Before the smoke had barely cleared from the final resistance in Nazi Germany, Major General Hugh Knerr, Deputy Commanding General for Administration of US Strategic Forces in Europe, acknowledged that the U.S. was "alarmingly backward" in many areas of research, and he ordered the U.S. occupation force to seize both the "apparatus and the brains" that had created the advanced scientific accomplishments of the Nazi scientists or the United States would remain several years behind.

While it was agreed that the United States should scoop up as many German scientists as possible, the occupation force then had to circumvent its own law that no former member of the Nazi Party could immigrate to America. Of the 1600 scientists and their dependents who had been assembled for immediate relocation in the United States, even a superficial inquiry revealed that at least 1200 of them had been avowed Nazis. Informed of this intelligence, President Harry S. Truman decided that it was in the national interest of the United States to gain technological superiority and the scientists were allowed to waffle and declare that they had only been "nominal Nazis" and had not actively supported Nazi military efforts.

The relocation of the scientists still had to be conducted in utmost secrecy, for the war had been costly and bitter with many American lives lost. The U.S. public at large would not respond favorably if they found out that many of the scientists being given a free ride to the States had worked in laboratories that had been constructed by Nazi slave labor and death camps. The scientists and their family members who were selected by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency had paperclips binding their scientific papers to the standard immigration forms, hence the name "Operation Paperclip."

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