In the chaos following World War II, some of the greatest spoils of Germany's resources were the Third Reich's scientific minds. The U.S. government secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis' knowledge outweighed their crimes and began a covert operation, code-named Paperclip, to allow them to work in the United States without the public's full knowledge. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues,...

Fritz Stern is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Editorial and Executive Committees of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein since 1984. The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture...