By every meaningful measure of the war as a war, the Soviets won it.
The emerging order in the Western occupation zones was not Soviet. It was American, and three of the German careers it absorbed are paradigmatic for the wider operation. Wernher von Braun, NSDAP member 5,738,692 and SS-Sturmbannführer, would design the Saturn V that lifted Apollo to the Moon. Reinhard Gehlen, chief of Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East, would build the West German intelligence service the Federal Republic still operates. Allen Dulles, OSS station chief in Bern and later director of the CIA, would draw both men into an apparatus that did not yet exist when the war ended and that they helped to design.
Hitler lost the war on the steppe. Three men who had served his regime, or negotiated with it, won the peace that replaced his regime in the West. Operation Paperclip is the visible part of that transfer. The wider operation begins where Paperclip ends.
This article is not written to argue that the United States chose Nazi Germany over the Soviet Union, nor to claim that an apex centre coordinated every step. It is written to argue something narrower and harder to dispose of. What was defeated was absorbed; what absorbed it was changed by what it absorbed. The defeat became the architecture, and the architecture became the present.
Wernher von Braun and the Saturn V that was built in Mittelwerk
The V2 was not a precision weapon. It killed roughly five thousand civilians in London, Antwerp and other Western cities between September 1944 and March 1945. It killed approximately twenty thousand concentration camp prisoners in the underground production complex at Mittelwerk in Niedersachsen, where the rocket was built using forced labour drawn from the Mittelbau-Dora subcamp of Buchenwald. The weapon’s industrial dead exceeded the weapon’s combat dead by a factor of four. This is the only major weapon system in the twentieth century for which that ratio holds, and it is a fact about the V2 that does not appear in the Apollo monuments.
Von Braun was the V2’s scientific director. He joined the NSDAP in December 1937. He joined the SS in 1940 and rose to Sturmbannführer. In a 1958 letter, made public after his death, he confirmed that he had visited Mittelwerk and seen the working conditions. He did not deny knowledge. He did not claim he could have changed them. He said he had no operational authority over the labour regime, which was true, and that he had concentrated on his rockets, which was also true.
In May 1945 von Braun and roughly five hundred members of the Peenemünde team surrendered to American forces in the Bavarian Alps. Fourteen tons of V2 documentation, hidden in a mine shaft at Bleicherode, was retrieved by US troops in April. He was thirty-three. He had given his American interrogators a list of his Peenemünde colleagues and the locations where they could be found. By September 1945, he was at Fort Bliss, Texas, under Operation Overcast, the pre-Paperclip cover. He was paid six dollars a day. He lived in a small house on the base. In the evenings, he read the German cowboy novels of Karl May, which had been popular in the Reich and which he had brought with him. By 1950 he was at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1960 he became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He was the chief architect of the Saturn V that lifted Apollo 11 in July 1969. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975. He died in 1977.
The architecture that built the Saturn V was not built around von Braun. It was built around the Peenemünde team as a unit. Arthur Rudolph, Operations Director of Mittelwerk and the man who in 1944 had signed the request for additional concentration camp labour, became Saturn V production manager at Marshall and received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1969. Kurt Debus, SS officer and Peenemünde test director, became the first head of the Kennedy Space Center and authorised the Apollo launches, including Apollo 11. Eberhard Rees succeeded von Braun at Marshall in 1970. Hubertus Strughold, who had directed Luftwaffe aeromedical research while experiments were conducted on Dachau prisoners, became the founding head of the Department of Space Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base and is still called, in some NASA historical literature, the Father of Space Medicine.
A documentary record this thick is not a story of individual recruitment. It is the record of an institutional design.
Reinhard Gehlen and the CIA’s eyes in Eastern Europe
Gehlen had been chief of Fremde Heere Ost, Wehrmacht’s Eastern Front intelligence directorate, since April 1942. By the spring of 1945 he understood two things. The Reich was finished. His files, his agents and his analytic templates were the most valuable Soviet-facing asset on the European continent.
