Operation Paperclip on 'Hunters' Was Somehow Very, Very Real

Hunters, Amazon’s Nazi-killing, history-bending, twist-ending pulpy bloodbath of a series probably left you pretty boggled. While most of the series remains fictional, there are dashes of truth in the late ’70s revenge tale. The hard part: trying to figure out which is which.

Aside from the very real Pavoloch Massacre and semi real team of SS hunters, there’s also a controversial government operation mentioned throughout the back end of the series and supposedly responsible for helping put the U.S. on the moon. It’s called “Operation Paperclip,” a name so administrative and banal only Army intelligence could have come up with it, and, in fact, they did.

The program launched in 1945 and entailed the recruitment of some 1,600 German scientists. (The name refers to the paper clips attached to scientist dossiers.) The scientists, many of whom had worked on chemical and biological weapons for the Nazis, would be recruited to aid in the growing arms race, helping the U.S. outpace the Soviet Union in weapons production.

Media outlets exposed the project in December of 1946, creating obvious outrage as some of the scientists had been active Nazi party members, responsible for the V-2 rocket attacks on London and Antwerp and the experiments done inside concentration camps.

Hunters also insinuated that these scientists helped America land on the moon. Their role in America’s space race is in fact well established. Aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, acquired by Army intelligence through Operation Paperclip, was later hired by NASA and worked on the Apollo moon landing. Von Braun is also characterized as a part of the conspiracy within the world of Hunters. Back in reality, other former Nazi scientists and engineers helped develop the Saturn V launch vehicle.

Kurt H. Debus (right), former director of the Kennedy Space Center (here displaying the Apollo 13 rocket) was one of the 1,600 scientists recruited through Operation Paperclip.
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The recruiting for Operation Paperclip went on for a number of years, and though the program brought boons to U.S. military and space programs, there was more than just a moral consequence.

Operation Paperclip also flipped the moral script, and soon American soldiers became test subjects for various nerve agents and interrogation techniques developed by the U.S. government—not dissimilar to the testing done on concentration camp victims. The experimentations violated codes enacted after the Nuremberg trials. It’s also estimated that the cleanup of the weapons developed during Operation Paperclip cost about $30 billion.

But when the perceived threat is nuclear Armageddon at the hands of the nation’s top enemy (the Soviets), deals with devils are just par for the course.

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