AMERICAN SELECTIVE AMNESIA

Americans are congratulating Russians on their national day? How utterly heartwarming. A touching moment between old Cold War pen pals. The same sweet duplicity that's been standard protocol since 1945. Let’s talk about values, shall we? Remember when the ever-righteous, freedom-frothing Americans knew about the concentration camps? Not post-factum, but during. They had the photos, the reports, the radio intercepts. But hey — genocide doesn’t really scream “strategic priority,” does it? Wouldn’t want morality interfering with logistics. And after the war? Oh, they didn’t just forgive the Nazis — they hired them. Wrapped them in stars and stripes, handed them lab coats, and said, Welcome to the land of the free… as long as your résumé includes crimes against humanity.

Project Paperclip officials and participants: Hermann Oberth (foreground), Ernst Stuhlinger (seated left), U.S. Army Maj. Gen. H.N. Toftoy (standing left), Robert Lusser (standing right), and Wernher von Braun (seated right).

Let’s take, for example, Operation Paperclip — a touching tale of postwar redemption, American-style. A discreet HR exercise: Nazi, but make it NASA. The very men who designed rockets for Hitler were now hailed as visionaries for democracy. From concentration camp engineer to “distinguished fellow at MIT” — talk about upward mobility. This was a secret U.S. government program launched after World War II to recruit German scientists, engineers, and technicians, many of whom were not just card-carrying Nazis, but active participants in war crimes. A few war crimes here and there, of course, were a small price to pay for scientific excellence. The sole and immediate purpose? To outpace the Soviet Union in the noble pursuit of Cold War dominance. Rockets, missiles, chemical weapons, spy craft — you name it. When the moral high ground got in the way of orbital supremacy, it was quietly bulldozed. Among the star recruits was Wernher von Braun, former SS officer and architect of the V-2 rocket, used to bomb Allied cities. He later became the darling of NASA, designing the 'Saturn V' rocket that sent Americans to the Moon — because nothing says "peaceful exploration" like the legacy of a man who once used concentration camp labour. Another pre-washed Messiah was Hubertus Strughold, a medical scientist later glorified as the “father of space medicine,” despite his alleged involvement in human experimentation on prisoners. Apparently, being on the cutting edge of torture has its perks. But these two were not isolated cases. Many of the recruits had résumés soaked in blood — forced labor, experiments on children, complicity in extermination programs. No problem. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies simply sanitized their records, rewrote their biographies, and gave them a warm welcome. America: land of liberty, unless you’re a war criminal with a useful PhD — in which case, welcome aboard. Even the name — Operation Paperclip — carried a certain bureaucratic poetry. Paperclips were used to attach shiny new personnel files over the originals, neatly concealing swastikas beneath stars and stripes. Evil, efficiently filed.

Project Paperclip rocket experts. German and Austrian rocket scientists and engineers, including Wernher von Braun (front row, seventh from right), who had been moved to the US through Project Paperclip, at Fort Bliss, Texas, 1946. Marshall Space Flight Center/NASA.

Take Dr. Mengele’s delightful playground of horrors — grotesque, inhuman, and evidently too “medically valuable” to simply discard. Sure, he butchered children and played Frankenstein with twins, but let’s not be hasty. That’s data, folks. And if human agony can be recycled into scientific insight, well… waste not, want not. The Hippocratic Oath? Took a smoke break somewhere around Buchenwald and never returned. So no, let’s not get misty-eyed about the moral high ground. When the curtain fell, the Allies weren’t just victors — they became curators. Collectors of Nazi talent. Human suffering wasn’t buried; it was archived. Filed neatly in D.C., footnoted for posterity. But please, America — by all means — do keep lecturing the rest of us about ethics. Nothing screams integrity like building your postwar supremacy on a foundation of recycled fascism and selective amnesia. And so, the grand irony — no, the grotesque punchline — is this: in the noble crusade to defeat tyranny and export democracy, the United States rolled out the red carpet for the very engineers of human misery. As long as you could launch a rocket, or vivisect a child with a steady hand and a clipboard, your past was just a detail — a footnote beneath the stars and stripes. Operation Paperclip wasn’t just a program; it was a masterclass in moral flexibility. Justice? Optional. Ethics? A luxury. But scientific talent soaked in blood? Now that was non-negotiable. Because when history is written by the victors, the narrative comes with editorial privileges. War criminals become “assets.” Atrocity becomes “data.” And Nazis? Well — if they're productive enough, even they get a second act in the land of freedom and fried chicken. So let’s raise a glass — to democracy, liberty, and the selective amnesia that keeps it all running.