In March 1945 he ordered the photographic duplication of his most important records and had them buried in fifty steel cases in the Bavarian Alps. On 22 May 1945 he surrendered to the United States Counter Intelligence Corps in a barn near Reichenhall. He brought no troops. He brought a map of the Alps marked with the cache locations, the agent rosters the cases contained, and the analytical templates that organised the rosters. The CIC report on his interrogation, in NARA RG 549, describes him as composed, fluent in his analysis of Soviet capabilities, and aware that he was negotiating his future. Within weeks he was at Fort Hunt in Virginia, debriefed by US Army G-2. By July 1946 he was back in Pullach, near Munich, running what would be called the Gehlen Organisation under American patronage. The organisation was staffed largely by ex-Wehrmacht and ex-SS personnel. It included figures with substantial war crimes records. Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon who had tortured Jean Moulin to death in 1943, worked for adjacent CIC networks before American intelligence helped him reach Bolivia in 1951.
In 1949 the Gehlen Organisation was transferred from US Army custody to the new Central Intelligence Agency, which had itself been formed in July 1947. The Cold War’s most important organisational instrument and its most important Soviet-facing asset were thus operationally fused at the moment the Cold War was institutionalising itself. In 1956, when the Federal Republic of Germany was permitted to rebuild a security service, the Gehlen Organisation was reformed as the Bundesnachrichtendienst. Gehlen served as the BND’s first president until his retirement in 1968. He died in 1979.
The early CIA’s Soviet threat estimates leaned heavily on Gehlen-derived analysis. Those estimates were systematically inflated. They were inflated because Gehlen’s institutional position depended on the Soviet threat being existential. They were also inflated because his network had been penetrated. Heinz Felfe, an SS officer who became Gehlen’s head of Soviet counterespionage, was unmasked in 1961 as a KGB double agent. By that date the Gehlen-shaped templates had already configured a decade of Western strategic doctrine. The Atlantic alliance was built, in part, on intelligence supplied by the regime the alliance had defeated, filtered through an officer the alliance’s principal adversary had partially controlled.
This is not a story that fits any standard rendering of the Cold War. It is the operational record.
Allen Dulles and the architecture of the postwar order
Allen Dulles was a Wall Street lawyer at Sullivan and Cromwell before the war and after the war. The firm represented German clients through the 1930s, including chemical and steel concerns whose participation in the Reich’s war economy was substantial. His brother John Foster Dulles, also at Sullivan and Cromwell, would become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State in 1953. The brothers’ careers map onto the postwar order with a precision that is hard to overstate. One designed its foreign policy. One ran its covert operations.
From November 1942 Dulles ran the OSS station in Bern. Switzerland was the only neutral capital with direct routes to senior German military, industrial and intelligence figures. He used those routes. He worked from a private residence in the Herrengasse. On the evening of 8 March 1945 SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff arrived at that residence. The conversation was conducted in German. Wolff offered the surrender of German forces in northern Italy. Dulles took the offer. The arrangement was given the cover name Operation Sunrise. The negotiations were held without Soviet knowledge. When Stalin learned of them through Soviet intelligence later in March, his protest to Roosevelt was direct. Roosevelt denied that negotiations were taking place. The denial was inaccurate.
Wolff had organised the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz. He had directed reprisals against Italian partisans. He was not prosecuted at Nuremberg. He was held, then released, then tried in West Germany in 1962, then released in 1969 on health grounds. He died in 1984. The man Dulles dealt with in March 1945 lived as a free citizen of the Federal Republic for most of the postwar era.
Dulles became director of Central Intelligence in February 1953. He held the post until November 1961, the longest tenure in the agency’s history. In those eight years the CIA carried out the operations that became its postwar signature. The 1953 coup in Iran that removed Mohammad Mossadegh and restored the Shah. The 1954 coup in Guatemala that removed Jacobo Árbenz. The 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs that ended his career. He oversaw the integration of the Gehlen Organisation. He oversaw the protection of Klaus Barbie. He oversaw the recruitment paths that placed ex-Nazi personnel in research positions across the American security state. He sat on the Warren Commission after the assassination of John Kennedy, the man who had fired him three years earlier.
