Our Germans
Project Paperclip and the National Security State
$36.29
- Paperback
264 pages
- Release Date
14 February 2020
Summary
A gripping history of one of the United States’ most controversial Cold War intelligence operations.
Project Paperclip brought hundreds of German scientists and engineers, including aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, to the United States in the first decade after World War II. More than the freighters full of equipment or the documents recovered from caves and hastily abandoned warehouses, the German brains who designed and built the V-2 rocket and other “wonder weapons” fo…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781421438184 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1421438186 |
| Author: | Brian E. Crim |
| Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Imprint: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 264 |
| Release Date: | 14 February 2020 |
| Weight: | 386g |
| Dimensions: | 16mm x 152mm x 229mm |
| Audience Age: | 18 |
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Critics Review
Through participant vignettes, historian Crim provides insight into early Cold War decision-making in this well-documented, microhistorical, dissertation-like expose of Project Paperclip. Highly recommended.
—Choice
A very fine account concerning the internal dynamics of the Paperclip program, providing a more nuanced evaluation than has hitherto been available.
—H-Net Reviews
At a time when drones, cyberweapons, and other high technology continue to substitute for coherent foreign policy, Crim’s book is a sober reminder of the moral hazards of a technocratic national security state.
—Journal of American History
What distinguishes Our Germans is its emphasis on the role of the specialists in the emerging national security state of the early Cold War, where Project Paperclip ‘exacerbated the growing rift between the State Department and an ascendant national security bureaucracy’ (99). But most importantly, Our Germans is a much-needed update and expansion of Clarence Lasby’s 1971 Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War.
—American Historical Review
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the US government recruited hundreds of German scientists and engineers, including the designers of the V2 rocket, to staff American agencies and companies under the so-called Paperclip programme. Crim draws on recently declassified documents to reveal the history of the programme and the controversies it provoked.
—International Institute for Strategic Studies
Brian E. Crim
Brian E. Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. He is the author of Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938 and the editor of Class of ‘31: A German-Jewish Émigré’s Journey across Defeated Germany.
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