AN AMERICAN "FOREIGN LEGION": THE RECRUITMENT OF EUROPEAN REFUGEES FOR UNITED STATES MILITARY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE PROGRAMS DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR

James Evan Schroeder

doi:10.7273/000007464

This study examines how and why the Truman Administration recruited skilled German and Eastern European veterans, specialists, and refugees for military research, intelligence, and psychological warfare programs during the early Cold War in the borderlands of US-occupied Germany. Originating from US Army efforts to exploit captured German knowledge and technology, Cold War tensions prompted these programs to evolve into mutually supportive operations to strengthen American military and intelligence capabilities against the Soviet Union. Initiated by the Army in mid-1945, Project Paperclip recruited several hundred German specialists for American research programs while the Army Historical Division employed German prisoners of war to analyze Wehrmacht experiences against the Soviet Union. Army Intelligence simultaneously recruited German veterans through Operation Rusty to construct intelligence networks targeting the Soviet Bloc while Army Labor Service Units (LSUs) containing tens of thousands of Germans and Eastern Europeans supported US military operations in Germany. During the early 1950s, the Army and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) depended on foreign nationals when implementing programs to foment wartime resistance movements behind the Iron Curtain. The Lodge Act of 1950 authorized the Army to enlist Soviet Bloc nationals as combat soldiers and liaison officers. The CIA’s Operation Aerodynamic supplemented Army programs by airdropping Ukrainian agents into the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952 to contact Ukrainian partisans, efforts intended to construct an early warning system against Soviet attack and establish peacetime relationships with potential wartime allies. A shortage of recruits prompted Aerodynamic’s transition in late 1952 into a propaganda operation targeting Soviet Ukraine, supporting the Truman Administration’s broader embrace of psychological warfare. This strategy included establishing the United States Escapee Program (USEP) in 1952. The USEP encouraged defection while advertising American benevolence to global audiences by subsidizing aid and resettlement services for the tens of thousands of Soviet Bloc refugees not employed by the United States government, ensuring they indirectly supported American psychological warfare campaigns. These recruitment programs together illustrate the multinational composition of American national security operations, and the vital contributions Germans and Eastern Europeans made to American national security and technological development from the frontlines of the Cold War.

AN AMERICAN "FOREIGN LEGION": THE RECRUITMENT OF EUROPEAN REFUGEES FOR UNITED STATES MILITARY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE PROGRAMS DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR

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