The architecture that he and his brother helped design was not built around them. It was built so that the things they had been doing throughout the war and immediately after would have a home.
How JIOA, the National Security Act and NASA were designed around them
The institutions that absorbed Paperclip personnel were not pre-existing structures with a small Nazi component bolted on. They were structures that came into being in the same twenty-four months that the Paperclip recruitment was operationalised, and they were configured to make that recruitment durable.
The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was formed in July 1945 within the War Department. Its specific function was to coordinate the scientific intelligence exploitation of the defeated Reich. Its specific institutional innovation was to handle the contradiction between Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067, which mandated denazification, and the recruitment imperative, which required men whose denazification screenings had marked them as unsuitable.
Truman’s directive of 3 September 1946 formalised Operation Paperclip. The directive’s plain language excluded “members of the Nazi Party and more than nominal participants in its activities”. JIOA reinterpreted “more than nominal” as a case-by-case clearance procedure that JIOA itself controlled. Specific files Linda Hunt later compared show the same OMGUS classification rewritten between an early version and the file submitted to State Department. “Ardent Nazi, security threat” became “not an ardent Nazi” or “no security threat” in the later version. The bureaucratic vocabulary of denazification was being preserved while its operational meaning was being inverted. JIOA Director Bosquet Wev wrote in an internal memo that the continuing focus on the scientists’ Nazi affiliations was, in his words, “beating a dead Nazi horse”. The memo is in NARA RG 330.
Internal opposition to these arrangements was real. State Department lawyers objected to specific clearances. The Immigration and Naturalization Service flagged personnel files. Drew Pearson’s syndicated column of April 1952 named Walter Schreiber, the SS-Brigadeführer working at Randolph Air Force Base, and forced him to leave Texas for Argentina within weeks. Each of these frictions produced a delay or a rerouting. None of them changed the trajectory of the programme as a whole. Absorption was a contested bureaucratic outcome, not a single coordinated act, and the contest was won by the side with operational momentum.
The National Security Act of 26 July 1947 created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency. NSC 4/A of December 1947 authorised psychological warfare as a permanent instrument. NSC 10/2 of June 1948 established the Office of Policy Coordination under Frank Wisner, which ran Operation Bloodstone. Bloodstone recruited Eastern European veterans of the Wehrmacht, the SS and Nazi-collaborationist police forces for covert action against the Soviet Union. The line between Paperclip, which was nominally about scientists, and Bloodstone, which was about covert operatives, was procedural rather than operational. Both relied on the same JIOA-style clearance logic.
The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 29 July 1958 established NASA as a civilian organisation. Marshall Space Flight Center, when it became part of NASA in 1960, was a direct administrative continuation of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, which was a direct continuation of the Fort Bliss arrangement, which was a direct continuation of Peenemünde. NASA was civilian by statute. NASA’s senior leadership at Marshall and the Kennedy Space Center was substantially the same group of men who had built rockets for the Wehrmacht.
The institutional build-out and the recruitment of its personnel ran as inseparable processes. By the time the apparatus was named, the men were already inside.
The Russian counterweight that made all of this necessary
None of this would have been done without Russia. The Soviet Union was the structural reason the absorption operation was undertaken at the speed and on the scale at which it was undertaken. Three layers of Russian power had to be neutralised, and the neutralisation determined what the postwar architecture would have to be.
The Russian counterweight was geographic. Halford Mackinder’s Geographical Pivot of 1904 had named the Eurasian Heartland as the structural pivot of world power. Nicholas Spykman’s Geography of the Peace, published in 1944, restated the doctrine as a Rimland strategy. Whichever continental power held the Heartland could not be defeated by maritime power alone. The Heartland in 1945 was Soviet. The architecture that would contain it had to be a global ring of bases, allies and intelligence positions along the Rimland, and that architecture is what NATO, CENTO, SEATO and the basing system of the 1950s actually were.
