Camp Confidential: America's Secret Nazis

CAMP CONFIDENTIAL: AMERICA'S SECRET NAZIS reveals the nuts and bolts of a WWII program, Operation Paperclip, designed to learn rocketry and strategic secrets from 4,000 high-value captured Nazi and German officers and scientists. German-speaking Jewish men who had escaped to America from Europe wanted to join the U.S. army and return to Europe to fight Nazis. Using interviews and animation, the filmmakers expose the way such young men were instead deployed by the U.S. Army in 1942 to fight their despised enemy a different way. Through interrogations at "P.O Box 1142," as the secret installation outside of Washington D.C. was called, the men were able to learn of the location of a secret underground Nazi rocketry factory, which the U.S. military destroyed for a strategic wartime advantage. The U.S. also illegally smuggled captured rocket scientists, including the famed Wernher von Braun, who would play an instrumental role in America's Apollo space program, sending men to the moon before the Soviets could. The same German-speaking American soldiers hosted the scientists at a country club-like prisoner of war camp, wooing them into serving American purposes through forced cordiality and diplomacy. The soldiers played tennis, chess, and volleyball with the scientists, fed them alcohol, and took them shopping for Christmas presents, all to instill a gratitude toward America and persuade them to work for American space and weapons programs. The film pointedly weighs the American technological advances the scientists gave the U.S. against the moral negligence of failing to prosecute them for collaborating with the Nazis. Information about the program was only declassified in the 1990s. Most of the men at 1142 died taking stories of their top-secret wartime assignment to their graves.