The Russian counterweight was financial. The Sovnarkom decree of 21 January 1918 had cancelled Tsarist debt. It was the largest sovereign default in history to that point and held the record into the postwar period. Through the 1928–1941 five-year plans the Soviet Union built its industrial base substantially with imported American and German technology. The Magnitogorsk steel works were designed by Arthur McKee Company. The Stalingrad tractor plant was built by International Harvester. The Gorky automobile plant was a Ford project. The Dnieper hydroelectric dam was constructed by Cooper Engineering. The financing came from Soviet gold reserves, grain exports, and currency arbitrage. It did not come from Western loans. There were no credits whose service could discipline Soviet policy. The Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 produced articles of agreement that the Soviet delegation signed and that the Politburo, in December 1945, declined to ratify. The dollar-anchored international monetary system that came into being in 1946 had no Soviet member. The dollar could not be used against the rouble in the way it would be used against every other industrial economy.
The Russian counterweight was ideological. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, had named British and American imperialism as the principal adversaries of the colonised world. The Comintern from 1919 had funded anti-colonial movements wherever they emerged. After 1945 Soviet economic and military support made it possible for Egypt, India, Indonesia, Cuba, Vietnam and a long list of other states to refuse Western conditions. When the United States and Britain withdrew their offer to finance the Aswan High Dam in July 1956, the Soviet Union financed it instead. The dam was completed in 1970 with Soviet engineering and Soviet credit. Cuba’s survival after the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the missile crisis of 1962 depended on Soviet support. Indian non-alignment under Nehru, Tanzanian socialism under Nyerere and Egyptian Arab nationalism under Nasser were each made possible, even where they were not communist, by the existence of a Soviet alternative against which Western terms had to compete. The presence of the alternative softened Western leverage in countries that never adopted the Soviet model.
These three layers were what the Anglo-American architects of 1945 were working against. Operation Unthinkable, drawn up by the British Joint Planning Staff in May 1945 for an attack on the Soviet Union using rearmed Wehrmacht divisions in the same month that the Reich surrendered, demonstrates how complete the pivot from anti-German to anti-Soviet already was. The plan was found militarily unworkable. The orientation it expressed continued. The Iron Curtain speech of March 1946 made public a doctrine that had been operationally adopted nine months earlier.
The defeated Reich’s Eastern Front intelligence director, the defeated Reich’s V2 designer and the OSS officer who had negotiated with the SS were absorbed into the new American security state because the Soviet adversary across the line made them appear to the architects of that state as too valuable to lose.
Britain won the war in 1945 and lost the empire by 1956
The Anglo-American story has another half. Britain went into the war as the senior partner in a global empire and came out of it as the dependent junior of a successor power. The transition was already running before the war began, on at least eight separate fronts, but the war finished it.
Bretton Woods in July 1944 installed the dollar as the new anchor currency. The Anglo-American Loan of 1946 made convertibility a condition of British survival. When sterling became convertible on 15 July 1947 it collapsed within five weeks. The McMahon Act of 1946 excluded Britain from American atomic information after British scientists had helped build the bomb. The Tizard Mission of September 1940 had already handed over the complete British top-secret technological inventory in exchange for war financing.
The Suez Crisis of November 1956 was the public ratification. Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt without American clearance. The United States, through the United Nations General Assembly and through pressure on the pound sterling, forced their withdrawal within ten days. The Royal Navy could not even guarantee its own oil tanker traffic without American cooperation. John Foster Dulles, as Secretary of State, applied the pressure that ended the operation of his own formal ally. By 1956 the Dulles brothers held the foreign policy and the covert operations of the power that had emerged from the wartime transition as the senior partner. Whether the displacement of Britain was the original strategic aim or the structural outcome of asymmetric capacities applied across forty years, the documentary record does not finally resolve. The outcome is documented. The intent is hypothesis.
What survived the imperial transfer was the elite cluster that operated above the imperial level. The Pilgrims Society, founded in London in 1902 and in New York in 1903, kept the same families connected through the change of headquarters. The Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House, founded in 1921 and 1920 by veterans of the same Versailles delegations, kept the same doctrinal frame circulating in two capitals. The hegemonic position migrated from London to Washington while leaving the substrate intact.
What 1945 built is still operational in 2026
The architecture that was assembled between May 1945 and April 1949 is still the architecture of the present. NATO, founded on 4 April 1949, has expanded thirteen times since the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Sweden joined in 2024. Finland joined in 2023. The Russia that the architecture was originally configured to contain is now contained more comprehensively, and on a longer perimeter, than it was in any decade of the Cold War.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst still operates. Its founding director was Reinhard Gehlen. The agency’s recent reckoning with its institutional past, undertaken by an official historical commission from 2011, has documented the early presence of more than a hundred former SS and SD officers in its senior ranks. The Bundesnachrichtendienst published much of this documentation itself. It is in this respect a more honest institution than the agencies that handled it on the American side.
NASA still operates the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Kennedy Space Center. The Strughold Award of the Aerospace Medical Association was renamed only in 2013. The Rudolph case of 1984 produced denaturalisation of the Saturn V production manager, who returned to West Germany rather than face proceedings. No one followed him. Forty years later most Apollo retrospectives still describe von Braun as a German rocket engineer who came to the United States after the war.
The pattern that this article documents is not over. It is operational. The institutions that were filled in 1945 are still standing. The doctrine that was written in NSC 68 in 1950, that the United States must bear the costs of organising a permanent global containment of a structural adversary, has been transferred from the Soviet Union to Russia, and is being prepared for transfer again, to China, with the same vocabulary and the same instruments.
Hitler lost the war on the steppe in 1943. The men he had trained, and the men who had spoken to him through the Vatican and the OSS, designed what came after. They did not design it because they believed in him. They designed it because the strategic position they inherited required absorption rather than punishment, and because the adversary across the line was the same adversary their grandfathers’ classical-strategic education had named as the structural pivot of world power.
By 1960 the architecture had been built. Its senior personnel at NASA Marshall, the Kennedy Space Center, the Pullach station of the new Bundesnachrichtendienst, the chemical and biological research at Edgewood and Detrick, and the aerospace medicine programmes at Randolph included a substantial number of men who in 1944 had been officers, scientists or administrators of the regime that the architecture had defeated. This continuity is in the personnel files. It is in the institutional histories that NASA, the Bundesnachrichtendienst and the German Medical Association have themselves published since 2006.
The personnel continuity was not incidental. By 1960 it had become institutional. The men named in this article had served a regime that lost the war. They were paid by a regime that won the peace.
The names are public. The archives are open. The facts have been in the record for thirty years. What is missing from the standard narrative is not access to the facts. What is missing is the assembly.
Sources for this piece are catalogued in the Paperclip dossier of The Manifest Archive. Primary records: NARA RG 330 (JIOA personnel files), RG 263 (CIA Name Files released under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act), RG 549 (CIC records), British National Archives CAB 120/691 (Operation Unthinkable). Scholarship: Linda Hunt, Christopher Simpson, Annie Jacobsen, Eric Lichtblau, Tom Bower, Adam Tooze, Carroll Quigley, Götz Aly, David Edgerton, Frank Costigliola. The Interagency Working Group’s 2005 and 2007 reports remain the official synthesis.
The Von Braun thread runs deeper. Did Wernher von Braun Predict the Alien Card? traces the threat-selection mechanism from Peenemünde to the policy instruments von Braun would later see deployed.
Jerry writes The Manifest Archive. Forensic analysis of the institutional structures that shape geopolitics, history, and power. Published on Substack and Medium.
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